[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Austin Hair]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> wine-users - http://forum.winehq.org/
>>
>> It started as a mailing list, then the forum was set up with a two-way
>> gateway. The forum is where most of the posters actually post from,
>> but so far it works ... surprisingly well!
>
> If you allow posting via email, then you lose the ability to properly
> authenticate those posts. If you allow receiving of the full content
> via email, then you lose the ability to postmoderate. Maybe it would
> be useful as a temporary migration measure, but it wouldn't solve any
> abuse problem until you removed those features.
>
>> The main thing Wine found is that the forum promptly had 10x the traffic!
>
> There's a chance we would see that aspect of it. The mailing lists
> have a different readership to the on-wiki discussion pages, and
> that's because of the technical barrier, which works in both
> directions. Some people prefer the interoperable nature of mail and
> don't bother reading the wikis, and some people like web pages and
> find the mailing lists strange, and the subscription process onerous.
>
> Because I know that this mailing list is mainly populated with the
> former kind of person, I know that my desire for a web-only interface
> is wishful thinking.
>
> A properly advertised bidirectional gateway might go some distance
> towards healing the split in the community that we currently have. But
> then we would run the risk of losing the people who contribute via
> mail, on small screens or non-threading clients, who already complain
> that foundation-l traffic is getting too high. A lower barrier to
> entry, with a continuing lack of postmoderation, would only make the
> traffic higher.
>
> I'm not opposed to bidirectional gateways, but I do think we should
> move carefully. If the software is not up to scratch, we could lose
> what productive public discussion we have, and increase our reliance
> on private mailing lists.

I agree with every one of Tim's points.

There is definitely a disconnect between mailing list participants and
wiki participants, and there would definitely be yet another
disconnect if we tried to split foundation-l between a mailing list
and a web forum.  This is not a tightly knit group of 20 people who
will migrate to whatever methodology we choose--a hybrid solution may
work as a transition, but it's not going to be the same kind of
community on the other side.  (But then, that's really not what we
want anyway.)

My ideal, personally, is something more like nntp--and while I'm
perfectly happy to turn over the list to some other technology, I
don't know that this is the magic solution, and I agree with Tim that
it risks killing what good we do have with the existing methods.

Austin