Re: [boost] is review system in place is extremely slow? (was Re: [rfc] rcpp)

Subject: Re: [boost] is review system in place is extremely slow? (was Re: [rfc] rcpp)
From: Mateusz Loskot (mateusz_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-02-24 13:10:50

DE wrote:
> on 24.02.2010 at 12:13
>  Rutger ter Borg wrote :
>> Offload more of the work needed for doing reviews to the community. Make
>> that low-barrier, e.g., by making the website interactive( drupal, or the
>> like), introducing a couple of on-line tools, like voting systems. Introduce
>> forums, etc. 
> 
>> IMHO, trac / mailing lists are not accessible enough for this more non-
>> development oriented stuff. 
> 
> sorry for offtopic
> 
> although i am on this list for only half a year i want to say i find
> this mailing list (and perhaps any mailing list) very inconvenient for
> the purposes it serves

My personal opinion:

Please do not migrate to Web-based forum!

Traditional form of mailing list *is* a very convenient
form of discussion forum.
I allows to participate in discussions in single place - my own
e-mail reader. I participate in number of mailing lists and it is
very important for me to be able to participate easily, from single 
place. Using e-mail reader, I can check new messages of all those
lists, skim and filter them quickly and get focused on those I'm
interested in and archive those I'm interested in. All in single place.
Having limited amount of free time, as every one here I suppose,
I can't even imagine how much time it would take to do the same after
all mailing lists are replaced by forums.

Using e-mail client, checking out new messages is constant time O(c)
with Web forum it is O(n) what would significantly lead to cut down
number of communities I'd like to participate.
Having N forums, I'd need to load N websites,
input my credentials N times, perform N x M clicks to browse a thread, 
another bunch of clicks to read a post, another bunch of clicks to reply.

I have participated in number of Web forums and every time it was taking
order of magnitude longer to reply/post than it takes with simple 
Thunderbird e-mail client. Single gateway for all discussions.

 > imho discussion and other activities are MUCH MORE convenient in a
 > forum-like environment (for example see intel software network:
 > http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/)

A week ago, I posted my first message to Intel forum and this interface
is very unusable. The search function is unusable comparing to 
simplicity and accuracy of:

+word +another site:http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost

Simply, Web forums do not work well at all with high volume
technical  discussions.
There *is* a reason and well-settled rationale why most technical
communities prefer mailing lists. And, the reason is *not* because
they are a legacy type of old school hackers! It's about performance and 
usability, but usability does not mean HTML formatting which is
useless for technical forums.

For those who prefer Web-based UI, there is gmane and nabble

[1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.boost.devel
[2] http://old.nabble.com/Boost-f14200.html

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net