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Why do many open source projects collaborate primarily through mailing lists rather than through, say, forums? I may be ignorant in my assessment, but I, along with my communication teacher, think mailing lists are rather inefficient:

  • It's hard to reference old messages. You have to wait until an archiving site picks up the message you want to link to, then look it up.
  • It's hard to reply to messages you haven't received from subscription, since you have to manually copy the sender and message contents.
  • It's impossible to moderate threads of discussion. Posts cannot be deleted or modified without supernatural powers.
  • It's tricky to keep threads together (namely, to ensure all participants in the conversation are copied/replied to).
  • It's tricky for users to participate in multiple high-volume mailing lists, as they have to subscribe and set up filters (or just be really involved).

What real edge do mailing lists have that didn't occur to me?

yannis
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Joey Adams
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    +1. I've always wondered this as well. Being a new graduate, I find it much easier to communicate using forums rather than mailing lists. I suppose the older crowd is more comfortable using what they are used to? – Brian D. Apr 25 '11 at 17:39
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    Mailing lists is one of a few things which I was never able to understand. It is simply unusable in my eyes. –  Apr 25 '11 at 18:17
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    Here, here. I HATE mailing lists, unfortunately the nature of my work requires me to use them occasionally. – Mr. Shickadance Apr 25 '11 at 18:28
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    "It's tricky to keep threads together (namely, to ensure all participants in the conversation are copied/replied to)." You don't reply to the participants. You reply to the list. – back2dos Apr 25 '11 at 20:06
  • @back2dos: Actually, you reply to the sender of the message, and copy the list. This is usually achieved with "Reply to all". However, you have to verify that you're not inadvertently replying to a whole bunch of people, and you have to double-check that the list is being copied. – Joey Adams Apr 25 '11 at 20:14
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    @Joey Adams: Here is a list mail header looks like: from: Alexander Konotop <[email protected]> reply-to: The haXe compiler list <[email protected]> to: The haXe compiler list <[email protected]> ... It should be quite obvious from that, what happens if you "Reply". – back2dos Apr 25 '11 at 20:24
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    @back2dos a lot of projects don't do that. It's an old religious debate - if you want to know more, google 'reply-to munging'. – Daniel James Apr 26 '11 at 01:59
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    @Daniel James: Then they are not using a mailing list as commonly defined. The question should thus be: "Why do programmers still use direct email for discussion groups". – back2dos Apr 26 '11 at 07:13
  • @back2dos What an odd thing to write. The page you linked doesn't define mailing lists as requiring reply-to munging. – Daniel James Apr 26 '11 at 11:26
  • @Daniel James: The page I linked defines mailing lists as requiring a reflector, which was my original point, (opposed to OP's claim, that you need to "ensure all participants in the conversation are copied/replied to"). I didn't clearly understand that your statement was only about reply-to munging. – back2dos Apr 26 '11 at 11:43
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    Just to say that i think this question is the best question i've seen since the creation of this domain. I think people should really start living in the 21 century... instead of the 17 century. – Pedro Luz Oct 11 '13 at 14:24
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    Maybe real projects need real programmers. Therefore, they use that communication trick as a filter. – mouviciel Jun 16 '14 at 07:09
  • http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/256479/131807 – Hello World Sep 17 '14 at 07:35
  • This is not a dupe. The linked question is about mailing lists for bug tracking. This question is about mailing lists in general. – qwr Jul 01 '19 at 01:25
  • @mouviciel gatekeeping goes against the core concepts of FOSS. – qwr Jul 01 '19 at 01:27
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    Another disadvantage which has not been mentioned: Not everyone wants their private e-mail address to be visible on a public mailing list which is likely scraped by authors of spam mail. And not everyone has a public company e-mail address or wants to use that. Creating separate e-mail addresses for every mailing list becomes messy pretty soon. – Marcono1234 Dec 28 '20 at 15:45

10 Answers10

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The Real Edge (tm) that mailing lists have is with less busy projects. In order for a web based forum to be successful, it needs a core of people constantly present who can respond to questions, provide suggestions, and moderate it. But if a board only has a couple posts a week or month, many people interested in the topic (be it an open source project, a commercial project, hobby, whatever) wont regularly visit the board because there's rarely anything new there.

What ends up happening then, is the board becomes what you might call a b-tch session. People only go there to post a bug report or when they have a problem/complaint. But since not a lot of people are visiting regularly, you just end up with a lot of complaints/problems without responses, and very little community building.

