Re: Proposal: Proposals are the wrong approach [prose and long]

[David Heiko Kolf <david@...>]

Tim Hill wrote:
> Slightly bending the thread .. Is this really a way of saying that
> the community is out-growing a mail-list as a (productive)
> communications mechanism? At any given time there are (a)
> announcements of new library etc releases, (b) long threads about
> suggestions for Lua,  (c) people seeking help with Lua programming
> and (d) general Lua discussions etc etc. To me, this starts to
> suggest some sort of web based forum, rather than a heterogenous mail
> list. Forums are also far easier to search than the archived
> discussions, which might help with the re-post problems.

There used to be a forum, the link is on
<http://www.lua.org/community.html>, but I don't know how much it was
used.  To me it appears that a mailing list was preferred by many,
including myself. I get everything into a mailbox with a single login
and don't have to visit a dozen websites.

If you want to stay up-to-date in web forums and don't wont to skip on
entire categories, the amount to read and the work to do so stays
approximately the same. A difference in forums is that people don't
quote so excessively as they tend to do in mailing lists and therefore
there is less text to skip.

For quite a number of discussions during the last time I would have
liked to move the discussion not to a forum but to the official chat
room. When I don't get the time to read the mailing list for a week I
get hundreds of unread mails where quite a lot seem to be "real time
chat", where two people are talking to each other with the maximum speed
the mailing list offers ("Yes! No! Yes! But! No but!").

The actual content appears to me to degrade with the posting frequency
and it becomes quite repetitive. So when I see a thread where most of
the posts appear to be from one or two persons the likelihood increases
that I just skip the entire thread. (I wouldn't read old chat logs, too).

I would even recommend to only send one mail a day per thread, so you
spend enough time writing it to let it speak for itself during the next
12-24 hours. Please remember each time that everything you write here is
read by almost 3000 people.

Best regards,

David Kolf