Racket Discourse

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John Clements

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Nov 21, 2021, 1:09:21 PM11/21/21
to Racket Users
TL;DR: Go to

https://racket.discourse.group/invites/okLTSrQw1T

and sign up for Racket Discourse (https://racket.discourse.group/)

# Thoughts behind the move:

Over time, it has become steadily more apparent that email-only
mailing lists are an outdated communication medium for the Racket
community. More recent arrivals in our community have generally
chosen other platforms like slack or discord to carry on discussions.
As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio of the racket users mailing list
has dropped below the level of viability.

In short, it’s time to give up on the mailing list.

After a good deal of research, it looks like there’s room for a whole
bunch of discussion platforms for Racket, but it also seems as though
there should be a “permanent” one; it should be archived, it should be
searchable in its entirety, and it should not tie us to someone else’s
plan to monetize user data.

Given these criteria, the winner is Discourse, an open-source
messaging platform built by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam
Saffron. It has a reasonable business model (they host projects like
ours unless they get really big, whereupon you can either host it
yourself or pay them to do it); it’s widely used by other language
communities; and it appears to do most of what we want.

# So where can I sign up?

Sign up here: https://racket.discourse.group/invites/okLTSrQw1T

The discourse platform has been in a “soft opening” phase for about
two weeks now, since RacketCon, and we have about a hundred users.
You’re receiving this message because we’d like to have *YOU* there
as well.

# Can I still receive messages like a mailing list?

Yes, you can. I have it enabled myself!
To use discord as a mailing-list:
Sign up, go to Preferences > Email, and tick “Enable mailing list mode'.

Yours,

John Clements & Stephen De Gabrielle

Sorawee Porncharoenwase

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Nov 21, 2021, 2:14:43 PM11/21/21
to John Clements, Racket Users
I could be in the minority here, but as an early proponent of Discourse to replace the mailing list (even before RacketCon), I feel reluctant to join it after observing it for a while. It has a very high traffic, with almost 100% of the contents being cross-posted everywhere else (and vice versa) anyway.

While I appreciate any efforts into promoting the site, I do think different content has different appropriate mediums. For example, FAQs probably should go to the wiki. There's no need to clutter anyone's inbox for this type of content.

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John Clements

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Nov 21, 2021, 6:08:17 PM11/21/21
to Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Racket Users
Wait, you think that’s high traffic? Gee whiz, the mailing list *has* shrunk, hasn’t it?

Okay, that was not an entirely serious reply, but I do think that in contrast to the discord & slack channels, the discourse is likely to be searchable and at least lightly curated six months from now. Also, if you take a look at the mailing list archive

https://www.mail-archive.com/racket...@googlegroups.com/

… you’ll see a *shocking* amount of spam. Many of us don’t see this because we have semi-reasonable spam filters, but others are putting up with what looks like more than 50% spam on this list. That’s just not acceptable.

John

Stephen De Gabrielle

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Nov 21, 2021, 6:38:22 PM11/21/21
to Sorawee Porncharoenwase, John Clements, Racket Users
Thank you for the feedback.

We are lucky that the Discourse platform allows users to mute categories that they are not interested in, and this setting also applies to mailing list mode so users can have more control about what they receive. (I’ve included some screenshots on how to mute categories below. )

We are still working out the new platform but fortunately Discourse is configurable - I expect it will grow and change to meet the needs of the community’s.

To help this a ‘site feedback’ category was created for “Discussion about this site, its organization, how it works, and how we can improve it.” 

With your feedback I hope we can make the Discourse work for all of us. 

Best wishes 

Stephen







PS We are not the first PL community to use Discourse - many racket users also use many other languages so if you see something good that another language community does please let us know.!

PL Discourse sites


--
----

Philip McGrath

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Nov 21, 2021, 6:42:32 PM11/21/21
to John Clements, Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Racket Users
I've long been in the basically-content-with-the-mailing-list camp, but I've recently come around to the view that the status quo is untenable. I looked into it after Racket 'Con and discovered the mailing list had shrunk especially much for me, because the Google Groups spam filters were letting through so much spam that Google spam filters on one hop of my receiving side have been classifying a great deal of legitimate mailing list traffic as spam.

I haven't done much with Discourse yet, but it seems promising, and I hope it works out.