If you have a mailing list, those questions, rather than being seen by only the small subset of members who think to visit the web forum that week, are delivered to everyone on the list. They are much more likely to be seen by someone who can actually answer the question.

Once the project gets large enough, moving to a board often makes sense, as at that point people are getting deluged with email.

imo, my favorite way of organizing these things is via newsgroups, but they have fallen out of favor. Groups allowed you, with a newsreader, to see all the new topics on all the groups you follow (benefit of the email list), but with the threaded discussion capability of a web forum. Unfortunately, particularly among non-technical people, requiring users to have a newsreader and set up the groups is a total no-go.

GrandmasterB
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    Google provide a forum-like interface to newsgroups. I've used it for years (after I lost a good NNTP provider). – Donal Fellows Apr 25 '11 at 22:44
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    Absolutely true. Forums are terrible for low volume topics. TBH I find them overrated in general, but they just don't work without a certain treshold of traffic. Mailing lists don't have that problem. – Tridus Apr 26 '11 at 00:31
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    Most forums have e-mail notification option. – Calmarius Feb 14 '13 at 11:59
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In addition to the "because they are used to it" arguments, email has a few other huge advantages:

  1. You already have an email address, no need to sign up for yet another messageboard account for every project.
  2. With a messageboard, you have to actively visit the page and refresh it to see new messages. On the other hand, most people have their email client (Outlook, Mail, Gmail) open all day and it refreshes automatically as soon as a new message comes in.

In short, using a messageboard requires me to change my habits in a significant way. On the other hand, mailing lists fit simply & easily into my existing routine, so adoption is much easier.

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    #2 is particularly true for low traffic boards/lists. You dont want to have to remember to check 20 different boards, each which may get only a couple posts a week. A board with such low traffic never reaches the critical mass necessary to have a dedicated group of users who can answer questions. A list, on the other hand, pushes out posts so everyone sees them. – GrandmasterB Apr 25 '11 at 20:09
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    @Cheshire: maybe it's my problem, but I find RSS for forums absolutely unusable, since you get posts from different threads mixed up. With a decent email client (even Gmail) posts are grouped and even shown as a tree. Sure, you can use RSS just to warn you and then visit the website, but that's more annoying than having them "just there." – André Paramés Apr 25 '11 at 21:22
  • Anyone up for writing an RSS replacement ;) ? – Anto Apr 25 '11 at 21:25
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    @Anto: I've heard of this nifty protocol for asynchronous message delivery called SMTP… – Donal Fellows Apr 25 '11 at 22:42
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    What about forums that you can "subscribe to this thread" which email you as soon as there is a reply, or you can even subscribe to entire boards, where you get emailed as soon as there is a reply or new topic, the better ones even let you reply to said email to post a reply to the topic... – Hailwood Apr 26 '11 at 04:51
  • There are certainly some workarounds you can do - RSS, subscribe to threads, etc - but they take noticeably more effort and don't address issue #1. Each time you reduce friction, the process is adopted by 10x more people, so I'm not surprised mailing lists are so common, despite their many many flaws. – Yevgeniy Brikman Apr 26 '11 at 05:27
  • This is probably the key reason -- if I participate in 10 different discussions, I don't want to keep 10 different websites open, with 10 different log ons, to check forums. I use 1 email client, that I already have open on my desktop for email (this could even be web-based email). – Sly Gryphon Apr 27 '11 at 00:21
  • You also don't need to sign up everywhere, if you already have an open id... – Calmarius Feb 14 '13 at 11:57
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    Signing up to a mailing list with my email address is far more onerous than signing up to a forum with my email address. – endolith Mar 07 '13 at 03:55
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    You still need to signup - and the process isn't significantly easier than signing up for a forum. Subscribing to more than a handful non-dead mailing lists means you'll get tons of messages everyday, most of which you're not going to be interested in. If you're not interested in a subject at the moment you'll either have to unsubscribe or filter the list, instead of just not going to the forum.mailing lists may have a couple of merits, but imho not enough to justify the disadvantages. – Cubic Nov 15 '13 at 11:06
  • Maybe we can have a Mailing List/RSS/Forum Board/Notifications manager, that stitches it all together in an easy to use form? – CMCDragonkai Apr 15 '14 at 05:44