Re: Potential Launch of Boost Website: Request for Final Feedback

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-02-15 17:13:39

On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 9:06 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost <
boost_at_[hidden]> 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