I'd guess the list administrators have tried this already, but, just in case, the Google Group settings should have a "Spam message handling" setting that could be set to "Moderate without notifying content moderators" (see https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2464926?hl=en#posting&zippy=%2Csettings-reference%2Cadvanced-settings-reference). If this is the official moment for giving up on this mailing list, it would probably be good to turn up these settings to some draconian level anyway, just to leave one fewer spam target on the internet.

-Philip

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/4b85e73f-4233-4b77-8d06-96b4afdebc24%40mtasv.net.

Sorawee Porncharoenwase

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Nov 21, 2021, 10:53:29 PM11/21/21
to Philip McGrath, John Clements, Racket Users

My personal opinion is that, if we want Discourse to be a replacement of the mailing list, then we should treat it like one. Right now, it’s a combination of the mailing list, wiki, FAQ site, and whatnot. And I don’t want one more email in my inbox when someone decides to add an entry to the FAQ.

As concrete examples, consider:

I’m not sure what’s the point of these posts in the context of the mailing list. Stephen definitely knows MrEd designer and has been promoting it for years, so this looks like his attempt to build a wiki/FAQ on Discourse. While I really do appreciate Stephen’s effort into building and maintaining the valuable wiki/FAQ at https://github.com/racket/racket/wiki, I personally don’t think a mailing list is an appropriate medium for it. Urlang is great, but I don’t understand why we are rehashing it now on Discourse. Will we also see 1735 more posts to rehash every package on the package website in the future?

Another issue is cross posting. Often posts are shared to all Slack, Discord, Reddit, the current mailing list, and whatnot (and also in the other direction). It makes sense to do that for event announcements. I’m not sure the same can be said for other posts. They are inundating (at least to me), especially if they happen a lot.

I understand that there's a spam problem on the current mailing list and in fact have been complaining constantly on Slack. I actually even proposed to Sam last year to consider Discourse as a replacement of the mailing list, so I'm not against the software at all if that's what you worry about.

To be clear, no offense to anyone at all. It could be that my expectation of the mailing list is far off from most people, and if that’s the case, I’d simply excuse myself from it.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 21, 2021, 11:20:21 PM11/21/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for letting us know. When should people expect to unsubscribe?

I read the ToS, privacy policy, and thoughts. Hard pass.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 21, 2021, 11:24:14 PM11/21/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com
Also: Apologies. That came off as rude. No offense intended.

But I have to ask, who wrote the ToS? Who is "the company" in its
context? Discord? One of the Racket team's universities? A sponsor?

On 11/21/21 11:20 PM, Sage Gerard wrote:
> Thanks for letting us know. When should people expect to unsubscribe?
>
> I read the ToS, privacy policy, and thoughts. Hard pass.
>
> On 11/21/21 1:09 PM, 'John Clements' via Racket Users wrote:

John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 12:51:42 AM11/22/21
to Sorawee Porncharoenwase, Philip McGrath, Racket Users
Many thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate that your time and inbox space is at a premium, and I’ll try to be careful about posting things to more than one forum.

Best,

John Clements

Stephen De Gabrielle

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Nov 22, 2021, 4:52:34 AM11/22/21
to Sage Gerard, racket...@googlegroups.com
Hi Sage, 

It looks like the same text, and has the same last updated date, as the Haskell Discourse TOS. 
I think it is the default text provided by Discourse for the free hosting.

I don't think anyone has the time or expertise to rewrite it, but I'm sure specific items could be looked at if they are a barrier to participating.
 
best wishes

Stephen


To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/a07b931b-3a0a-0a29-0582-e899aa335130%40sagegerard.com.

Norman Gray

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Nov 22, 2021, 4:54:38 AM11/22/21
to Sage Gerard, racket...@googlegroups.com

Greetings.

On 22 Nov 2021, at 4:24, Sage Gerard wrote:

> But I have to ask, who wrote the ToS? Who is "the company" in its
>
> context? Discord? One of the Racket team's universities? A sponsor?

I'm not sure who 'the company' is, either, but they appear to be called 'company_name' (catchy!), and that users are notified that disputes can only be arbitrated in city_for_disputes, under governing_law. *cough*

Such curiosities aside, all of that does represent unappealingly more legalese than one expects for a mailing list. But since the current list is hosted at googlegroups, and since it's not obvious that Discourse Corp is more predatory than Google Corp (indeed, the former is dispensing freemium-ware rather than ad-ware, so are more attractive in terms of business model), it feels irrational for me to be too put off by it.

