[asterisk-dev] Mailing List Future

[asterisk at phreaknet.org]

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.

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.

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.

NA

On 12/4/2023 7:28 AM, Jaco Kroon wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> My 5c.  Killing the dev list is a bad idea.
>
> Most developers could not care about having to poll forums.  It also 
> means that stuff that would previously get an audience will now get none.
>
> github discussions are better than forums at least.
>
> May I inquire as to the problem you're having with the ML? Perhaps I 
> might be able to assist ...
>
> Kind regards,
> Jaco
>
> On 2023/12/04 14:00, Joshua C. Colp wrote:
>
>> Greetings all,
>>
>> Over the past few years, the use of the Asterisk mailing lists has 
>> diminished, with far more conversation happening on the Asterisk 
>> community forums[1]. The state of email, to ensure reliable delivery, 
>> has also gotten more complicated - emails get caught by spam filters, 
>> etc.. To continue the mailing lists would require a huge time and 
>> resource investment, for minimal use.
>>
>> To that end, we’ve decided to discontinue the mailing lists effective 
>> February 1st, 2024.
>>
>> This means the following:
>>
>> 1. Sending and receiving mailing list emails will no longer be possible.
>> 2. The list archives, however, will remain available.
>>
>> We need to decide the future of the asterisk-dev mailing list; 
>> specifically, where to hold discussions in the future. There are a 
>> few options:
>>
>> 1. A “Development” category exists on https://community.asterisk.org/ 
>> already that can be used.
>> 2. We can use GitHub discussions, which keeps things with the GitHub 
>> project.
>> 3. We can use a hosted mailing list elsewhere.
>>
>> We suggest option #2, since it keeps things with the GitHub project, 
>> which is where everything development-related happens now regardless. 
>> This has been set up and enabled already.
>>
>> If you have any input, now is the time to state it.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> -- 
>> Joshua C. Colp
>> Asterisk Project Lead
>> Sangoma Technologies
>> Check us out at www.sangoma.com <http://www.sangoma.com> and 
>> www.asterisk.org <http://www.asterisk.org>
>>
>
>