On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 04:05:53 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 10:46:22 UTC, QAston wrote:
>> I could point to the building you're sitting in. Most likely made almost exclusively by males.
>
> LOL. I happened to spend most the day today with a group of women... building something. (I was there too, of course, but I'm practically one of the sisters myself and they all did more work than me anyway. The other five are all non-controversially women.)
>
> I read this message out loud to them. We all got a good laugh.

Yes, it was funny to me as my mother worked as an industrial designer in the 1960s and designed a top-of-the-line radio (within a group of men) called Tandberg Huldra 9. She spent a lot of time on the backlight, and came up with acrylic backlight as a novel solution (at that point in time). She wanted the front to be all black, but the head of the company didn't want that, so it was all aluminium coloured like the top image:

http://nrhf.no/Tandberg/TR%20Radio/Tandberg%20Huldra/T'Huldra-9.html

After she quit Tandberg released the version with only the bottom half in black...  Which looks a bit silly. But guess what, some decades later audiophile equipment was black aluminium and acrylic backlights was standard... I am pretty sure that there are many "invisible" women involved with the products we use, but maybe men are spending more effort at getting their name published. Incidentally, she had to correct a newspaper earlier this year that wrongly attributed her design to a male designer (he was hired after she quit)...

Later when she was teaching furniture design/interior architects, most students were female, so they tried to get some men in as well in order to get a more mixed group. Most educators know that having some diversity in a group is good for the social dynamics. The interaction in mixed groups are usually more interesting than all-male or all-female groups.


> Y'all should stick to arguing about the color of the bikeshed.

Maybe or maybe not, but meta discussions are important for changing norms within a forum. If a given tone means that some women hesitate to join in, it probably also means that a group of men also hestitate to join in. Adjusting the tone might mean that more people will participate which would be better for all.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 07:59:09 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 07:54:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 3/23/2016 8:43 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
>>> NNTP is a dinosaur.
>>
>> Vladimir's D forum software.
>>
>> It doesn't allow editing of posts already made, but it is otherwise much much better than endless other "modern" forum software I've had the misfortune to use.

I'm not knocking Vladimir's software. I ditched my newsreader some time ago and use the web interface exclusively now. Much more convenient. We can debate the usefulness of specific forum features that are out there in the wild these days, but the main issue is that the most basic features (like editing and deleting posts) are not practical when the central database belongs to the NNTP server.

>
> BTW, there is no problem with adding the ability to edit posts, except that the edits will of course only be visible to forum users, and not NNTP or mailing list.

Yeah, I get that. But then we're maintaining two separate databases. The database for the web interface should be the primary, with all of the post meta-data stored together with the posts themselves in one place. Then, people who pull the posts in a newsreader after any edits have been made will at least see the edited posts (still nothing to do for the mailing list subscribers, I suppose). It also allows much easier moderation, not relying on the news server admin to delete spam and any posts that go beyond the bounds of propriety.

I'm not coming at this from a personal perspective, but from that of a new D user who wasn't necessarily around during the height of the newsgroup craze. More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to edit or delete their posts. We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as important or useful. These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today, whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one more thing about the D community that doesn't jibe with expectations, like the way the web site looked before the revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a part of the whole it's one more point of complaint. One that could be easily resolved.

On 3/24/2016 1:41 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> I'm not knocking Vladimir's software. I ditched my newsreader some time ago and
> use the web interface exclusively now. Much more convenient. We can debate the
> usefulness of specific forum features that are out there in the wild these days,
> but the main issue is that the most basic features (like editing and deleting
> posts) are not practical when the central database belongs to the NNTP server.

Ironically, I've used various "modern" forum software that didn't allow post editing, either. Post editing has its downside, as well. Replies to a post may no longer make sense if it was altered.

One possibility is to have the forum software delay actually posting it for 5 minutes, and you can have second thoughts.


> I'm not coming at this from a personal perspective, but from that of a new D
> user who wasn't necessarily around during the height of the newsgroup craze.
> More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to edit or delete
> their posts. We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as
> important or useful. These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today,
> whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one more thing about
> the D community that doesn't jibe with expectations, like the way the web site
> looked before the revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an
> annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a part of the whole
> it's one more point of complaint. One that could be easily resolved.

