Re: Thoughts about creating Stack Exchange page?

[David Kastrup]

Hilary Snaden <address@hidden> writes:

> On 2013-11-02 05:52, David Kastrup wrote:
>> Gilberto Agostinho <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>>> I am also totally up for this idea as well.
>> 
>> What's wrong with this list?  Everybody wants to take his LilyPond
>> business to the web interface of his choice that takes a lot of
>> additional work over just reading and typing text and further dilutes
>> the LilyPond knowledge.
>
> I agree. I may have an advantage in having worked mostly with mail and
> news for a long time now, but I still far prefer those media to any
> web interface I've seen. I suggest politely redirecting enquirers
> elsewhere to the manuals, snippet library and mailing list. They're
> all for the most part lean, clear and accessible.

I guess that basically the one thing missing from our mailing list
archives is a popularity metric.  Mail search engines including the
mailing list's own search engines work by matching "significance", an
approach that ceased working for the much larger search space of web
sites long ago (basically, this is what made Altavista lose to Google in
user numbers).

Sites like Stack Exchange have voting mechanisms that work for assigning
popularity to answers as well as reputation to authors.  And they make
it possible to sort entries into categories.

Feeding information like that into the searches for mailing list
archives and displaying them might help with organizing better what
appears like a somewhat uniform search space.

I mean, if it just the look/interface, you could read this at
<URL:http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.lilypond.general> and be
happy.

Hm, I like this idea of turning a mailing list into an entirely optional
social networking medium by adding more of a feedback/scoring criterion
than "Report Spam".

Putting in a Bcc to someone who might or might not have a thought on
this.

-- 
David Kastrup