Best wishes,

Norman


--
Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

Etan Wexler

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Nov 22, 2021, 8:06:41 AM11/22/21
to Racketeers

The stewards of Racket have decided that it’s time to give up on the mailing list (that is, racket-users, to which this message is a contribution). The stewards of Racket have designated another forum for Racket as the successor to racket-users. This other forum for discussing Racket has as its basis the software named “Discourse”, which is open‐source. Enlisting is prerequisite to contributing to the Discursive forum for Racket. Enlisting is prerequisite to receiving as Internet mail the contributions to the Discursive forum for Racket. The stewards of Racket have published a facility for enlisting as a participant in the Discursive forum for Racket.

David Storrs

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:40:41 AM11/22/21
to Etan Wexler, Racketeers
That's sudden.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:44:37 AM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com

If anyone here still has demand for a vanilla email list, please reach out to me.

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John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:49:49 AM11/22/21
to Norman Gray, Sage Gerard, racket...@googlegroups.com
I’m actually very heartened to see the boilerplate here; it sounds like this is something we can edit, and not something imposed by Discourse. If that’s the case, then it certainly seems likely that we can find some language (or, more importantly, *lack* of language) that makes more of us happy.

I, for one, am shocked to see binding arbitration language in here: I think binding arbitration is one of the most revolting elements of corporate control in our society today, and if we were unable to remove the binding arbitration clause, I would likely abandon discourse myself.

Sounds like the next step is to come up with a TOS that’s acceptable to all, or find a way to remove it entirely.

John
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users...@googlegroups.com.
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Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:52:52 AM11/22/21
to John Clements, Norman Gray, racket...@googlegroups.com
Thanks for checking on this. I'd expect something like a CoC more than a ToS in this case, but terms are terms :)

If you don't mind, I have a couple of follow up questions.

  • Were "rank-and-file" Racket contributors alerted to this change in advance? Say, in a RacketCon speech? I may have missed it.
  • Did a sponsor play any role in this transition?

John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:55:08 AM11/22/21
to Etan Wexler, Racketeers
I’m … super confused by this message. Did I miss something? I feel like this message has a subtext that I’m completely missing.

John

John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:57:58 AM11/22/21
to Sage Gerard, Norman Gray, racket...@googlegroups.com
Good questions:

1) Yes, Sam mentioned the discourse group at RacketCon, and there was some “hallway” discussion about it.
2) No, no sponsor was involved. Yikes! Indeed, I’m not aware that Racket *has* any sponsors currently, aside from the research and infrastructure grants that are being funded by the NSF et cetera.

John

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 9:59:30 AM11/22/21
to John Clements, Norman Gray, racket...@googlegroups.com
Gotcha, thanks. As long as we were warned! I thought I remembered Sam
mentioning something along the lines of an "AWS grant," but my memory is
unreliable here.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 10:00:05 AM11/22/21
to Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, John Clements, Norman Gray, Racket Users
Thanks!

