Re: Forums

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Matthew Wilcox <elvendil@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > @Tab
> >
> > "Because we always have" is not good enough. Sorry, I'm wading in here
> > with my newbie boots, but do you realise how incredibly off-putting
> > the technology and systems the W3C use for communication are to people
> > wanting to get involved?
>
> I'm just explaining why it is the way it is.  Inertia is a powerful force.
>
> > Even for people as passionate and committed as me, it's an incredible
> > battle to get involved. I don't think it's a good argument to keep the
> > status quo that "it works for now". Horses worked fine too, but we
> > invented the car because it was better. The rest of the web are
> > driving cars and the W3C is sitting in it's horse-drawn-carriage
> > causing irritation with the general population who are sharing the
> > same roads and wondering what's going on.
>
> While I appreciate the car metaphor (there is no subject where a car
> metaphor is inappropriate), it's not accurate.  Forums aren't a strict
> improvement over email.  They're better in some ways, and worse in
> others.  For example, another useful benefit of email is that I can
> subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists and see them all in one place.
> Multiple forums make that impossible - I'd have to visit multiple
> websites each day to read all the messages.  Personally, I've dropped
> forums from my daily rotation simply for that reason.  (At this point
> I visit a single forum regularly, and then rely on a whole bunch of
> RSS for most of the rest of my daily reading.)  Forums also require
> yet another sign up, with yet another username and password pair to
> remember.  Hopefully the various WGs would share a login system with
> their separate forums.
>
> Again, I think the primary problems with our email system are (1)
> signing up is a usability hassle, and (2) the archives are horrible.
> Both of these are problems only because no one's ever spent any real
> effort to fix them.  In the meantime, there are other archives of all
> the w3c stuff that may be easier to read (I occasionally read a thread
> in MarkMail when it's from a mailing list I don't follow).
>
> (Another patch for the problem is to use POP3 to import the archives
> into your mailbox.  Then you have as much history as you want, working
> well with existing messages.)
>
> These problems need to be fixed, because they are definitely lowering
> participation, it just takes someone with the time to fix them.  ;_;
>
>
> > Another example of email-list problem : I want to share the discussion
> > publicly on Twitter. Nowhere im my mail client is there a URL I can
> > copy and paste to share the discussion. I have to go poking around the
> > w3C website to try and find the archive pages so I can then find this
> > thread so I can copy that link onto Twitter.
> >
> > On a forum, I'd just copy the URL in the address bar and be done with it.
>
> Little-known workaround - if the email was sent to you by the mailing
> list (that is, if you aren't personally on the  recipient list for the
> email), you can look at the headers (in Gmail, click the dropdown in
> the upper-right and select "Show Original" and get the archive address
> from the "Archived-At" header.  I hear that some mail clients expose
> this more easily, too.
>
> If the email was sent directly to you, those headers obviously won't
> be there, since the list didn't really touch the email.  Then you have
> to go archive-diving, unfortunately.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Marat Tanalin | tanalin.com
> <mtanalin@yandex.ru> wrote:
> > Another related problem: messages cannot be reliably united into one
> single thread. As a result, quite often we end up with _several_ threads in
> mailing-list archives that are really parts of one thread. It makes it hard
> to follow discussion later.
>
> This only happens when people screw up their subject lines, which
> happens rarely.  Most email clients do things correctly so messages
> thread appropriately.
>
>
> ~TJ
>

Its technically possible to make a UserScript.js that adds a button with
the "archived-at" link, and a button with "share the discussion publicly on
Twitter",
if that information is useful to you...

-- 
..