I've used a lot of other forum software on the web, and most of them have maddening gaps in their feature set, and have the look/feel of being written by dilettantes as their first project.

For example, take a look at the comments for this article:


http://mynorthwest.com/813/2938339/Should-President-Obama-have-come-right-home-after-the-attacks-in-Brussels

Note the lack of tree threading, and the very low information density.

BTW, the distributed nature of NNTP I regard as a major asset. The aggregate of the forum posts are an immense resource for D, and having it in a central location in a proprietary format is pretty risky.

Also, the C++ illuminati communicate via a mailing list (lists.isocpp.org), pretty much equivalent to NNTP. So does Linux. We aren't really out of step with serious developers. Are they old codgers, or are they on to something overlooked by others? Another thing I like about this approach is that posts are restricted to text rather than emoji and pictures and pretty styling - i.e. actual content.

It's hard to find any actual content buried in all the noise:

  http://www.cuda-challenger.com/cc/index.php?topic=112797.0

Emojis, no threading, microscopic text font:


http://www.gamedev.net/topic/677326-is-there-an-elegant-way-of-writing-straight-hlsl-code-without-preprocessor-macros/

Here's my (yet another) presentation of the NNTP forums:


http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Choosing_D_over_C_Go_Rust_Swift_278458.html

I'm sure I could improve it, the styling kinda sux.

We're doing just fine with NNTP and Vladimir's forum software.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

> We're doing just fine with NNTP and Vladimir's forum software.

+1!

/Paolo

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Yeah, I get that. But then we're maintaining two separate databases. The database for the web interface should be the primary, with all of the post meta-data stored together with the posts themselves in one place. Then, people who pull the posts in a newsreader after any edits have been made will at least see the edited posts (still nothing to do for the mailing list subscribers, I suppose).

NNTP users won't see the successive edits, though, and those who have their newsreader poll the server won't see them at all.

> It also allows much easier moderation, not relying on the news server admin to delete spam and any posts that go beyond the bounds of propriety.

I don't think we have an issue with moderation.

The spam filter could be a bit better, I suppose. Then again, we get MUCH less spam than any off-the-shelf forum software, since the spambot authors target them specifically, thus their spambots will find their way in much easier.

> More than once I've seen people post here looking for a way to edit or delete their posts.

Perhaps forum.dlang.org could make it clearer that once a post is sent, it is immutable.

> We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as important or useful.

I really think this is entirely unnecessary.

"Sticky" threads on typical web forums are used to post things such as FAQs or things people should read before posting. Essentially, in pretty much all cases, this feature is used as a poor way to change the website in general in order to bring some things to users' attention.

If the latter feature becomes required, since we have full control over the forum website's contents as a whole, we can look at how we can implement that feature properly (e.g. by adding a notice at the top of the thread list, or to the "create new thread" form, etc.)

Still, I think this feature is only really necessary for websites where "the forum is the website". We could just as well post important information to dlang.org.

If you have a specific need, we can discuss that.

> These are the sorts of thing that people *expect* today, whether everyone finds them beneficial or not. It's just one more thing about the D community that doesn't jibe with expectations, like the way the web site looked before the revamp. It's not a major issue in and of itself, just an annoyance and a lack of convenience, but taken together as a part of the whole it's one more point of complaint. One that could be easily resolved.

I really don't think that "mailing list phobia" is something we need to pay much attention to. Any way you turn it, it comes down to personal preference, and once you have configured your email client to deal with mailing lists in a nice way, there is not much left to object to. Ultimately, all serious open-source software projects do their development on mailing lists. The Linux kernel, Git, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice, you name it. Can you imagine someone telling Linus Torvalds with a straight face that mailing lists are antiquated and it's time for him and his gang to get on with the times? The truth is that familiarity with mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software developer.

Don't forget that forum.dlang.org has features that no other forum software can offer, features many people depend on. That includes its NNTP/email interoperability - one third of users communicating on this group don't do it via the forum. (If you think that one third is not too bad, don't forget that that includes most of the core team.) The ratio will probably be lower on "learn", but higher on the more technical groups.

The forum offers multiple view modes. Many people don't use the default one, which mimics typical web forums. One view mode I've added at Andrei's request, I think he will be unhappy to see it go.

The D forum also seems to be frequently lauded outside D's community for its performance, and people seem to often present in as an example of D's capabilities. It seems that any time someone posts a link to forum.dlang.org, someone mentions its unusually low response times.

