Re: [boost] [text] [review] Text formal review result

On 2020-06-27 22:56, Vinnie Falco wrote:

On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 12:40 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost wrote:

...

I don't mind having a forum as an additional communication platform, if there is demand, but it should not replace the ML.

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.

There is an archive: https://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/ I can't say it is as easy to search as Google, but there is no reason to believe a forum search would be better. Many forums I've seen simply don't have search at all.

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.

I'm not sure why boost.org traffic needs to be increased. But then again, I probably don't know enough about how Internet works these days.

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.

Well, you can, with an archive, but I admit this is probably easier with a forum.

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

As I said earlier, as a participant I would prefer to keep using the ML as it is simply more convenient for me.