On 2022-10-19 at 08:28, Dan Ritter wrote: > Paul Johnson wrote: > >> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 11:54 PM Bruce H. <bth73@juno.com> wrote: >> >> > Why do you have to make it so hard to sign up to the user forums? >> > Auto gen passwords do not work, and the requirements are excessive! >> > >> >> Was previously unaware Debian had a web forum. Why bother when we have >> mailing lists that have none of these problems? > > Some people have strong preferences. > > If I had a lot of time to donate to the project, I would try to > advocate for adopting the D-lang forum software for Debian, > which is a unified system that keeps the same content and > threading across: > > usenet newsgroup > web forum / mailing list archive > mailing list > > Unfortunately, I don't have that time right now. While I don't have experience with anything that uses this software, so I can't say for certain that my expectations apply to it, I would expect this to produce bad results. The reason is simple: The quoting practices that are correct and appropriate on Usenet and in E-mail (where only one message has its contents visible at a time) are not the same as, and in fact are likely to conflict with, the quoting practices that are correct and appropriate on a Web forum (where the contents of multiple messages are typically visible at the same time). So either you wind up with people quoting correctly for the mailing list / newsgroup interfaces, and thereby quoting too much for the Web-forum interface, or quoting correctly for the Web-forum interface, and thereby not quoting enough material for the mailing list / newsgroup interfaces. (And given past observations in various contexts, I'd expect it to be disproportionately the latter.) If that doesn't happen in practice, I'd be all for the idea, but as far as I can recall I have yet to encounter a case where it doesn't. We already get too many examples of people failing to quote correctly even here on this mailing list, without having actively brought Web-based interfaces into it. (If the Web-forum system involved were one which does display only one message body at a time, that would probably avoid that consideration - but it would also introduce dissonance for the people who want to use a Web interface, since it's so atypical of Web fora in general that it would probably be a considerable mismatch with their expectations.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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