On Sun, Sep 22, 2024 at 3:47 PM Andrzej Krzemienski
One more data point, which may help.
My motivation for joining every mailing list I joined, as far as I can remember, was to communicate a bug or a problem that I found, and wait for a bit to respond to the replies. It was already inconvenient, that I only wanted to communicate something, and had to go through all the annoying process. I never thought about this action as joining a community.
That is definitely a data point and thank you for that. There are probably several main reasons for joining the list, with each person having their own individual motivations and needs. You said that it was inconvenient to report a bug, and I agree. You have to sign up for the list, wait for the email verification, then post by sending an email, and then wait for the moderator to approve it. And then you have to wait for the replies. Here is an idea: we can present a web page "report an issue" which combines the process of posting a message and signing up for the mailing list. We can use OAuth, to also allow for Google or GitHub credentials to be used for skipping the verification step. This would streamline the process. The counter-argument is that these users should be using GitHub issues. There are advantages to each method. Through the mailing list, we get more activity and a consolidated view of needs. Through GitHub we get better technology and global visibility. Thanks