Yuv, Gilles,

Thanks for your feedback, it's not so unexpected that the "power
users" are those who find the idea of a "forum" questionable.

The Redmine forums (current version 0.8) *do* provide a mailing list
interface to some extent. In particular, it is possible to "watch" an
entire forum or individual threads (see the "watch" link in the upper
right corner of the page - of course only if you're subscribed). In
your account settings you can also opt to "watch" all activities of
the project (incl. forum posts, issues, commits) if you like. As a
result you'll get an email sent to your registered address for each
"watched" event. What I haven't seen is an option to subscribe to some
sort of digests.

Redmine further allows creation of issues and submission of comments
by email. Surprisingly however, it does not (yet) support forum posts
by email, so it's not possible to reply to an email from a watched
thread or start a thread by email. (But the mails contain a link that
brings you to a page from which you can reply reasonably quickly).

There is an existing feature for this in the Redmine bugtracker
(http://www.redmine.org/issues/show/1616), even with a patch.
Unfortunately and for no obvious reason that patch didn't make it into
the last release of Redmine. Brad, our sysadm, is not keen to maintain
a patched version of Redmine.

However, both Brad and myself have recently left comments on this
Redmine feature expressing the need for a more complete mailing list
interface. I'll leave another one with a pointer to this thread,
you're feedback will hopefully have more impact than our previous pleas.

The main advantages that I see from using the Redmine forum(s)
* Users need only account to access all project information through a
common interface
* Easy cross linking between issues and forum posts and repository commits
* Today most discussions take place in the Yahoo group and I
frequently end up copying a post to the bug tracker (bug/feature) and
once it's there, the discussion usually stops. With the new setup, I
hope it will be easier for people to post to the appropriate channel
right away and we can discuss it there.
* Last but not least, the data in Redmine in our control, not Yahoo's
(or Google's)

> There are places where bandiwdth is unavailable, expensive, slow,
inconvenient,
> dangerous, or a combination of those factors.

Yes... most of those apply here :)

> Enabling anonymous posting works around another of the crippling
> limitations of web based forums: remembering all the passwords and
> nicknames and URLs is a nightmare. But anonymity is an open door for
> spammers and trolls. In most cases, if somebody has to hide to post a
> message, it is a sign that he better not post that message.

It has always been possible to post to the Yahoo group anonymously,
although Yahoo's terms probably don't allow it. It's meant for people
who have a quick question or feedback and no intention to stay around
for long. The Yahoo sign-up procedure is complicated enough to put off
most of these users, so that without the possibility to post
anonymously, we won't get this feedback and won't be able to help
these users. If it gets abused I won't hesitate to disable it very
quickly, but on the Yahoo group at least, this has been working well.

> Needless to say that I could rant for hours
> against HTML-formatted mail, which I display as text-only for both
> readability and security reasons.

Currently emails are sent in HTML format I believe. But you've got a
point, let me try out the plain text setting.

Andreas