Forums and mailing lists

Posted Dec 18, 2025 17:00 UTC (Thu) by Vorpal (guest, #136011)
Parent article: Mix and match Linux distributions with Distrobox

> The project does not, unfortunately, have a mailing list or even a web forum: the documentation points users to a Matrix room and Telegram group instead.

Is that really "unfortunately" though? Sure, a forum would be nice (and more searchable than matrix / telegram), but mailing lists are a pain. You are guaranteed to get spam on whatever email you use soon after ever sending a mail to a public list like LKML.

I would like to see a Discourse or Zulip instance if the project doesn't want to use github discussions (or whatever the gitlab equivalent is). But I absolutely don't miss mailing lists.

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Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 7, 2026 20:46 UTC (Wed) by archaic (subscriber, #111970) [Link] (6 responses)

> Is that really "unfortunately" though?

Yes, it is. In this day of more information than any 100 people could assimilate in a single day, I require all info I care about to be pushed to me. I cannot spend time looking for it nor "following" it in the manner of modern social networking.

I'm not saying email is perfect, ideal, best, or even all that good. But until everything supports RSS, it's what I'm able to dedicate brain cycles towards.

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 7, 2026 21:21 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

I have to agree. I can manage spam. I know how to set up filter rules in my email client, and I often filter ham rather than spam (that's quite a good tactic).

Pretty much all the web fora I read are a pain in the arse to filter. LWN's "unread comments" is one of the best, by a long way, but it's still seriously flawed. I hate web fora because - even when I know exactly what I'm looking for - it's usually a pita to find it again.

Cheers,
Wol

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 7, 2026 21:27 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

If you have suggestions for how the "unread comments" page could be improved, we're definitely all ears...

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 8, 2026 7:52 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

One simple - to me rofl as a user - improvement would be to have better context. It's good now, but there's a little tweak of an improvement ...

I can't remember whether it's a setting or a default, but unread comments have their read parent above. Each read parent is the root of a tree of comments BUT. Sometimes it's also an immediate child of another read parent. It would be nice if it displayed as child, not root.

Of course, that's easy for me to say, it might not be for you to code! :-)

Apart from that, searching. I just find Thunderbird works great for me. Because I can organise things how I want, everything is local, I'm a grumpy old man who wants everything to work like it did 30 years ago rofl ... I just don't see how web fora can match that ...

And of course, Thunderbird keeps everything in one place. If I have to go to one forum for this, one forum for that, one forum for the other ... I hate push notifications, and Thunderbird is a great intermediary for receiving push notifications and hiding them from me until I'm ready - it's called "unread mail" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 8, 2026 9:35 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (1 responses)

Not really related to this thread in particular but one improvement that would be nice would be if the "please stop responding to this discussion" comment wasn't at the bottom of the discussion but right at the top of the comment thread you want people to stop responding to.

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 8, 2026 10:44 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Agreed. Oh - and another one, please can we have all articles over - say - three months old automatically go into moderated status. It doesn't happen often, but if new comments are added to old articles, it's often very tempting click-bait. I sometimes respond without realising the article is several years old.

Fine if responses are relevant, but "me too" to an old article is not good. Hence preferring moderated rather than closed comments.

Cheers,
Wol

Forums and mailing lists

Posted Jan 9, 2026 18:21 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

Would it be possible to include an <InReplyTo> tag for each item in the Latest Comments RSS feed, that refers to the <guid> of the comment (or <url> of the article) that the item is replying to? This would help when reading comments in an email client.