Is it time to kill the mailing list?

[asb]

Does nobody else find this a worrying step backwards for what is otherwise a pretty exemplary open project? Being able to dive right in is one of the great things about open source. Spam from naive users can sometimes be an issue, but Discourse gives moderation tools to help with this.

[sinistersnare]

I do not think diving into stdlib/rustc development is a good way to learn the language. Usually those kinds of code-bases are not beginner friendly. Also I think its fine to read the dev-section, thats fine, its open and transparent.

There have been RFCs from people who want let mut to be turned into var or just mut, not understanding the syntax for let patterns. This is just an example, many ideas have been proposed over and over from people who are new and havent read the prior discussions. That is the rationale for the trust system, to make sure they understand the language, at least a little bit, before trying to get into development of it. At least that is how I see it.

[asb]

My concern is that you don’t have to be new to the language to be new to discuss.rust-lang.org. Even if people do propose RFCs with lack of understanding of the language, that’s not going to change because RFCs are filed at github. Similarly, there could be no restriction on commenting on github issues or RFCs as Github doesn’t support that functionality.

[vks]

Rather than setting up a Reddit server I would favor lobsters. It has a nicer interface, especially on mobile.

[brson]

Right now I’m considering creating a second instance of discourse for user discussion, renaming this one to perhaps discuss-dev.rust-lang.org. Concern with putting both user discussion and development discussion here is that the user threads will swamp the dev talk.

[brson]

Hm, actually, before committing to an entire separate instance I’ll spend some more time poking at the config options. If we can set up the categories properly and exclude ‘internals’ from the main listing that would probably make me happy.

[brson]

Seems like it isn’t possible currently to hide categories from the front page https://meta.discourse.org/t/can-i-hide-a-category-from-the-latest-page/6728/25

[eviltrout]

Is the issue that the categories are private?

We allow you to create groups and assign certain forum members to certain groups only. You can only see the categories you have access to.

[brson]

@eviltrout The categories are not private. It’s more that we don’t want casual users to see certain categories by default to discourage drive-by bikeshedding. (There are sort of two ‘classes’ of participants, ‘users’ and ‘developers’, and users vastly outnumber developers).

From the previously-linked thread it does look like current discourse has some support for hiding categories, but that it may be buggy in some situations.

[eviltrout]

I think I understand now. So the categories would not be off limits for new users, you just don’t want them visible because it might confuse users?

The problem is it’s not obvious to me where to draw the line. It’s not hard to remove a category from the Latest view. But what about the drop down to select it for navigation? Also we send out digests of the most popular topics. Not to mention Google results.

Basically there are many ways a user could discover a topic in a particular topic rather than seeing it on the homepage.

[bstrie]

As the self-proclaimed Supreme Dictator of /r/rust, I concur that we need to provide a better long-term solution than the cesspool that is reddit. We’re doing our damndest to keep it civilized, but that will only get harder and harder as we grow (and we’re growing super super fast). And I’ve long since given up on the incoherent mess that is the mailing list.

Honestly, I’m not convinced yet that Discourse as a platform is a great solution (no offense to the developers (case in point: how the heck do I get my text emoticons back?)), but it seems like our best alternative. We need something over which we have ultimate control for hosting and moderation, which reddit will never fulfill.

[steveklabnik]

I think removing it from ‘latest’ would be just fine, really. It’s about creating a small barrier, not about making it impossible.

[eviltrout]

In that case it can be done using the method described in the link above

[d3zd3z]

I’m a little late coming to this thread, but I only discovered the Discourse from an email posting today.

So far, in using Discourse, I have one significant complaint: all replies are linearized. A significant advantage that mail lists and Reddit both have is that the replies are organized in a tree. As soon as I see a sub reply that I’m not interested in, I can collapse that, and go on to the next reply that is not a reply to that one. With Discourse, I’m just presented with a long list (dozens and perhaps hundreds) of replies, and don’t feel there is any of figuring out what is meaningful in that.

Perhaps Outlook and Gmail having removed this tree-view has made people not expect or be aware of it, but for me it makes the difference between a forum I can follow, and one that largely gets neglected.

Possibly related, Discourse’s notion of what I’ve read also seems unusual. In the “new” list, they don’t seem to get marked as read the first time, even if I’m careful to scroll through all of the postings.

Is there a better place to be discussin Discourse than a comment at the end of a long thread?

[zmoazeni]

I’m a new user to rust and I have to admit. I am very confused on where I should direct some questions/discussions. Currently I have know of 5 communication avenues:

• StackOverflow
• The Mailing list
• This Discourse forum
• IRC
• Github Issues (if it’s bug-related)

As a new user, I honestly dislike IRC unless it’s an in-depth or nuanced discussion and it needs a higher bandwidth than email or a forum.

I came across this on the mailing list

The mailing list is mostly dead BTW. Consider bringing this up on discuss.rust-lang.org instead.

And now I’m thoroughly confused.

As a concrete example, I just posted http://discuss.rust-lang.org/t/is-the-proper-way-to-specify-statically-compiled-ffi-libraries/1190 and I had to do some reading before posting to see if I was violating the community rules. Discourse told me to read http://discuss.rust-lang.org/t/about-this-forum-please-read/6 before posting and that seems pretty strict, yet there are other active discussions going on. I’ve followed the mailing list for a while, and that has been pretty helpful.

Is there any guidance on what sorts of discussions should be on what mediums? Is there also a way that can be clarified for other new users?

[brson]

@zmoazeni Currently I see it as

• Reddit - news, blogs and announcements
• SO - questions and help
• discuss - discussion about the development of the language itself

In practice, when people want something to be seen they often cross-post to Reddit, but I’d like get to a point where that’s not necessary (with more eyes on SO and more actual dev activity here).

As of now the mailing list is no longer even advertised anywhere. We’ve considered adding another discourse instance specifically for arbitrary user-level discussion, and I have basically resolved to do so, but it’s on the backburner ATM. There’s some concern that adding another forum to replace the mailing list could fragment the community further, but it does feel like there’s a function missing still (user discussion) that isn’t quite covered by reddit.

The docs page tries to make it clear where to go for what kind of discussion. What would have helped you @zmoazeni?

[zmoazeni]

Thanks @brson that does help. I missed the docs page. You’re right that is pretty clear.

I’ll go back to lurking on this forum for now.

[nodakai]

Why do we have to split this forum into “user” and “developer” ones when we already have the category system?

• http://discuss.rust-lang.org/categories

Perhaps we can modify the “new topic” screen to prompt newcomers to tag their questions with sth like helpme.

[brson]

@nodakai In http://discuss.rust-lang.org/t/distinction-between-user-and-developer-audiences-for-this-forum/925 we decided that it was more appropriate to have two. The tagging system seems to be in ill fit for the kind of segregation we desire.

Today I requested the mailing list be shutdown, preserving the archive for future Rust archeologists.

[system]

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