I am continuously collecting (constructive) feedback about the forum. Last year I made an overhaul and implemented nearly all feature requests. If you have specific requests for improvement, please create a GitHub issue:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues

All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious proposal to replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears, it will face just as much, if not more, vocal disagreement. You can always create a poll or something if you wish - out of curiosity, since as mentioned above, you'll have a hard time convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:16:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> We're doing just fine with NNTP and Vladimir's forum software.

I agree. There is no need to change anything.

However, there is room for improvement, but it requires to change the UI, which is not possible with Newsreaders.

For example, "likes" so you don't have to make one line replies. See for example the Rust forum (you need be logged in). This can be extended to more semantic flags like "insightful", "offtopic", and more. See for example Slashdot.

(Since I mentioned the Rust forum and logging in. Log in via OAuth (aka Github etc) should be possible for the web interface.)

What I have not seen in any forum software is the ability to connect different topics. A threaded forum is a tree. I would like a DAG. The closest thing I used is the Github issue tracker. If you mention another issue, it automatically adds a backlink to here in there.

Disclaimer: I like the current forum. Keep it! My ideas are very experimental and they are probably not worth killing the NNTP backend.

On 3/24/2016 2:39 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> "Sticky" threads on typical web forums are used to post things such as FAQs or
> things people should read before posting. Essentially, in pretty much all cases,
> this feature is used as a poor way to change the website in general in order to
> bring some things to users' attention.
>
> If the latter feature becomes required, since we have full control over the
> forum website's contents as a whole, we can look at how we can implement that
> feature properly (e.g. by adding a notice at the top of the thread list, or to
> the "create new thread" form, etc.)
>
> Still, I think this feature is only really necessary for websites where "the
> forum is the website". We could just as well post important information to
> dlang.org.

Such things belong on the wiki, not in the forum. I agree we don't need sticky threads, in fact, they'd be a nuisance as they raise pointless bikeshed controversies over whether something should be in the wiki or the stiki.


> I am continuously collecting (constructive) feedback about the forum. Last year
> I made an overhaul and implemented nearly all feature requests. If you have
> specific requests for improvement, please create a GitHub issue:
>
> https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues

Just to reiterate, you have done an awesome job with this and DFeed is a great resource and showcase for D.


> All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious proposal to
> replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears, it will face just as much,
> if not more, vocal disagreement. You can always create a poll or something if
> you wish - out of curiosity, since as mentioned above, you'll have a hard time
> convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.

There's little to no chance of convincing me. Many of the things people complain about with NNTP are features I prefer :-)

On 3/24/2016 2:54 AM, qznc wrote:
> What I have not seen in any forum software is the ability to connect different
> topics. A threaded forum is a tree. I would like a DAG. The closest thing I used
> is the Github issue tracker. If you mention another issue, it automatically adds
> a backlink to here in there.

You can do that manually by inserting URLs (each posting has its own URL), and people do that now and then. I admit it's klunky, but it works.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:

>
>> We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as important or useful.
>
> I really think this is entirely unnecessary.
>

Again, the benefit of such features are debatable. I'm personally ambivalent to anything other than the ability to edit or delete posts.


> I really don't think that "mailing list phobia" is something we need to pay much attention to. Any way you turn it, it comes down to personal preference, and once you have configured your email client to deal with mailing lists in a nice way, there is not much left to object to. Ultimately, all serious open-source software projects do their development on mailing lists. The Linux kernel, Git, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice, you name it. Can you imagine someone telling Linus Torvalds with a straight face that mailing lists are antiquated and it's time for him and his gang to get on with the times? The truth is that familiarity with mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software developer.

I'm not talking about developer mailing lists. I'm a member of numerous mailing lists myself. The core developers and contributors can use mailing lists, NNTP, or smoke signals for all I care. Those who want to join such lists will and that's perfectly fine. What I'm talking about is building up a community of users.


> The D forum also seems to be frequently lauded outside D's community for its performance, and people seem to often present in as an example of D's capabilities. It seems that any time someone posts a link to forum.dlang.org, someone mentions its unusually low response times.

Yes, it's a great piece of work and I am by no means suggesting we replace it. It would serve as a great foundation for future features. I just don't think NNTP should be our primary means of community management.

