[Gretl-users] mailing-list vs. forum

Am 20.08.2020 um 05:20 schrieb Alecos Papadopoulos: Hi, Let me hijack Alecos' above mentioned statement. I would like to pose a more general issue. I always felt a bit unsure about whether the mailing list is really the "best" tool for communication (questions, bug reports and discussions), _and_ for advertisement of the project outside the gretl community. Subscribing to a specific mailing list is already quite a step for some people (Oh no, another account is needed!). Given that there exists https://stackoverflow.com/ which hosts two big sites related to statistics, ML and programming, I never saw an advantage managing a mailing list on its own -- but I may be wrong: 1) "stackoverflow": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/gretl (last gretl thread from 2018) 2) CrossValidated: https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=gretl (5 threads in 2020) I've seen the relevance of stackoverflow and stats.stackexchange during the last 2 years. The first place every data scientist, analyst or programmer looks for an answer to a problem is stackoverflow. I am pretty sure this is also the case for academic researcher and students. Using stackoverflow would allow us to post issues and discuss within a big statistics/ programming community. It is _the_ common place to join people from different fields and software projects. It has all functionalities like tagging threads for improving the matching, a good search engine, the possibility to vote answers to highlight good-quality replies. One gets many different statistics (number of views and votes) to get an impression of what seems being relevant for the community. Community members can collect achievements such as "reputation" and "badges" which may motivate people to stay active. For more "features" see here: https://stats.stackexchange.com/tour Don't get me wrong, I like to be active on the gretl mailing list but I think that stackoverflow may be a chance to spread the idea(s) of the gretl project. Artur