On 11/22/21 9:58 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 9:52 AM Sage Gerard <sa...@sagegerard.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for checking on this. I'd expect something like a CoC more than a ToS in this case, but terms are terms :)
> The discourse site is hosted by the people who make/run Discourse the
> project, you can read about them here: https://www.discourse.org/team
>
> I believe that this mailing list is covered by the general Google
> terms of service, here: https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US and
> the Google Groups content policy here:
> https://support.google.com/groups/answer/4561696?hl=en
>
>> If you don't mind, I have a couple of follow up questions.
>>
>> Were "rank-and-file" Racket contributors alerted to this change in advance? Say, in a RacketCon speech? I may have missed it.
> I announced it in the State of Racket talk at RacketCon.
>
>> Did a sponsor play any role in this transition?
> The Discourse site is free based on the Free-for-open-source version
> of Discourse, but no sponsorship is involved.
>
> Sam
>
>> On 11/22/21 9:49 AM, John Clements wrote:
>>
>> I’m actually very heartened to see the boilerplate here; it sounds like this is something we can edit, and not something imposed by Discourse. If that’s the case, then it certainly seems likely that we can find some language (or, more importantly, *lack* of language) that makes more of us happy.
>>
>> I, for one, am shocked to see binding arbitration language in here: I think binding arbitration is one of the most revolting elements of corporate control in our society today, and if we were unable to remove the binding arbitration clause, I would likely abandon discourse myself.
>>
>> Sounds like the next step is to come up with a TOS that’s acceptable to all, or find a way to remove it entirely.
>>
>> John
>>
>> On Nov 22, 2021, at 04:54, Norman Gray <norma...@glasgow.ac.uk> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Greetings.
>>
>> On 22 Nov 2021, at 4:24, Sage Gerard wrote:
>>
>> But I have to ask, who wrote the ToS? Who is "the company" in its
>>
>> context? Discord? One of the Racket team's universities? A sponsor?
>>
>> I'm not sure who 'the company' is, either, but they appear to be called 'company_name' (catchy!), and that users are notified that disputes can only be arbitrated in city_for_disputes, under governing_law. *cough*
>>
>> Such curiosities aside, all of that does represent unappealingly more legalese than one expects for a mailing list. But since the current list is hosted at googlegroups, and since it's not obvious that Discourse Corp is more predatory than Google Corp (indeed, the former is dispensing freemium-ware rather than ad-ware, so are more attractive in terms of business model), it feels irrational for me to be too put off by it.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Norman
>>
>>
>> --
>> Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
>> SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users...@googlegroups.com.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/BEC261BF-C274-4221-8F62-C77D181ED1EF%40glasgow.ac.uk.
>>
>> --
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group.
>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users...@googlegroups.com.
>> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/8bb7efbe-0d8a-32d8-c423-986e523e343c%40sagegerard.com.

Jens Axel Søgaard

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Nov 22, 2021, 10:16:49 AM11/22/21
to Etan Wexler, Racketeers
There are no plans of closing the mailing list.

Things take time.

Different forums for communication have different strengths.
Discourse might attract an audience that is unfamiliar to mailing lists.
There is no need to rush things however. 
In due course maybe the number of users on the forum will
grow to outshadow the number of participants on the mailing list,
but it will take some years. 

/Søgaard


“Put up in a place
where it is easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T

When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.”

- Piet Hein




Den man. 22. nov. 2021 kl. 14.06 skrev Etan Wexler <racket-...@r-6.org>:

The stewards of Racket have decided that it’s time to give up on the mailing list (that is, racket-users, to which this message is a contribution). The stewards of Racket have designated another forum for Racket as the successor to racket-users. This other forum for discussing Racket has as its basis the software named “Discourse”, which is open‐source. Enlisting is prerequisite to contributing to the Discursive forum for Racket. Enlisting is prerequisite to receiving as Internet mail the contributions to the Discursive forum for Racket. The stewards of Racket have published a facility for enlisting as a participant in the Discursive forum for Racket.



--
--
Jens Axel Søgaard

Martin Weigele

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Nov 22, 2021, 10:25:02 AM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com
Am Montag, 22. November 2021, 16:16:35 CET schrieb Jens Axel Søgaard:

> There are no plans of closing the mailing list.
>
> Things take time.
>
> Different forums for communication have different strengths.

Exactly

> Discourse might attract an audience that is unfamiliar to mailing lists.
> There is no need to rush things however.
> In due course maybe the number of users on the forum will
> grow to outshadow the number of participants on the mailing list,
> but it will take some years.

A discourse type forum - we had this discussions in other contexts again and
again - may be a better choice for persons who have the luxury they can
concentrate on very few thingies. For all others, mailinglists are a much
better choice, you can follow many developments in one place: your mail
client, with a completely standard UI.

Cheers
Martin



J. Ryan Stinnett

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Nov 22, 2021, 11:01:56 AM11/22/21
to Martin Weigele, racket...@googlegroups.com
On Mon, 22 Nov 2021 at 15:25, Martin Weigele <mar...@weigele.de> wrote:
A discourse type forum - we had this discussions in other contexts again and
again - may be a better choice for persons who have the luxury they can
concentrate on very few thingies. For all others, mailinglists are a much
better choice, you can follow many developments in one place: your mail
client, with a completely standard UI.

Discourse has a mailing list mode each user can choose to enable which allows them to receive every post to their mail client, so you can continue to use your mail client workflow for following messages over there as well.

