I am new in the tagging mailing list and only took part to one voting until now, so I will not express myself on proposals and voting.
Regarding discussion, however, I am in favor of moving it to the forums.
I’ll list a couple reasons:
- As pointed out, subscribing to the mailing list is a barrier to enter. It is not a large barrier, but still requires that you understand there’s a mailing list and that you have to subscribe to it in order to know what is going on. With the forum you can simply browse the forum or find a link to a particular discussion and easily read everything that is going on.
- It’s not easy to follow a long discussion in the mailing list. You may lose some emails or forget something that was said a few days before and definitely it’s not easy to reference something that has been said a lot of time ago.
- Emails are a mess: if you decide to receive all the emails you will have your inbox daily filled with a lot of messages; many of which you may not care about. If you use the daily/weekly digest you get one single email which is poorly formatted and in which is difficult to understand where a message starts and ends, who wrote it and who he’s replying to.
Because of these reasons I would consider the forum a superior place where to conduct all discussion, provided that:
- It is possible to subscribe by email/rss feed to the new threads opened under one tag (e.g. every time someone opens a new discussion tagged tagging I will receive one email or one digest with all the ones opened in one day)
- It is possible to subscribe to a single thread, thus every time someone replies to a discussion I’m interested in I receive an email or a daily digest that tells me in which threads there are new messages.