Re: Discourse

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le jeudi 23 février 2023 à 22:14 +0000, Wols Lists a écrit :

On 22/02/2023 12:39, Andrew Bernard wrote:

My offer is open. For the main Discourse server I run, amusingly the majority of people use the email interface, no matter how much I encourage them to use the nice web interface. [It's a forum devoted to harpsichord.] The point is that it runs the web interface and email list including digests in parallel, and you can initiate topics by email as well.

Your "nice web interface" is my "pain in the arse". I much prefer to
work in an off-line manner, using text. I can't work off-line with a web
server.

You can work off-line with the emails that Discourse sends you.

In fact, you can interact with Discourse pretty much like you do with a mailing list and never visit the website.

Most web sites (can't speak for Discourse, I've never touched it) are
stuffed full of adverts that often obscure the text I'm interested in.

Discourse is free software and does not include adverts.

Many of the websites I interact with on a regular basis (shopping, of
course) have completely broken print interfaces, so bad that one page of
interesting web text will give 20 pages of print with all of the
interesting text missing ...

I just tried Ctrl-P on https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-702-marking-deprecations-using-the-type-system/23036 (in Firefox). It gave me a perfectly legible and relatively nicely formatted PDF.

Pretty much EVERY web site I CHOOSE to interact with has its design
ethos stuck in the last century. Discourse might be similar, but I have
absolutely no desire to find out. And the last I heard of discourse (it
sounds like your setup is better) email appeared to be a second class
citizen.

For me, interacting with Discourse forums by email works just fine.

The only quirk I remember with discuss.python.org is that at some point, it was quoting the whole discussion in every reply, which was annoying. I turned off some option in the preferences and it went away.

The other main difference from a mailing list is the linear flow (not threaded). I don't consider this an issue personally, but your mileage may vary.

And of course, the other massive difference between web and email is
that I have to actively visit the website - I've got better things to do
with my time. Email just ends up in my (in this case) lilypond-box for
me to scan as and when I have nothing better to do :-)

Again, in my experience, interacting with Discourse by email only works jus fine.

This is only my opinion - other people are free to disagree. There's no
right or wrong, only a whole bunch of lost people who for one reason or
another are unwilling/unable to make the transition. I've had a list
move underneath me - I didn't move with it ...

You're free to have your opinion of course, and I'm not saying that Discourse is perfect — it has its issues, like mailing lists have their issues — but most of your fears seem unfounded to me.

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