It's funny, because from his point of view mailing lists are awesome.
But from the point of view of everyone else they're pretty terrible - it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value.
For most open source projects, the correct way has been to find the backchannel - the mailing list is only a source of frustration and bikesheds. You must either contact maintainers personally or find an IRC or other real time method.
1) First hand, official documentation is the only one that matters. No blog posts. Some projects have very bad, or inexistent documentation, but those are probably not worth using anyway. I have found software and documentation quality to be very strongly correlated.
2) If you want to participate, or you have a deep problem that can't be solved by reading the documentation, mailing lists are the way to go. Web forums, stackoverflow and similar things are an awful waste of time. Do your homework before posting to a mailing list. If you send HTML emails and/or you don't fmt(1) or par(1) your email, you will be ignored.
3) IRC is great for social interaction. Sometimes you'll solve a minor problem on IRC, but that's not what it's for. You can learn a lot on IRC just by listening to other people talk about technology.
Forums are OK, but second-best. The problem I see with a forum is probably the thing you like about it: messages are broken up by (arbitrary) "topic" or "subject". Basically, each thread in a forum operates like its own little mailing list - that enables someone to ignore parts of the discussion. They will then inevitably miss something that they needed to have seen.
"But how else can you manage the volume of messages?" I hear you cry. Well, having only a single "thread" forces you to use social pressure to keep the discussion on topic.
A forum can have obscure corners which people start to use for off-topic discussions, or general mouthing-off or project gossip. That kind of noise can't be tolerated on a mailing list - because there's no good way to ignore it. So the off topic stuff is pushed out, and the discussion remains mostly on-topic.
The "social pressure" that keeps mailing list discussions on-topic is often interpreted by newbies as "rude people shouting at them", and perhaps that's accurate. But the end result is worthwhile.
You've nailed it, except I still think it's a feature not a bug. I think you might think that way too, if you'd been involved in an open source project with tens of thousands of non-technical users.
I love them, really I do, but it only takes 0.1% of the user-base to naively believe that it's easier to ask for help than to RTFM, and bang - there goes 110% of your time dealing with them.
Try being an active member on 50 forums. Try being an active member on 50 mailing lists.
When there's some software that lets me see all activity from all forums in one place, I might consider using one again :P (RSS is a good start in theory, but I've not seen a single forum which uses it effectively)
Why? Mailing lists have a common UI (your email client), they are easier to archive locally, messages are processable entities (can be easily tagged, filtered, forwarded, etc) and they can be used when the service is offline.
The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
I think "a good archive for new members" is more important than just the "only" suggests.
The reason it's lacking shows the problem with mailing lists: they restrict participation to those who were members at the time. Yes, there's a limited ability to have search after the fact, but most of the web UIs are awful, and the search is weak.
Worse still is if you join late and somehow find a thread from 2010, there's no way to revive it with updated information or corrections. So the archives suffer terribly from bitrot, in some cases sending latecomers down the wrong path for years to come.
In a well-designed forum, by contrast, threads "live" forever. When something useful needs to be said or asked, a thread can spring back to life. As a result, their archives remain useful for longer, and they don't need to suffer nearly as much from newcomers asking the same old FAQs, either.
To boot, with the right forum, you can also have posts sent to your email, for all the local benefits you mention.
Fair enough, but frankly well-designed and well-run forums are few and far between. And even less support real threading, which I consider a killer feature for this kind of discussions.
> The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.
Three data points/opinions:
- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].
- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because mostforumslackproperthreading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.
I can't figure why "forums" and "mailing lists" are two separate things. Making a nice unified mailing-list/forum hybrid doesn't sound impossible... honestly though, most maling-list web-views are terrible and excruciating to navigate.
Give me a big threaded forum where each "category" corresponds to its own mailing list (so you can just avoid email-subbing to the "offtopic" one). Then you can also include some nice secondary features like upvotes/downvotes and the like.
> Making a nice unified mailing-list/forum hybrid doesn't sound impossible...
That's basically what Google Groups used to be (I haven't used them in awhile, so no clue if they've changed significantly since then): at its heart, it's NNTP. You choose to receive messages as they come, or in digest form. You can either reply to the email, or login to the web interface and reply there. The web interface groups discrete email subjects as separate forum posts (with some mild intelligence to lump "some topic" and "re: some topic" together).
It's not without its own set of issues, but I found it a good compromise since those who only wanted to interact with the email interface could keep that, while those that wanted a more full-featured forum experience could do so as well.
it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value
According to my memory and browsing history in this week I've been able to find solutions to issues in Emacs, Doxygen and Cygwin by Googling and ending up to their relevant mailing-list threads.
It is awesome that mailing-lists get archived and the problems (and solutions) other people had can be queried. Sure, I wasn't the first person to encounter these issues, so they had been already found and circumvented. Anyway, the issues/questions had been sent to mailing-list and they had been answered.
If mailing-lists didn't work, I wonder why Linux kernel manages to evolve at all. Sure, mailing lists aren't Stack Overflow where you get karma and gold medals for providing solutions.