> you'll have a hard time convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.

I knew that before I posted :) I'm not expecting any changes now. I'm just pointing out what I see as a potential future sore spot. That the web interface exists at all kind of supports my case. When I first came to D, most communication was done with a newsreader. The old Digital Mars web interface to the newsgroups was painful to use. The mailing list interface, IIRC, was added later. Your work on this forum software made it all imminently more useful and convenient, thanks to the features you enumerated above. It opened the door to more users being able to more easily come in and participate in discussions. I'm simply arguing that as the community grows, taking things to the next level will open the door even wider.

It's not something I feel passionately enough about to keep arguing for, though, so I'll drop it for now :)

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 09:39:34 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 08:41:18 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> We recently had a suggestion her for a means of marking threads as important or useful.
>
> I really think this is entirely unnecessary.
>
> "Sticky" threads on typical web forums are used to post things such as FAQs or things people should read before posting.

I don't think he's talking about sticky placement, as much as some kind of tagging of threads.  Of course, that raises issues of how you surface those tagged threads and whether people will bother applying the tags.

> not much left to object to. Ultimately, all serious open-source software projects do their development on mailing lists. The Linux kernel, Git, Gnome, KDE, LibreOffice, you name it. Can you imagine someone telling Linus Torvalds with a straight face that mailing lists are antiquated and it's time for him and his gang to get on with the times?

Not only can I imagine it, I would say it to his face.  Mailing lists were incredibly outdated back when I first encountered them decades ago, let alone today, which is why I have never used them.

> The truth is that familiarity with mailing lists is simply necessary for any serious software developer.

Not really, in fact, you can easily tell which dev teams are ancient by the fact that they still use a mailing list as the main form of communication.

Now, there are certainly benefits to SMTP/NNTP that centralized forums don't have, no question, and a lot of web forum software is ridiculously broken and even worse than a mailing list.  But you could do a lot better than a mailing list, it's just rarely done.  I though Apache Wave had some interesting ideas on collaboration, though I never tried it, so I can't say if they pulled it off.

> Don't forget that forum.dlang.org has features that no other forum software can offer, features many people depend on. That includes its NNTP/email interoperability - one third of users communicating on this group don't do it via the forum. (If you think that one third is not too bad, don't forget that that includes most of the core team.) The ratio will probably be lower on "learn", but higher on the more technical groups.
>
> The forum offers multiple view modes. Many people don't use the default one, which mimics typical web forums. One view mode I've added at Andrei's request, I think he will be unhappy to see it go.
---snip-and-paste---
> I am continuously collecting (constructive) feedback about the forum. Last year I made an overhaul and implemented nearly all feature requests. If you have specific requests for improvement, please create a GitHub issue:
>
> https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/issues
>
> All in all, I'm rather certain that as soon as an actual serious proposal to replace forum.dlang.org with e.g. Discourse appears, it will face just as much, if not more, vocal disagreement. You can always create a poll or something if you wish - out of curiosity, since as mentioned above, you'll have a hard time convincing the people who are actually working on D to switch.

As I understood what Mike originally wrote and he's now made certain below, nobody is critizing DFeed for its features or suggesting replacing it, only removing the lowest-common denominator accomodation of email and newgroup readers.

> The D forum also seems to be frequently lauded outside D's community for its performance, and people seem to often present in as an example of D's capabilities. It seems that any time someone posts a link to forum.dlang.org, someone mentions its unusually low response times.

Yes, I've seen that praise too, DFeed is a good showcase for D.  The "Save and preview" button was a great addition; I use it often, particularly for long posts, and it largely obviates his desire to edit a post whenever.

I'd like some sort of formatting language, like github has.  Can't you provide that option in the forum and send the resulting HTML as text/html MIME attachments to SMTP and NNTP?  I don't know if NNTP supports MIME.  Of course, some may complain about HTML messages, but perhaps they can be handed some text formatting fallback?  Anyway, not a huge issue, but nice to have.

The current messaging status quo, where everyone gets an undifferentiated stream of messages and then are forced to manually scan the headings or run a keyword search on all the contents, is incredibly outdated.  However, advancing beyond that will require some work, either to manually tag and vote on posts/threads or write software that will at least automate tagging, which is why it is rarely done.

But we need to move beyond this decades-old tech someday, as it's wasting too much of our time.