On Sat, 27 Jun 2020 at 22:57, Vinnie Falco via Boost
Mailing list sucks. People that are not subscribed can't search through messages, and even people who are subscribed do not have access to messages from before they subscribed. Google doesn't index the mailing list, unless there is a mirror. In the case of Boost, the mirror is controlled by third parties and cannot be leveraged to generate traffic for boost.org and raise interest.
The barrier for joining a mailing list just to ask one question is high. Right from the beginning you have to wait to get approved, and then you need to wait for approval to post. In a forum, you can post a message, get the URL of the message you just posted, and then share that with your friends out-of-band (for example, on Slack or in a reddit post) and get attention with possible replies right away. You can't do that with a mailing list.
Link to the archive once the first message gets through?
With a forum, information can be grouped in a top down fashion for everyone. For example, we could create a subforum for each library being reviews, have the review take place entirely in the forum, and the forum is then locked and archived, available permanently through boost.org (and associated with the library as part of its social media history). At any point in the future someone could look through the original review for the library including everyone's questions and comments. They can share a link to the review subforum with their friends. Someone can write a blog post years later about the review and describe their experience, or lessons learned, or tout the great value of the Boost Review Process, and so on. These things are not possible with a mailing list.
Same thing, link to the archive.
We absolutely should move to a forum on boost.org for all things, import as much as we can from the mailing list (as far back as possible) into the forum, and then cease the use of the mailing list forever. Anyone who emails the list should get an automated reply that says "Please register for the wonderful forums at boost.org" etc
Not that this is my concern really, I'm not a boost regular, but I have an email system that beats the living daylights out of any forum that has ever been suggested to me. While I can't search the messages that were there before I subscribed, for the ones that are in my mail folders post-subscription the search I have is vastly superior to any forum. So are the filtering and other things. Forums may be an attractive option. But they don't hold a candle to some existing email systems.