Discuss mailing list

[Maiyannah Bishop <maiyannah.bishop AT postactiv.com>]

One of these days I'll get an email from this list that isn't someone pitching an alternative to the mailing list.
-mb

On 2017-04-19 13:45, Jonah Aragon wrote:

I'd like to propose moving our Mailing List and long form discussion to a new platform, Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/). Most of this post will probably sound like a Discourse ad (sorry), but I want to make sure everyone understands why we should switch.

Discourse is a discussion platform that doubles as both a web based internet forum and mailing list management software. I think we should switch primarily because of the forum's benefits to our community: having an easily accessible discussion platform for planning and proposing topics is an issue for us at the moment, in my opinion. The mailing list can be difficult to understand for newcomers, and I suspect many people might be overwhelmed after joining, and won't participate. 

Having a forum for our community would make it easier for users to register (and we could potentially include SSO for integration with our current Members system), and Discourse serves that purpose especially well with a clean interface that's easy for most newcomers to get a feel for.

Discourse also supports many different integrations/plugins (https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=topic%3Adiscourse-plugin&type=Repositories&ref=searchresults), for example, a voting plugin in particular (https://github.com/discourse/discourse-voting) would be a great addition to our current system, as it would allow for easy tabulation on new proposals.

We could also categorize posts. We don't need (or want) to be notified by every single question newcomers might have, but we certainly don't want to discourage those kinds of posts. We could create a Q/A category with less pronounced notifications (or individual users can change their notification preferences from the defaults) so you can make sure you only need to see important discussions in the future.

And finally, in addition to all the forum benefits, Discourse can also serve as a mailing list, for those of us who truly prefer email based discussions like this. In your user profile there would be an option to enable "Mailing list mode", which would send individual emails for either all posts or categories you wish to hear from on a regular basis. Switching should be a win-win for all community members, mailing list users will get to keep existing functionality, and we could gain a great new discussion platform, which will hopefully get more people to join in.

If you all agree, I can spin up a Discourse server immediately and get everything working. I've managed a few Discourse communities for a while now so everything can be taken care of. I have server space at DigitalOcean to run it with redundancy so we don't have any issues with our platform going offline in the future.

If you have any questions, please reply and I'll try to answer them. I'm also available on OpenNIC's IRC channel on Freenode (as jonaharagon).

Thanks for reading all that, I'm hoping we'll be able to setup a new forum soon!

Jonah

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