Re: Perhaps it's time to think about enhancements to the NANOG list...?

[Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa>]

On 3/23/21 11:37, Alfie Pates wrote:

> More opinions, from someone old and jaded enough to prefer IRC but 
> quite a bit younger than the NANOG mailing list itself!
>
> I feel like Mattermost bridged into a private IRC server (Matterbridge 
> is really good at puppetry these days: 
> https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge 
> <https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge>) would cover the widest gamut 
> of old hands who like IRC and newer users more familiar with 
> slack/discord/similar platforms, without forcing people onto one or 
> the other. (Discord bridging is also a possibility, but I cannot 
> emphasise enough how absolutely unenthusiastic I am using Discord for 
> anything work-related.)
>
> As for improving the mailing list experience, I think a migration to 
> mailman3 would make interacting with the mailing list a lot more 
> friendly for folks not used to the quirks of mailman2. Hyperkitty (the 
> mailman3 archives renderer / web interface) is a really nice 
> experience for browsing list archives, and has functionality to enable 
> replies / new threads / etc, which are _super_ usable. Again, I think 
> this would cover the widest gamut of users both new and old, whilst 
> still remaining definitively a mailing list and allowing searching of 
> all of the NANOG archives.
>
> Discourse is an utterly dire user experience for a larger community 
> such as NANOG. I'm subscribed to a few Discourse instances - the 
> mailing-list mode just isn't worth using (It does not behave like a 
> traditional mailing list, nor a forum!) and I find the web interface 
> sluggish and fairly unintuitive (scaling is apparently expensive): All 
> of this seems to contribute to a much less satisfying forum experience.

Personally, I'm not bothered by any of this at all. The state-of-the-art 
will naturally gravitate to where it wants to go, and the dust will 
settle where it does.

I quite enjoy the mailing list format, but in as much as I am now 
running Telegram on my desktop to interact with the kids that aren't 
keen on the mailing list alternative of the forum, I have accepted that 
I will simply have to be ready and adapt to the order of the day, or get 
left behind in my utopia.

There's no right or wrong answer... just what is.

Mark.