On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 9:06 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
I think, part of why this discussion culture have succeeded in Boost is the mailing lists, which required registration and pre-moderation of the first post. Most of the time, this was enough of a barrier against spammers and trolls.
I agree. It is The C++ Alliance position that the Boost developer's mailing list is the ideal format for high quality technical discussion. There has been quite a lot of discussion about this last year with talk of moving to a forum. We are against getting rid of the mailing list and replacing it with a forum. In fact we are working on upgrading the mailing list to use Mailman 3 which offers a number of improvements on the back-end (nothing changes with respect to the user experience). In particular I am not very enthusiastic about Discourse, despite it being free. The authors' philosophical stance against recursive threaded discussions is at odds with my positive experiences on the mailing list. You can read the Discourse author's views on that here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/ and https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/ The C++ Alliance honors and respects the Boost traditions of the mailing list. The website we developed does not offer a separate forum nor do we plan on building one or using a third party solution. Based on feedback from last year we have fully embraced the mailing list. Marshall Clow in particular was quite persuasive when he explained his workflow to me (which is optimized for maintaining multiple projects across many separate mailing lists). Thanks