Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

John Sullivan wrote:
> I'm not aware of any, but I think that's a good idea, since I've seen
> the same conversation many times too. The libreplanet.org wiki could be
> a good place for it?

I see that https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists_vs._Discourse_Forum 
now points only to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum .

I wanted to bring up one Discourse.org-specific problem I've not seen with 
mailing lists: Discourse.org doesn't seem to design their server layout to 
properly scale up.

Background: Currently there's a problem with Firefox where apparently a 
certificate used with Firefox add-ons has recently expired and now Firefox 
users are seeing their add-ons become disabled.

Current situation: Mozilla has a discourse.org forum to discuss this 
(https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/certificate-issue-causing-add-ons-to-be-disabled-or-fail-to-install/39047) 
and it isn't scaling up well -- the site is returning an error "429 Too 
Many Requests" instead of the discussion.

Until discourse.org increases their capacity nobody gets to read the 
discussion. Whatever sage advice was posted there is flatly unavailable to 
others. A comparable failure could happen with an email server too (perhaps 
too many posts fills up a server's temp storage and the server fails, or 
the list processor has a lot of messages to handle so list responses are 
sluggish) but I'd hardly call discourse.org's current implementation an 
improvement.