Ben Langfeld <ben@langfeld.co.uk> wrote:
So forum software with a "Subscribe to all by email" option and/or similar RSS feed? Would that cover all the bases?
No, not necessarily. An RSS feed wouldn't be enough; you can't use an RSS client to post content, so it would have to be e-mail or NNTP to give users choice of client, which is what I'm insisting on. For e-mail support, it would have to handle the in-reply-to and references headers properly to enable threading. At this point we're talking about exactly what we have now: a mailing list that can also be accessed on the Web. If you want NNTP access, this is also available - see http://www.gmane.org/ or just refer your favourite NNTP news reader to news.gmane.org and you'll find that you can read and (probably) post to this list over NNTP too. So my point is: we already have enough to satisfy everybody's preferences - you can read and post via the Web, via e-mail or a newsgroup - we're not excluding anybody on the basis of their needs and preferences regarding how to participate - so the conclusion is that we should leave the mailing list in place. If you think there are shortcomings in the current Web interfaces then I'm sure it would be possible to add another on top of the existing mailing list setup.