Re: Future of the lists

Responding to Daniel and Eddi both...

On 21 May 2021, at 11:54, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> wrote:


I agree with everything Daniel said, especially

> Big thanks to Scott for the long-standing managing and moderating work !

Thank you, both!


Would it be legally possible to integrate the list archives into the forum? (I would very much prefer the community continue to have at least two legs to stand on, but even then it would be great to have the sc-users history searchable in the forum. My naive opinion is that since the email addrs are blanked out, it would be ok.)(whether it's technically feasible would be the follow up question)

My guess is no, as the addresses are only partially obscured. I think it might be technically possible though: https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-mailing-lists-mbox-listserv-google-groups-emails/79773

In my discussions with the IT people they did raise the possibility of migrating to a forum, and I think Discourse would be the obvious choice, but that would basically just duplicate the functionality of scsynth.org<http://scsynth.org/>. I suppose if scsynth.org<http://scsynth.org/> was moved to be hosted by Bham it might be legal to merge them. I’d be happy to ask about that, but I guess that won't be a popular choice, as some people have raised concerns about university ‘control’ of community fora in the past. Though of course the same issues (longevity, portability and GDPR issues) can arise no matter who controls a forum. But ‘big brother’ and all that, so it’s not something I’d try push for in the face of opposition.

Does anybody know who owns synth.org<http://synth.org/> and how its hosting is funded, btw?

On 21/05/2021, 12:43 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
As someone who has been around on the lists for a long time I would certainly regret their vanishing. That said, as a matter of fact, nowadays the vast majority of user requests goes to the SC forum (e.g. posts on ca. 50 different threads during the last two weeks alone).

It’s definitely becoming busier, which is worth considering. In contrast there are over 1300 people subscribed to sc-users, and I think around 800-900  on the forum. It may well be that in terms of activity and *active* users however, the weight of gravity has moved.

I’m not much involved in the developer discussions but they also seem to have shifted from sc-dev to GitHub.

As I said I’ve been holding off presenting my views as I wanted to leave some space for others to speak first, but I may as well say this as its come up:

I think we should wind up sc-dev in any case. There have only been about 10 posts in the last month, and most of them are just courtesy messages about scheduling the meetings. It’s certainly important as an archive of significant discussions, but I don’t think it really serves much purpose anymore. Most of the discussion happens elsewhere as Daniel notes, on platforms that suit such discussions better I think (Github for serious stuff, Slack for chat)

More later,

S.