For one it's easier to browse without committing. If there happens to be no new topics in Japanese Animation I might read Spanish Animation and if I want, reply to a topic. With N mailing lists I have to commit to the entire list rather than just individual topics in subforums. In other words I have to subscribe to the "Spanish Animation" list rather that just one topic inside.
Like one of the posters above mentioned, forums have multiple subsections. As an example let's say the forum is about animation, I can read Japanese animation section and ignore the Spanish animation section. With a mailing list it's all or nothing.
4chan is a forum, neogaf is a forum, gamedev.net is a forum. I think they all work much better as a forum than a mailing list.
I think mailing lists serve a different need/style/purpose than forums.
I find that mailing lists are such a poor medium for discussion that I participate in zero of them today.
Every time a community switches from a mailing list to a forum (like Elm lang recently), they seem to agree with me.
This statement is often met with nerd rage on HN (“why wouldn’t you want to deal with mailing lists?!”) but it’s something you’ll just have to understand or take for granted if you are going to understand what people want from a Github competitor, for example.
On the forum thing. Best i can tell, mailing lists are nice for when you want to be involved day to day, but forums allows you to search the history of discussions (yes there are third party sites that offer list searches, but i have found them noisy at best).
I agree it's a personal preference thing for sure. I just really am not compelled by the threaded view of mailing lists. I prefer being able to quickly scan text to "catch up" on things, and I have filters to catch any of the important things I don't want to miss.
Another (late) voice that prefers forums over mailing lists.
One argument about what that I haven't seen so far in this discussion is that I can go to check the forum whenever I want (and not go for a couple of days if I decide to) whereas a mailing list is more like a push model where you receive the emails no matter what, even if you can't take care of them for a couple of days.
I have to say that I have very little experience with newsgroup though, so it might be a best of both world, but let's face it, it has becomming almost inexistant.
I'm the opposite - I love forums, hate mailing lists. Mailing lists clutter my inbox, while I can browse forums to my heart's content without it intruding on my personal mail.
Mailing lists work exactly because of your complaint - they force you to stick around longer than you would with a webforum or IRC. If the list is good you'll say "yeah, I want to see what else is going on with this project." If you're purely an end-user it's much more frustrating, of course.
My main gripe about mailing lists is that I prefer using digest mode because it loads faster over webmail. But if I use it, it becomes non-trivial to reply to a particular discussion thread.
Really, that isn't a huge gripe, in the grand scheme of things.
As for "good lists" - pretty much any active project with a topic you're interested in will have some discussion.
One thing that mailing lists (and newsgroups) have over platforms like Github is threaded discussions. It's similar to comparing reddit and HN to facebook and github.
But email lists (and newsgroups) have one thing that even HN and reddit do not. That is, the ability to quickly see new posts. In HN, I have to search through the entire thread to find new posts when I refresh the page. It's the same issue with reddit unless you're a subreddit moderator or have a reddit gold subscription.
All the relevant mailing lists for my interest projects have web interface/archive, I can selectively reply/participate in any or no ongoing threads, and stop at any time.
It's a mailing list.. you want it to be a forum, but that's not the point or what it is meant to be.
Some of us prefer mailing lists and interacting over email in our preferred client over having to go to various websites and deal with their varying user interfaces.
> unlike forums, people really enjoy mailing lists. I don't think I've ever met anyone, ever, who said they liked forums.
I think it entirely depends on what the purpose of communication channel is serving.
Mailing lists are transient passive participation. I can sign up to a list and never have to do another thing because I use email all the time. Occasionally a back and forth discussion might pop up, but I can easily choose to ignore it by simply glancing at the subject line.
Forums are persistent active participation. I have to specifically access the forum, possibly logging in in the process, to see what activity has happened. Many do enable some kind of email notification with a set frequency. Digest emails lose the benefit of the quick glance decision to attend or not, while all activity would be similar to the mailing list model. As forums can encourage more silo-ed conversations or short disposable responses, getting all activity is generally not ideal, however.
That's a good question. Part of the answer is that a properly run mailing list doesn't require subscription in order for you to post a question or a patch, and also keeps you in the loop (i.e. lets you receive the replies to your posting) by avoiding "reply-to header munging". The barrier of having to subscribe to lists is just a quick and lazy anti-spam measure that decreases usability for everyone.
So that is to say, mailing lists in their original inception didn't require "tracking" as a prerequisite for engagement. They were really just re-mailing robots: you write a message to a robot, and it sends it to others. Those others do "reply all", so that you receive the reply even though the robot doesn't have you in the list. The robot stays in the loop because it is CC'd, and so the list subscribers can track the discussion.
When I have some question, or want to report a bug, I don't actually want to track all of the activities in that project's mailing list. It is rude to expect that of me. And anyway, there are web archives of mailing lists!
All the mailing lists that I operate are in this classic open manner.
Can someone outline for me the pros/cons of a mailing list vs. a forum?
Except for the registering-over-and-over-again issue, it seems like forums would be preferable generally... (Especially given that most will send you emails with new posts if you ask it to.)
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