Deprecate the mailing list in favor of StackExchange

[Ohad Schneider]

I suggested moving off the old-style mailing list in a recent thread: ​https://listi.jpberlin.de/pipermail/smartmontools-support/2021-July/000728.html

The advantages should be clear, StackExchange (SE) is more efficient than mailing lists by orders of magnitude in practically every parameter.

To address the criticism in that thread:

1. mailing lists are publicly available, often times mirrored by other mailing list archives, you have them in your mailbox for personal archive etc. So you can find something again.

SE is also publicly available and mirrored in other (albeit sometimes shady) sites, not to mention a million sensitive local sites where internet access is restricted (e.g. in the Israeli Defense Force). It's just way past the point of "too big to fall", there's just no way that content "disappears" from the internet, it's like saying Wikipedia will disappear. And even if it did, it's cached by multiple sites including Google, and every few months you get a full data dump of *all* SE content uploaded to the Web Archive: ​https://archive.org/details/stackexchange. If you want to talk about safety, you can't beat those guys...

2. It's a matter of time until privately owned platforms (such as StackExchange) might suddenly start charging to read answers (Experts Exchange). Or the service might be attacked and is down right then when you need it

I think the comparison to Stack Exchange is about as ludicrous as saying Google or Wikipedia will start charging money, but at any rate how is this different than SourceForge or MarkLogic?

3. A public discussion board, such as the one suggested in ticket 217, is generally a better idea, but I've seen exactly this happening with the monitoring plugins mailing list. Everything was moved from mailing list to a discussion board (not sure which one) and because people have abandoned the project and problems with DSGVO/GDPR and technical security vulnerabilities of the discussion board started to arise, the discussion board was shut down. Including all archives. Everything is gone. And there was a lot of helpful information there which would still apply today. Just visit ​https://monitoring-portal.org/ to see for yourself.

Irrelevant, you have zero cost and zero technical maintenance. Either you use ServerFault as-is, or you open an SE sub-site (e.g. smartmontools.stackexchange.com) like they did for a million other topics.

Smartctl is hard core enough, and if anything is behind some sort of a wall, it's these mailing lists which are hard to search and more daunting to participate in for the average user.

[Christian Franke]

-1 from me.

[Claudio Kuenzler]

-1 from me, reasons why given in mailing list
(And no, I'm not ludicrous just fyi ;-) )

[Gabriele Pohl]

-1 from me
(but will make another try at MARC ​https://marc.info/?l=smartmontools-support to bring the new mailing list therein)

[Ohad Schneider]

Replying to Claudio Kuenzler:

-1 from me, reasons why given in mailing list
(And no, I'm not ludicrous just fyi ;-) )

I specifically addressed those reasons in the ticket's body...