"Interesting discussions" for This Week in LiveCode

[Peter TB Brett]

On 11/01/2016 15:56, Alex Tweedly wrote:
> Every week I look at the newsletter, and in the "Interesting discussion"
> section I find pointers to the uselist discussions.
>
> I follow the uselist pretty closely, but have never found an acceptable
> way to follow the forum discussions, so I rarely read anything on there
> (except if an entry on the uselist contains a pointer to a particular
> discussion).
>
> Does the fact that the weekly newsletter always references interesting
> discussions on uselist but not on the forums indicate:
>
> (a) all the interesting discussion happens there, and I am right to
> (almost) ignore the forums
> (btw - :-)
>
> (b) it is assumed that everyone follows the forums anyway, so there is
> no need to mention their discussions in the newsletter.
>
> (c) whoever draws up this part of the newsletter is, like me, a uselist
> follower rather than a forum user.
>
> Or of course,
> (d) something else entirely.

Hi Alex,

I'm the person who (usually) puts the newsletter together!  I do 
sometimes include forum topics.  I usually prepare the newsletter first 
thing on a Monday morning.  I use Gmane to look through the recent 
messages in the use list [1], and I use the "Active topics" search on 
the forums to look through the list of topics that have had recent 
messages [2].

I usually look for several criteria when I'm choosing a discussion to 
include:

* There should have been more than two people involved
* There should be more than about 3-4 messages in the conversation
* The conversation should have started since the last newsletter
* The topic should be of reasonably general interest

I feel like one of the reasons that more mailing list things make it 
onto the newsletter is because the majority of forum topics seem to 
follow the "basic LiveCode question, straightforward answer, end" 
format, where as mailing list discussions usually seem to be more 
open-ended and involve more people.

Also, if you notice any discussions about LiveCode or LiveCode 
development in other places (Reddit, Hacker News, ...), please send a 
message to <opensource at livecode.com> or open an issue on the TWiL GitHub 
repository so that it can be incorporated into the next issue.

                                   Peter

[1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ide.revolution.user
[2] http://forums.livecode.com/search.php?search_id=active_topics

-- 
Dr Peter Brett <peter.brett at livecode.com>
LiveCode Open Source Team

LiveCode on reddit: https://reddit.com/r/livecode