Re: Proposal: Move Council Discuss List to Discourse

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It's important to look at the user base of who is preferring mailing lists and how it holds up for new users. Mailing lists are the preferred way for most people who've used them for a long time, but new users (newcomers to open source, younger people) definitely prefer to write on a forum and for that experience, it's better if it's a more modern one with relevant features that enhance user experience.

Mailing lists don't do that and you also have zero control over where your emails are kept. Usually, it is very painful or impossible to get anything deleted on a ML, for example.

Regarding IRC, I'll use the same argument I always use. You need a bouncer and you need to be in the same timezone. It's suboptimal for real collaboration and also has no SEO value (logging opens another can of worms regarding privacy and in my personal preference I avoid logged channels wherever I can). With Discourse I have more control, no timezone issues, and several features that I don't have on IRC or a ML, such as polls, nicer image integration, looking up other users, not clogging up my mailbox (doesn't matter if it's filtered into another folder, it's still there), and many more.

That is just my personal opinion, obviously doesn't relate to any of the communities I'm responsible for and developer-heavy communities do tend to need different communication channels than user-focused ones.

On Wed, 10 Oct 2018, 22:07 Neal Gompa, <ngompa13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 4:11 PM Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 03:49:32PM -0400, Neal Gompa wrote:
> > It has been a pretty difficult for me to properly filter for the
> > OpenMandriva and Snapcraft forums (which replaced MLs with Discourse).
>
> We can customize the subject format in a way that might help. See
> https://meta.discourse.org/t/customize-subject-format-for-standard-emails/20801
> It'd be nice if there were further X- headers for more filtering rather than
> just parsing the subject.
>
> Other than the filtering issue, what's your impression of the switch for
> OpenMandriva? Did they just do it for support forums, or for devel as well?
>

Initially it was the support forums. The rest came when we lost access
to the mail list system and it went down. We've transitioned over to
Discourse, and now we don't discuss much there anymore.

It has forced us to more aggressively hold conversations on IRC,
because Discourse was far too painful. There are some developer
feedback threads on the OpenMandriva Discourse, but it was largely a
failure.

It did work out reasonably well for user support, but that's because
historically there were both support forums and mail lists for user
support. Mageia does the same thing, though they run a phpBB forum
instead of Discourse. For OpenMandriva, we just closed the user list
and migrated it to Discourse.

However, I think if we had HyperKitty back then (it was brand new
then), we probably wouldn't have stood up Discourse. Most people
preferred the mailing list and that feeling remained after the
transition.


--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!
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