I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead. Newsgroups are mailing lists done right (or rather, mailing lists are newsgroups done wrong).
> I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare
Mailing lists have a central place where all messages come in, and that can ban spammers. Usenet is distributed and messages come from everywhere, so any spam protections needs to be done in the client.
I'm not necessarily talking about Usenet in particular but rather the "Network News Transfer Protocol" versus SMTP.
When you subscribe to a mailing list you cannot easily fetch older emails to get some context, you usually have to use some web interface. If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client.
There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form.
That being said, in this day and age using dedicated protocols is not really "in" anymore so I don't expect NNTP to make a comeback. I still think that a good web forum would still be a massive improvement over most mailing lists.
That's what google groups could have been by the way, if Google had cared enough to make it worthwhile.
Maybe a HN-style discussion "tree" with no upvotes/downvotes or external links but the possibility to add attachements (and maybe gateway interfaces with SMTP and/or NNTP) would be the killer of mailing lists.
> If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client.
This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine.
> There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form.
Just send an email to list-join@fqdn or list+subscribe@fqdn. It's really a pity google groups is inferior even to mailman, but I guess you can't have nice things.
Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.
> This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine.
You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.
> Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.
I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway. That's why I said I would be fine with a well designed web app to replace mailing lists.
> You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.
While not standardised, I expect any decent e-mail client to handle mailing lists mostly automatically at least in that regard, e.g. Claws-Mail builds a nice menu from List-* headers. It is true that one usually needs to manually add filtering on the server side (in Sieve, maildrop or whatever you use), which is not as nice as the standard handling of news, but you can even automatise that if you’re willing to have emails containing random headers create the corresponding folders (which, of course, you shouldn't do).
> I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway.
Most email clients also have NNTP support baked in, so the client side is not really an issue. However, newsservers have to keep at least a rolling archive of messages and possibly federate with others, whereas a mailman installation is mostly stand-alone and doesn’t even have to keep an archive if you don’t want to.
Back in the 90s, I worked at several ISPs, and let me say that NNTP required more infrastructure than SMTP. First, you need to arrange for NNTP feeds. Then you needed disk space. Tons and tons of disk space, because most of the people using Usenet wanted the alt.binaries.* groups. Skimp out on those, and there was a sizable number of customers who would go elsewhere. Then you needed to configure your expiration policies (posts in alt.binaries.* expire after 24 hours; the rest of Usenet expires in two weeks, that type of stuff).
Then there was the software that supported NNTP---all requiring arcane black arts to keep running smoothly. As much as I loved Usenet back in the day, administrating Usenet (or NNTP) was something I loathed. The server side stuff was just horrible.
Usenet was superior because the average IQ was higher and people more knowledgeable. A normal consequence of access being technologically limited to academia and very tech-savvy people.
Usenet is superior because it evolved to handle large scale discussions properly. These include:
- user agents that thread properly
- long expiration times for local caches (spools)
- cultural norms (that differed from group to group) about replies, new posts, quoting, and FAQs
- groups are folders: the participant needs to make a decision to subscribe to a group, and then each time to read one group at a time, rather than trying to handle a dozen different groups in date-received order
- and for a mixed blessing, search over the current spool was reasonably easy but general search was hard or impossible.
Comparing Usenet or even mailing list cultural posting norms with Reddit is asinine.
I still don't know how I can pipe a reddit comment into patch(1) or git(1). I can do that easily with mbox files (which can come from SMTP or nntp-to-mbox.pl(1) or something).
I did not actually, for some reason I always thought NNTP predated SMTP but wikipedia tells me it was created as an alternative to SMTP for newsgroups[1]. The more you know.
So my first wording was actually correct: "newsgroups are mailing lists done right" :)
I like to use gmane to browse projects' mailing lists and post to them. I use a NNTP client to do this. It's great when it works, except for the few cases where posting is broken (seems to be mostly google groups lists).
B) Other people respond with the same problem, no solutions
C) Unhelpful response detailing the solution to some superficially similar but unrelated problem
D) Excoriating reply about how that is not really a problem because I am bad at life and/or not supposed to be using it for that.
E) Discussion pace on the topic rapidly log-descent-curves into zero without anything really being resolved but lots of time being spent.
F) Discussion on the mailing list is so high volume that trying to pay attention to it is akin to drinking from a firehose, and a solution is posted in an unobtrusive way 330 messages later.
This is even true when attempting to make meaningful contributions of time and energy, money, or both.
A mailing list archive is a web site that happens to draw content from a mailing list.
Of course that's useful - good documentation is important.
Is the best way to write that documentation a mailing list? I seriously doubt it.
And that said, I'm not discussing 'googling for mailing list archives to solve problems', I'm discussing 'attempting to email the list to solve problems'.
But from the point of view of everyone else they're pretty terrible - it's extremely rare I've had mailing lists deliver value.
For most open source projects, the correct way has been to find the backchannel - the mailing list is only a source of frustration and bikesheds. You must either contact maintainers personally or find an IRC or other real time method.