Discourse (this forum engine) supports mailing list mode and it is possible to do conversation with only e-mail and without opening web page: What is "Mailing List mode"? - support - Discourse Meta. I see no benefits of using freelists, it has terrible online web interface and downloading archives is not available.
Using obsolete and hard to use discussion methods will cause unnecessary difficulties for new Haiku contributors such as GSOC students and some people will abandon contribution.
The online web interface for Freelists is pretty simple; it’s no Discourse, to be sure, but what’s wrong with it?
Downloading archives is not available to end users, but it isn’t available to end users on Discourse either, so I don’t know what the difference is.
So far, no GSoC students have complained about having to use the mailing lists, and in fact most of them never post in this forum but send plenty of emails to the mailing list. So they seem to have no problems there, so far.
Mesa, LLVM, Linux kernel, FreeBSD, and plenty of other large open source projects use mailing lists as their primary discussion forum; I see no good reason why we need to be any different from them on the basis that mailing lists are “outdated” or something like that.
But if you are trying to get people to change, posting here won’t help, as we make technical and project decisions on the mailing list
It have no topic list, it can’t chronologically display multiple messages in one page, no good search feature, it has a lot of adware. It is possible to achieve this features by downloading archive and importing to software that support it, but archives are also not available.
I don’t try, just please stop writing like “it’s better to discuss this on mailing lists/IRC” after every post. Let people use tools that they like and familiar. Web interface haters can use e-mail client.
Compared to Trac/Gerrit/Forum discussion on Haiku mailing lists is inactive recently.
The main mailing list always less active; we use it for technical discussions and collecting concensus when we need to get it, and for items that do not depend on Trac.
However, the haiku-commits list is still the “last point” for code review, and the i18n lists are also used extensively. We do not like doing internals discussions on the forum, it’s not what we intend it for.
Some GSoC students contacted me because they didn’t manage to post to the mailing list. I can only wonder how many of them tried to send a mail without subscribing, did not get a reply, and went somewhere else.
That’s only your personal opinion. This was never discussed because no one so far suggested we should move.
