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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> old-school forums

Most open source projects still use mailing lists, which are even better than forums in that everyone can read and write emails in whatever client they prefer.

And yes, it's far better than chat for serious discussions, with a global group of people. You don't want to exclude the Americans from important decisions when everyone in Europe is awake and on the chat in the morning, and vice versa.

I think both systems have their places - if I have a quick question, chat is usually better. For longer more serious discussions, perhaps with code included, email wins.

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Mailing lists are close to perfect; one missing feature from mailing list software is the ability to easily reach back in time to discover threads from before one joined a project.

For quick questions and discussions, irc is hard to beat.

It's not hard to provide an archive, both in website and in mbox formats. There are multiple free tools available.

> one missing feature from mailing list software is the ability to easily reach back in time to discover threads from before one joined a project.

I must be missing something, I've always found mailing list UIs frustrating to navigate and explore. Does anyone maybe have a primer on how to get the most out mailing lists for someone not already intricately familiar with them?

Mailing lists are kind of terrible beyond a certain point of complexity. First, they lead to a lot of self-spamming, with internal conversations. Second, if you're not on the thread, you'll never see it. Email depends on enormous duplication of data.

And in practice, at large companies, forced expiration is used to control email storage space, in part because of the duplication.

So at very minimum, you want something threaded like email, but stored in a single location, so storage/duplication/deletion aren't problems, and indexed searching is available. This also allows things like tagging someone into a thread after it already started.

> Second, if you're not on the thread, you'll never see it.

This doesn't make any sense. If you're subscribed to a mailing list, you will see everything sent to it.

Mailing lists are about organization, not content. If I'm on a 20 person team, there will be threads I'm interested in, and threads I'm not interested in. A mailing list doesn't make it easy to ignore the stuff I don't care about.

> Mailing lists are kind of terrible beyond a certain point of complexity. First, they lead to a lot of self-spamming, with internal conversations.

This isn't a clear argument. What do you mean?

> So at very minimum, you want something threaded like email, but stored in a single location, so storage/duplication/deletion aren't problems

Certainly, the distributed nature of email may pose problems for an organisation which stores emails for a number of its employees. Storage is cheap and backup processes de-duplicate data so using mailing lists shouldn't pose too much difficulty.

It means you'll be getting notifications in your inbox all day while the thread is running, whether you're interested or not. Which gets us in the habit of ignoring them.

The whole point of Doist is to get us away from the interrupt-driven behavior of constant notifications, and the instant gratification of response. Email lists do not solve this problem, unless you turn off your email client entirely.

Generally I've found that any forum project that also doesn't include reply-by-email functionality is a waste of time.

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