- Ryan

Philip McGrath

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Nov 22, 2021, 11:19:13 AM11/22/21
to Racket Users
On Monday, November 22, 2021 at 10:16:49 AM UTC-5 Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
There is no need to rush things however. 
In due course maybe the number of users on the forum will
grow to outshadow the number of participants on the mailing list,
but it will take some years.

This was my opinion until the last few weeks, but I've become convinced that doing nothing is no longer a viable option.

It appears that some Gmail spam filter has decided that racket...@googlegroups.com is a suspicious email address. It seems like roughly half of the legitimate traffic on the list is never reaching me and being marked as spam (at one of two or three hops on its way—but I have every reason to believe the situation would be as bad or worse for a new subscriber with a less convoluted email setup, especially since even mail from people I've corresponded with directly is being marked as spam). This seems reasonable, actually, since the Google Groups filters don't seem to be stopping a very high proportion of total traffic on the list from consisting of all-caps spam in Italian with some obviously-off-topic keywords.

I understood John's email not as a threat to shut down this list immediately, but as a call for those (like me) who have been skeptical of Discourse to give it a serious try and look for any actual, concrete problems, with an eye toward making it the primary Racket communication channel. The points raised about the terms of service seem like a good example of this. Hopefully they can be fixed. If Discourse's "mailing-list mode" works well enough that people like me can treat it like a generic mailing list, while people who want a fancy web app can use it, that seems ideal. The discussion yesterday about starting new topics by email seems important, if that's the goal: https://racket.discourse.group/t/how-to-enable-mailing-list-mode/167/3

As someone not involved in the decision-making process, I also want to say (more in response to previous discussions than this one) that hosting a high-volume public mailing list like racket-users is not a trivial job. I have enough experience running Postfix to know I shouldn't volunteer. Take note, for example, of the multi-billion-dollar corporation that isn't doing an adequate job hosting this list currently. It's also worth emphasizing that Discourse is free/libre and open source software under the GPL-2.0-or-later. Google Groups is not!

Finally, I think this would be a great area for the Software Freedom Conservancy to provide support. I'm sure Racket isn't the only project facing these questions. At a minimum, it would be good to have them review the legal boilerplate, since some of them are lawyers and I, for one, am not. If there were some concrete reason not to use the hosting generously offered at no charge by the company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. (but at first glance they seem to be doing many things right), perhaps the Conservancy could provide hosting for Racket and other member projects. If ultimately we were to determine that Discourse wouldn't work as a mailing-list replacement—but I think we should seriously try it before jumping to that conclusion!—I've noted before that the Conservancy hosts a few mailing lists: https://lists.sfconservancy.org Mailman 2 would be a step in the wrong direction as far as friendly UI, but I've been impressed by Mailman 3 with HyperKitty (also more than the Google Groups web UI, which I've never especially liked): e.g. https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikim...@lists.wikimedia.org/ Presumably they will upgrade their server to Debian 11 and get that improvement (https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/mailman3-full).

-Philip
 

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 11:40:49 AM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com

Since I missed the hallway I'll settle with a belated comment.

Over my lifetime I have accumulated hundreds of accounts. Breaches led to incessant spamming. Thankfully I've kept my passwords varied and strong, so the damage hasn't terrible to contain. I tried to delete accounts to manage my risk, only to learn just how hard it is to do that as a U.S. citizen. In the case of Google, I already had a Google account so I didn't figure the mailing list would worsen my situation much.

Point is, I do due diligence now.  Adding an account means another legal agreement, another privacy policy, another social structure, and another increase in my personal attack surface. I know maintaining a mailing list is a PITA regardless of its usefulness, so I totally understand moving to Discourse. I just don't understand this habit of "we're doing this, we want you to do it too" with sunsetting overtones. 1) it sounds like I'm doing someone a favor, and 2) this sounds like when someone first said "Racket2", and I should probably get the fuck outta here before someone throws something.

I know I'm being dramatic, but please consider just leaving the list to die inactive if that is to be its fate. The messaging I'm seeing keeps messing with the community messaging about backwards compatibility, and it's super confusing.

A discourse type forum - we had this discussions in other contexts again and
again - may be a better choice for persons who have the luxury they can
concentrate on very few thingies. For all others, mailinglists are a much
better choice, you can follow many developments in one place: your mail
client, with a completely standard UI.

