Milan Curcic’s statement is good but it omits what I read Fortran-Lang for: discussions on using the Fortran language itself.
That is even more vital at a time when few people are contributing to comp.lang.fortran.
Most of the tools I see recommended here seem to want gigabytes of my storage space, which is why I resist installing them.
I agree, we should highlight the community space in this discourse for discussing all the things around Fortran. I have visited a few other discourses and I’m always positively surprised about the activity in the Fortran-lang one.
I checked now a few times on c.l.f, each time I was overwhelmed by the amount of spam and advertisements on the list, which make it quite hard to pick out discussions I want to look into. I don’t know whether there is actually a good way to prevent those in a mailing list format other then holding messages for moderator approval. It is not that we don’t get spam and advertisements on the discourse as well, but it seems like we have quite good tools here to reduce this kind of noise.
For most of the tools we have quite some control what goes in the distribution (not for all, unfortunately). Feedback is welcome to remove unnecessary bloat from projects like fpm, stdlib, etc., e.g. for fpm we should be able to reduce the size of the single source bootstrapper by making use of the tree shaking.
Using the Google Groups interface of c.l.f. just now I only saw 1 spam message (which I flagged) out of the first 10, but the last activity was on Sep 21. Although Fortran Discourse is busier, it would be nice to keep c.l.f. viable, by flagging spam and posting announcements, because some people are opposed in principle to a moderated forum and will not join this group.
I think that c.l.f. is out of the sphere of influence of Fortran-lang and the scope of the NumFOCUS application; we cannot appease everyone. There will always be people that disagree with Fortran-lang for their own personal reasons. The only thing we can do as a community/organisation is be as welcoming and accommodating as possible, while staying true to our long term objectives and our code of conduct.
I have a number of questions regarding this post.
I am not sure what this means.
We cannot appease everyone seems a bit strong
then you say
I am also not sure what you mean by this.
sad
People prefer for whatever reasons different types of forums. Fortran-lang among many other things has a moderated discourse forum. This is a post about applying for a NumFOCUS fiscal sponsorship, how we should address certain questions and what should be included. Not how we should also aim to support c.l.f. I would therefore appreciate staying on topic.
We are moderating this forum, but only as lightly as we can, so that we can all get along. People that prefer forum that is not moderated at all can use the c.l.f. mailinglist.
That way there is something for everyone.
Just for the record: comp.lang.fortran is primarily a usenet newsgroup, not a mailing list. Maybe some services can propose a mailing list relay to access it, but still this is a newsgroup.
I am accessing it through the news.individual.net nntp server, and I don’t see a lot of spam there (the server is doing a good job at filtering the spam).
I am using news.dotsrc.org and since June there is ~30 spams posts. Sometimes there is no spam, and sometimes there is. Maybe the antispam soft is learning to eliminate certain kinds of message, until new kinds emerge?
For people interested by comp.lang.fortran history, there is that post:
Hopefully, I don’t come out as ignorant, but as a millennial I have no idea what usenet is. By the time I started using a computer as a computational tool, and not just a gaming device, we were already in the era of dominant browsers and online email providers (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.). Aside from Microsoft Outlook which I was required to install by my employer to access Outlook Exchange calendars, I’ve never felt the need to use an email client.
If you visit the comp.lang.fortran Google Group there are no instructions about what are the classical/alternative access methods. Am I supposed to read/reply to comp.lang.fortran threads via an email client (or online email service) or some other kind of program?
I’m a big supporter of age diversity and intergenerational knowledge transfer, but someone should open the door for us. One reason I don’t like visiting the comp.lang.fortran Google group is due having to sift through all the spam, drug ads, and other strange and vulgar posts.
There are spam posts that appear in the Google Groups interface of comp.lang.fortran . To reduce the spam people need to flag it – I do so. Currently I don’t see spam there. If you have a Google account, you can start threads and post replies from the Google Groups interface. There are other ways to read Usenet – I have heard of Eternal September. There is a Wikipedia article on Usenet. I would call it a decentralized collection of unmoderated forums, although there are a handful of moderated ones.
Ivan, this is what I wrote in another post about comp.lang.fortran:
20 years ago, most universities were proposing a Usenet access via the NNTP protocol (port 119). It has become more difficult nowadays. Personally, I am for several years using a Danish server of the Aalborg University, where I registered freely (see Usenet - dotsrc ), with my Mozilla Thunderbird email client. NNTP is used for reading and SMTP for posting.
Once it is configured in Thunderbird, you use it exactly like e-mail. The only visible difference is that it is a kind of public e-mail! See Creating a Newsgroup Account | Thunderbird Help
I don’t know if other e-mail clients like Outlook still manage newsgroups… Or if some webmail can do it…
What is usenet: Usenet - Wikipedia
Usenet is a network of decentralized servers that talk to each others and exchange the messages. You can connect to any of them and get the messages that are posted on any other server. To connect to a server you use a specialized client software. The protocol between the servers and between a server and a client is NNTP.
There exist fully open servers where you don’t need to register. They usually have restrictions (read-only, or a limited amount of posted messages per day…). But on most servers you have to register to be able to connect. Most of them are free (beer), but a few propose a paid subscription. Some servers heavily filter the spams, and some not at all (considering this is the client’s task to filter).
A serveur without registration needed: https://news.aioe.org/
A server with registration needed: https://www.eternal-september.org/
Then client softwares. One of the most widely used nowadays (but not necessarily the best one) is Thunderbird, which indeed has a NNTP (newsgroups) module beside the email module. You can visit the group news.software.readers to inquire about the clients and how to use them.
Google Groups is actually a bunch of a NNTP server, a NNTP client, and a web interface. It’s somehow convenient because it is accessible with a Google account, and without the complication of configuring a connection in a classical client. However the inferface is terrible and makes it one of the worst ways to access usenet (but I don’t see a lot a spam there: Screenshot by Lightshot ). There are no really good web interfaces to usenet, the only one I could recommend is http://news2.nemoweb.net/ (but in french only)
Let this be a warning to those who want to introduce changes to fortran that are not backwards compatible. All languages do this to greater or lesser extents, but it is frustrating when it happens, especially with a language that you are not fluent with. I recently went through some of this with some old perl scripts.
I moved the emerging discussion on backwards compatibility in Python, Fortran and co to a new thread to keep this one on-topic.