[asterisk-dev] Mailing List Future

[Joshua C. Colp]

On Mon, Dec 4, 2023 at 8:52 AM <asterisk at phreaknet.org> wrote:

> I strongly object to not having an asterisk-dev list. Mailing lists are
> essential for FOSS developer discussion. The majority of non-ephemeral
> development discussion happens either on IRC or here on the asterisk-dev
> list - just check the archives to see that it's still active. Most of us
> are not on the community forums and/or couldn't be bothered to use them.
> You can go and see now that "Development" on the community forums is
> basically dead, because nobody wants to use it, so trying to push that
> on everyone is a terrible idea.
>

The "Development" category was done on a whim and hasn't really been
advertised or mentioned a huge amount. I presented it merely as an option,
as it was present.


>
> Even for users, I think the loss of asterisk-users will be a major loss.
> Far more *discussion* is happening on the Discourse forum, but far more
> *quality* discussion still happens on asterisk-users. Being on a mailing
> list seems to be a natural weedout for junk questions. More serious
> questions still seem to come through on the mailing list. The community
> forums is far fuller of useless postings from people who can't tell a
> hard drive from a memory stick. Nobody wants to wade through a bunch of
> low-quality posts to find the few that might have some use. Thus,
> getting rid of asterisk-users would see a significant drop in the
> average quality of user engagement. But at least, even if the -users
> list is dropped, the -dev list should stick around in some form.
>

To be quite blunt, the quality is better on asterisk-users because few
actually use it. In the earlier days the quality wasn't as good when it was
actually used more. Even then, the quality still varies on the
asterisk-users list.


>
> I know the forums can have emails enabled that you can receive, and no,
> that's not a proper replacement for a mailing list.
>
> GitHub Discussions aren't a proper mailing list, either, so ultimately I
> think that will run into the same issue. GitHub has a lot of bells and
> whistles but most of them aren't as built out as using the proper tool
> they try to emulate.
>
> I think #3 is the right choice. It's using the right tool for the right
> job. If you don't want to maintain the lists, have somebody else do it.
> I do a combination of hosted and self-hosted for my own lists. Contrary
> to the opinions of some, people, especially technical people, have not
> "moved on" from mailing lists; they are widely used, and I get hundreds
> of emails a day from them that I have a good workflow for.
>
> Most lists I'm on that used to be elsewhere (e.g. Yahoo Groups, Google
> Groups, mailman, LISTSERV, other custom or independent platforms) have
> now migrated to groups.io and are generally highly satisfied with it
> compared to other platforms. It used to be completely free; it's now
> free for lists under 100 members, or ones that are grandfathered in. As
> the maintainer of several lists there and a member of many more, I've
> been pretty happy with it.
>
> I'd suggest creating a list there and letting people on this list
> manually opt into it, since there are probably a lot of people on
> mailman that aren't active anymore. If it's under 100 members, it's
> completely free anyways. If more than 100 people join, that means people
> here *really* like mailing lists and find value in them, and I'm sure
> Sangoma can afford $20 a month for it, if it really doesn't want to run
> mailman lists anymore that badly, and $20 is a small price to keep
> developers happy.
>

Your opinion has been noted.

-- 
Joshua C. Colp
Asterisk Project Lead
Sangoma Technologies
Check us out at www.sangoma.com and www.asterisk.org
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