Cheers
Martin



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Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 11:46:40 AM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com

To add, since I forgot about the spammer: By "leaving the list to die inactive," I am assuming that the list would not be co-opted and would still function just fine as an archive. But I would love to keep the option, even if I only have a small few people to talk to.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 11:56:32 AM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com

Y'all are configuring Discourse to allow replies by emails too, right?

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John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 12:17:01 PM11/22/21
to Sage Gerard, racket...@googlegroups.com
Yes, I believe that replies by email are currently enabled. Here, let me test that.

…

Oh, yeah… can’t do that, the incoming email address isn’t the one that I send from. Sigh. Perhaps someone else can try this?

One thing that I know isn’t set up yet is starting a new topic by email. I know it’s possible, but somebody needs to read the docs and check what’s required in order to set it up.

John
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/37a16e37-a38f-906f-3f7a-4c008e5a0a76%40sagegerard.com.

Sage Gerard

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Nov 22, 2021, 12:19:37 PM11/22/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com
Mozilla's notes on their own instance summarizes an email-exclusive
workflow well.

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/how-do-i-use-discourse-via-email/15279
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/df2d0a47-804e-4275-a4b3-dbfd2116a702%40mtasv.net.

Siddhartha Kasivajhula

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Nov 22, 2021, 4:05:31 PM11/22/21
to Sage Gerard, Racket Users
That first email reads like a cross between a mathematical proof and some kind of satire. Good stuff :)

The broad communication needs seem to be:

(1) a bulletin board / a channel for announcements
(2) a forum / a channel for discussions
(3) chat / a realtime channel.
(4) a knowledge base
(5) a broadcast / external-facing medium

It sounds like the proposal here is to use Discourse for both (1) and (2). All of the above become (4) if they are archived, but there is also the wiki (which I didn't know about) and of course the website and docs. Anyone can tweet @racketlang for (5), I guess. And we haven't really talked about (3) yet.

Some considerations people have brought up include:

Noise: I agree that Discourse is likely to have more volume. As a result, simply using it in mailing list mode isn't exactly a 1-to-1 replacement, since the volume of emails would be higher, making it less appropriate for announcements. It would be nice to be able to have more fine-grained controls over which messages get emailed (e.g. in terms of category or activity). The other (complementary, in my view) option is to use digest mode. In traditional mailing lists we pick one or the other. In Discourse, it seems that if you visit the site, it doesn't send you the digest for that day. It would be nice if it could be configured to always send a digest, to actually emulate mailing list behavior. Finally, I did notice that I wasn't able to reply to a Discourse post from my phone. It looked like my phone email client was using the default sender instead of the Discourse-specific one. I don't recall that happening in similar situations before, but it's entirely possible that this is a problem with my email client. In any case, with these improvements, I do think Discourse could be compelling as a replacement for the mailing list for most people.

Open source: I agree this is an important criterion (which is one reason you'll find me on IRC rather than Discord or Slack). Phil's point that Google Groups isn't open source while Discourse is, seems a compelling argument for Discourse here.

Terms of service: Can't believe I signed my rights away to company_name without even reading applicable_laws in jurisdiction_here.




To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/afb88687-458a-2516-9f1e-2fef2dfa39d7%40sagegerard.com.

John Clements

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Nov 22, 2021, 4:44:39 PM11/22/21
to Siddhartha Kasivajhula, Sage Gerard, Racket Users
I think I agree with pretty much everything you’ve written here.

I will note that your problem with sending email to the mailing list from a different address *is* one I’ve experienced, many hundreds of times.

I think your #1 and your #5 is more or less what blog.racket-lang.org is. I see Discourse as our best choice for #2. For chat, it sounds like most folks like IRC, Slack, or Discord. I’m not generally in that market, so I don’t think my opinions are worth much, there. I think there’s some hope that discourse might help out with #4, as well.

Best,

John
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/CACQBWFmvAoMReGB7%2BZJd-XwXyBtOkbApT1YMhP0eb33cZYt8Fw%40mail.gmail.com.

Hendrik Boom

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Nov 22, 2021, 5:37:06 PM11/22/21
to Racketeers
First reason for ignoring this message:

It's an html-only post on a text mailing list.

