Mailing lists vs this forum

Mailing lists have the disadvantage that all FreeBSD developers are there :-) They tend to discuss things which mere mortals don't understand. Another disadvantage is, that the FreeBSD mailing lists are obscenely divided in sub-sections, and it is less easy to find the correct section for the topics of your interest.
 
In my opinion the user interface of a mail software as mail/mutt allows it to be faster in going through the threads. The highest advantage is that it is straightforward to move mails around for later reference. Then they are on the users system and should not disappear. With a forum you can of course set bookmarks and export and import them. But I find the procedure somehow messy.
 
  1. Search quickly.
  2. Threaded conversations
  3. Text only (junk free)
  4. mutt/pan friendly
  5. keep track of previous conversions and back an forth between different participants.
  6. be able to archive locally.
  7. Troll un!-friendly
  8. Replicable on other servers, such as NNTP, e.g. gmane.io
  9. Header-only download
  10. Think first, post later principle.
I really reevaluate my conversions/relationship with those who prefer IM/DM/PM over email.
 
Bike-shedding is more fun on forums.

This community is pretty technical so forums work too but usually technical focused questions yield more useful answers on mailing lists.
 
obsigna said:
Mailing lists have the disadvantage that all FreeBSD developers are there :) They tend to discuss things which mere mortals don't understand.
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Some of them also take the time to help novice users.

msplsh said:
It's arcane and obtuse as a ward against new people entering them.
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That is a very negative point of view or yours, also it does not match what I observed. I advised some inexperienced forum users I wasn't able to help them here to present their problem on the mailing lists. Not all of them but mostly they have been taken care of, even by developers. I follow certain lists on a daily basis, and what I saw is, there are many experienced users, besides developers, helping novice users. Of course not all who asks there gets an answer, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Here is one examples I can remember of, a user I advised to seek help on freebsd-x11:

forums.freebsd.org

Sun keyboard and xorg-server 1.20, FreeBSD 12.1, xfce 4.12

Sorry, didn't see the message earlier. https://pastebin.com/QCr4xnY7 Cleaned-up version concentrating on input (mostly removed nvidia-related junk).
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

247465 – base system/kern after update to xorg-server-1.20, Sun keys are > not recognized

bugs.freebsd.org bugs.freebsd.org

If you follow forums regularly or read FreeBSD News you might recognize Vladimir Kondratyev from the freebsd-x11 list mail and bug report, here on forums, one of the FreeBSD developers, src committer, author of the wmt(4) driver.
 
"how to present the problem"

Basically, you need to do a little work before the mailing list can help you? They had to do some back and forth on the forum to refine their problem before just submitting it? Sounds like the ward worked, maybe?

People only have so much bandwidth, so gating it behind a "ewww gross" mailing list and having an "easier" outlet for people in the forums as a way to limit demands on developer attention is a strategy to handle it.
 
These forums only failed me once at which point I posted to the wireless mailing list (it might have even been a forum suggestion to do so) and received the code needed to get the Broadcom WiFi working on my two late-2009 Mac minis.

I subscribe to: arm, current, stable, doc, ports, stable and wireless. I've really only participated in arm (for RPis several times) and wireless (for the Mac mini WiFi). I still read them all daily though.
 
What is the best, most efficient way to browse, search the mailing list. This in order to only read, no posting. ?
Do you use a webbrowser or some software with a bit of configuration, tuning ?
 
I think a mailing list is something different than a forum. Mailing lists are not appropriate
for small-talk, it can be annoying there. For general questions, for discussing ideas I find
the forum better.
 
Alain De Vos said:
What is the best, most efficient way to browse, search the mailing list. This in order to only read, no posting. ?
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Posting: just subscribe to a list, using your favourite MUA (Email client) to post to a list, read replies and if it's necessary, reply
Reading:, i.e. you just want to skim through posts, and have no intention to participate in a list. It depends on, how far you want to go. Only one or two low-traffic list? subscribe with email client is fine. Occasionally skimming through the posts of random list? use web browser. But If you want to read a lot of lists, including high-traffic ones, and you don't want to miss a single post, or maybe trying to archive some of them for future reference, you have to think about some specific solution. There's NNTP read-only replicated servers such as gmane. You can use Usenet readers, e.g. news/slrn to read them. If you are not going to subscribe to large number of the lists, there's also GUI clients, e.g. news/pan. Some MUA offer NNTP reader. For example, mail/thunderbird, and www/seamonkey. They can server as both MUA for post/subscribe and usenet-client (NNTP) for read-only. But such program will not handle a large number of the list/post, properly.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Is it possible for instance to have all mails on "freebsd-www" of the year 2019 ?.
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With news/slrn, I use the default setting, aka fetch all headers of a list. I don't know how to restrict that. Someone may know.
If your are using news/pan, mail/thunderbird or www/seamonkey, you can limit the number of headers for downloading. For example last 666 messages or last 13 days. You can also download all headers, then delete some of them. For example, delete 2018 and 2020, and only save/retain 2019 headers.
I mention headers several time. By that I mean you don't need to fetch body of messages. It's take too much time, space and server resource.
In program like mail/thunderbird or www/seamonkey, you fetch header first, then when you're select a message, it's going to fetch body. You can also set it to fetch body of all messages of specific lists for offline use. In news/slrn you can use slrnpull (subset of slrn) to fetch bodies, for offline use. That's not my approach, but it's there. By the way, when you read a new message, it will be cached. Hence it's not going to download every time when you read an old message.
Alain De Vos said:
Via the web it is organised in a non-usefull way.
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I agree. But it's fine when you are searching with search engine.
 
I have never had good experience with any mailing lists. Forum to be a modern way of discussion is much better. Mailing lists is, IMHO, just convenient for the developers, don't have to left for a web browser but could continue with their email client. Other than that, I saw no benefit of mailing lists over forum.
 
I search in this order:
- Google
- bug reports/patches (bugs.freebsd.org)
- mailing lists (freebsd.markmail.com)
- reviews (reviews.freebsd.org)
- and finally the FreeBSD forum.

All of these have their usefullness. It's not one vs. the other.
 
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