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

[Michael Downey]

On examination, this argument doesn't hold up. Read on to learn why.

On Sat, 2019-05-04 at 02:13 -0500, J.B. Nicholson wrote:
> 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.

A few years back, when the project I was leading received the Free
Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit, our project's web site,
which at the time running using WordPress, similarly showed capacity-
related errors when links to the site were posted on Slashdot. (AKA
"Slashdotting".) Mozilla has received a lot of news coverage about
their current incident, surely resulting in huge spikes of traffic to
their (self-hosted by Mozilla, apparently using AWS) forum.

> Until discourse.org increases their capacity nobody gets to read the 
> discussion. Whatever sage advice was posted there is flatly
> unavailable to 
> others.

Blaming the Discourse software project ("discourse.org") for the
capacity Mozilla did or didn't build out for their forum would be like
blaming Automattic (builders of WordPress) for my project's site outage
during LibrePlanet that year. It's neither accurate nor fair.

BTW, like mailing lists, Discourse users can subscribe in mailing list
mode and receive an email for every post on the system, creating their
own offline cache of information. I've got an individual email in my
Inbox, auto-moved to a special folder, for each reply to the topic in
the forum you link to above.

So there is, in fact, parity to something like mailman where you have
individuals' email archives & the online web-based archive. Of course,
if you weren't subscribed to get emails from the forum, you wouldn't
have your own copy -- in exactly the same way that you wouldn't have
such emails if you weren't subscribed to the mailing list or only read
digests, or read it on the online archive. Services like the Internet
Archive can also crawl & save snapshots of the site at given times, as
well.

Michael