-- hendrik


On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 08:06:01AM -0500, Etan Wexler wrote:

George Neuner

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Nov 23, 2021, 2:37:29 AM11/23/21
to racket users

On 11/22/2021 11:19 AM, Philip McGrath wrote:

It appears that some Gmail spam filter has decided that racket...@googlegroups.com is a suspicious email address. It seems like roughly half of the legitimate traffic on the list is never reaching me and being marked as spam (at one of two or three hops on its way—but I have every reason to believe the situation would be as bad or worse for a new subscriber with a less convoluted email setup, especially since even mail from people I've corresponded with directly is being marked as spam). This seems reasonable, actually, since the Google Groups filters don't seem to be stopping a very high proportion of total traffic on the list from consisting of all-caps spam in Italian with some obviously-off-topic keywords.

I'm all for finding that fool who spams in Italian and giving him a Sicilian necktie for Christmas.

OTOH, the problems with spam filters are just more reasons to ditch Google and Gmail ... not necessarily the mailing list.

YMMV,
George

Dexter Lagan

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Nov 23, 2021, 3:12:25 AM11/23/21
to Racket Users
  This is by far the strangest message I've ever read about Racket. It comes a close second to that all-caps spam we get constantly on the mailing list! I'd pay good money to know what's written between the lines. It sounds like really, really passive-aggressive.

Dex

Dominik Pantůček

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Nov 23, 2021, 3:42:16 AM11/23/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com
Hello Racketeers,

I wouldn't take it as passive-aggressive per-se. It's just super
confusing. Especially if you watch the discussion about future of Racket
at RacketCon where Matthias has stated it pretty clearly and other
confirmed that - the core team is doing all infrastructure maintenance
more-or-less in their free time because their primary focus is
development (of various parts of Racket ecosystem).

I am trying to use Discourse like ML and although it's got some really
rough edges, it kinda works. If the new topic creation via mail gets
resolved, it will be basically OK for me. My impression is that some of
its features could be called "NNTP-like" and yes, I would really like to
see NNTP interface (and then importing all those years of MLs into the
archives would make much more sense then).

But as others have pointed out, maintaining infrastructure such as this
requires non-negligible amount of work! So please take this as my
personal opinion and not as an - even the slightest - attempt of
demanding anything! I run some infrastructure and I know it needs time
(all the time).


And thanks to John and Stephen for taking care of the Discourse instance!


Cheers,
Dominik
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kamist...@gmail.com

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Nov 23, 2021, 5:38:50 AM11/23/21
to Racket Users
I searched for "Etan Wexler" on google groups and found other older messages, but they seem more normal, human written.
But I can't quite decide whether this latest message is human art, or maybe ai art / an ai or a bot conversing.

What I find strange is the repetitions within the text, but that might be an "intentional" choice, whether human or AI.
Interestingly Discourse is mistyped as Discursive, I didn't know that word as non-native speaker, it means to digress / "to wander from the subject" and the text seems to do that.
So that could both be a human using irony or an AI seeing it as an prompt to do that.

While the message reminds me of early videos I saw about GPT-2 and AI generated texts, within the context of the other messages I am not really sure.
The earlier messages make me think, the text is written by a human that likes word puzzles and experimenting with different styles of expression, without leaving an explanation of what is actually meant.
I guess we are reaching a point were we can't be sure anymore whether there is a human typing anymore.
I also wonder whether all captchas are completely useless by now.

At least videos like this make me think that is the case:
OpenAI GPT-3 - Good At Almost Everything! 🤖

I guess we will have to wait and see, whether there will be other messages.

Simon

Dexter Lagan

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Nov 23, 2021, 5:54:25 AM11/23/21
to kamist...@gmail.com, Racket Users
  Correct! Same feeling here.

Sir Wexler please do explain yourself.

Have a great day!

Dex

On Nov 23, 2021, at 11:38 AM, kamist...@gmail.com <kamist...@gmail.com> wrote:


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damien...@gmail.com

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Nov 23, 2021, 12:25:47 PM11/23/21
to Racket Users
if i create an account following the link at the end of this message , i never get verification email at my google address i specified.

On Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 7:09:21 PM UTC+1 johnbclements wrote:
TL;DR: Go to

https://racket.discourse.group/invites/okLTSrQw1T

and sign up for Racket Discourse (https://racket.discourse.group/)

# Thoughts behind the move:

Over time, it has become steadily more apparent that email-only
mailing lists are an outdated communication medium for the Racket
community. More recent arrivals in our community have generally
chosen other platforms like slack or discord to carry on discussions.
As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio of the racket users mailing list
has dropped below the level of viability.

In short, it’s time to give up on the mailing list.

After a good deal of research, it looks like there’s room for a whole
bunch of discussion platforms for Racket, but it also seems as though
there should be a “permanent” one; it should be archived, it should be
searchable in its entirety, and it should not tie us to someone else’s
plan to monetize user data.

Given these criteria, the winner is Discourse, an open-source
messaging platform built by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam
Saffron. It has a reasonable business model (they host projects like
ours unless they get really big, whereupon you can either host it
yourself or pay them to do it); it’s widely used by other language
communities; and it appears to do most of what we want.

# So where can I sign up?

Sign up here: https://racket.discourse.group/invites/okLTSrQw1T

The discourse platform has been in a “soft opening” phase for about
two weeks now, since RacketCon, and we have about a hundred users.
You’re receiving this message because we’d like to have *YOU* there
as well.

# Can I still receive messages like a mailing list?

Yes, you can. I have it enabled myself!
To use discord as a mailing-list:
Sign up, go to Preferences > Email, and tick “Enable mailing list mode'.

Yours,

John Clements & Stephen De Gabrielle

John Clements

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Nov 23, 2021, 12:46:05 PM11/23/21
to damien...@gmail.com, Racket Users
I’m sorry to hear that! Several things to check/try

1) I see the confirmation email coming from “rac...@discoursemail.com”, with subject line "[Racket Discussions] Confirm your new account”

Maybe it’s in your junk folder?

2) You can always ignore the given url and just go to racket.discourse.group and sign up manually, perhaps that will work.

Let me know if I can help any further, I do know that people have signed up using gmail accounts.

John
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Damien Mattei

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Nov 23, 2021, 1:06:48 PM11/23/21
to John Clements, Racket Users
i apologize ,the confirmation mail  was in the spam folder,
everything is fine now
thanks
Damien

Matthias Felleisen

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Nov 23, 2021, 4:57:38 PM11/23/21
to Dominik Pantůček, racket...@googlegroups.com


On Nov 23, 2021, at 3:42 AM, Dominik Pantůček <dominik....@trustica.cz> wrote:

Matthias has stated it pretty clearly and other confirmed that - the core team is doing all infrastructure maintenance more-or-less in their free time because their primary focus is development (of various parts of Racket ecosystem).


I was trying to say something slightly more general: 

1. We would _welcome_ it if people in the user community took on _community tasks_ such as mailing lists, discussion boards, comm channels, etc. 
(I turned myself into a mere observer of  `users` years ago though some of you may have gotten private replies to questions.) 


2. In the past, we have developed a language via research-design and that could also be split into two: 

— 2a: research-design, like in the past, with for example contracts, types, syntax-parse, expanders, visual syntax,  etcetc. 

— 2b: user-oriented design, like plot and math and Science and Emacs mode that others have already taken on. 

We’re absolutely grateful to those who have taken on these tasks, including those who manage repos for releases. We’d love to see more of this.

Thanks to all those who have contributed and all those who will :-) 


Etan Wexler

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Nov 27, 2021, 2:28:37 PM11/27/21
to Racketeers
“[racket-users] Racket Discourse” is too vague to suffice
as the body of the “Subject” field of an announcement of
the end of the racket-users mailing list and the migration to Discourse as a
forum for Racket, so I sent a message with a “Subject” field
that identifies the subject at hand. I regret having produced so much heat
and so little light.

James Platt

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Dec 7, 2021, 1:39:02 PM12/7/21
to racket...@googlegroups.com

> I wouldn't take it as passive-aggressive per-se. It's just super confusing. Especially if you watch the discussion about future of Racket at RacketCon where Matthias has stated it pretty clearly and other confirmed that - the core team is doing all infrastructure maintenance more-or-less in their free time because their primary focus is development (of various parts of Racket ecosystem).


If the Racket community has grown enough recently (not sure where we stand right now), maybe we should take a look at what needs doing and which tasks can be split up to be done by different people. Then ask for volunteers.

James
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