Hello Mailing List,
I am all just about forum. Since I think forum is more clear, and better organized (in my view/opinion). I do not like mailing lists. I hate them. But...
I admit complete defeat!
"If you can not defeat/beat them, you join them!" ;-)
Zoran
On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 12:18 AM, WordPress wordpress@blogs.coreboot.org wrote:
A new post titled "Results of the coreboot "Mailing List vs Blog" poll" has been published on the coreboot blog. Find the full post at http://blogs.coreboot.org/blog/2017/03/04/results-of- the-coreboot-mailing-list-vs-blog-poll/
A little while back, there were a few requests to switch from the mailing list format to a web-based forum for our official communication channel. The coreboot leadership wanted to see what the actual preferences of the coreboot community was, so I posted a poll. The poll was publicized in IRC and on the mailing list itself, so should have been communicated to the people who would be most directly affected by any change. Poll results
*Here are the overall results from all responses:* [image: Hate Mailing List:1, Prefer Forum: 6, Don't care: 2, Prefer Mailing list: 21, Hate Forum: 26] https://i2.wp.com/blogs.coreboot.org/files/2017/03/All_results.png All_responses
We had a total of 60 valid responses, and I think the overall results pretty clearly indicate that the coreboot project should NOT move away from the mailing list.
One suggestion was to split the communication into the mailing list for Developers, and a forum for non-developers. To see what the various groups thought, I made a few more charts:
*Developer preferences:* [image: Prefer Forum: 1, Prefer Mailing list: 16, Hate Forum: 15, Other: 3] https://i2.wp.com/blogs.coreboot.org/files/2017/03/Developer_results.pngDeveloper Responses
So not unexpectedly, the coreboot developers even more overwhelmingly prefer the mailing list to the general results
*Non-developer preferences:* [image: Hate Mailing list: 1, Prefer Forum: 5, Don't care: 2, Prefer Mailing list: 5, Hate Forum: 11, Other: 1] https://i1.wp.com/blogs.coreboot.org/files/2017/03/Non-developer_results.pngNon-developer Responses
So even within the non-developer group, there was a definite preference for the mailing list format.
Finally, I broke the Non-developer group down into the group that said they were coreboot users, as opposed to those that mainly read the mailing list.
*coreboot users (non-developers):*
[image: Hate Mailing list: 1, Prefer Forum: 4, Prefer Mailing list: 4, Hate Forum: 5] https://i2.wp.com/blogs.coreboot.org/files/2017/03/User_Non-Developer_results.pngcoreboot Users (Non-Developers)
That group had the highest percentage of people who preferred the forum, but it was still well under 40%. Suggestions
We also asked people what we should do to improve the mailing list. Here’s a summary of the suggestions:
- Show people how to set up their (or a different) email client to
make reading the mailing list easier.
- Have people be more polite.
- Add a FAQ showing previously asked question and answers.
- A netiquette should be established like on the Linux kernel mailing
list.
- Several suggestions to improve the coreboot mailing list archive at
https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/ https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/ - Fix the archive so that long threads aren’t spread into different sections by months. - Add a search function to the archive - Create monthly archives that can be downloaded (This exists.) - Update from Pipermail to a more modern archiver like Hyperkitty – https://pypi.python.org/pypi/HyperKitty https://pypi.python.org/pypi/HyperKitty
Since it doesn’t look like we’re going to switch to a forum, I’m not going to list the suggestions that people had for that. Follow-up
Over the upcoming weeks, we’ll look at our options, and discuss our options and plans in the bi-weekly coreboot community meetings.
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