Discuss mailing list

[Jonah Aragon <jonah AT triplebit.net>]

Hello all!

This is going to be a pretty big proposal today, since not much has happened in a while. TL;DR: we should move to Discourse (but I hope you'll read the rest of this mail anyways).

## It's just a proposal.

I want to be clear right from the start that this is just a proposal, nothing here is guaranteed, and the entire point of this thread is to hear your opinions. Before shutting it down, lets see if we can reach some sort of agreement.

## Why should we do this?

For quite some time, I've been thinking about ways OpenNIC's community platforms have been a success, and ways we could improve ourselves, especially in terms of gaining new users and fostering regular discussion. Times change, and a mailing list is simply a relic of another era. I firmly believe there is a significant group of people that would join our community, but don't want to join a mailing list. In these modern times, people simply expect a UI to join platforms like this, and are a lot more comfortable there/online versus participating via email. This is a thought I've heard repeated by other community members here, so I'm not alone.

## Why Discourse?/Why a forum?

Let me just link to https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/ for an overview, but I'll pull out some especially useful examples below, in no particular order.

* Easier for new users to get started with a clean and simple interface 

* Better search and search engine indexing

* Post creation tries to be helpful, suggesting similar topics that already exist.

* Markdown support.

* Category-level subscriptions.

* Browser & phone push notifications for new posts.

* Community digest by email & “unread” on the web (for those who can’t keep an eye on the web site all the time).

* Converting a post to a wiki post, so everyone can edit it.

* Group-level notifications.

In an overall sense, migrating to a forum, and Discourse in particular grants us many new features out of the box, that aren't replicable on a list like this, as well as flexibility in the future.

## How it helps with support

When it comes to support, especially with integral operating system components like DNS, which we specialize in, what matters is that users can ask a question and get a reply that they can feel confident in.

The problem with mailing lists is that neither of these things are really achievable on a mailing list. If a user, who just joined this mailing list and knows nobody, gets two differing replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum on the other hand can display user reputation levels, badges, and titles that distinguish trusted members of our community from another new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing distinguishing users apart whatsoever, to the point where I still have to check peoples history and qualifications after years of participating here.

Discourse specifically also helps new users by showing "Similar Topics" when they're creating a post, ideally pointing them to existing resources before starting a new thread. This is impossible for new users to do from within their mailbox, and incredibly difficult to find via Sympa's uh, "lacking," web interface. Features like this can prevent duplicate posts from cluttering our platform.

Discourse also supports plugins (it's a Rails app) which should allow us to look at things like issue templates, etc. for people needing support with some of our services like Tier 2 servers.

## How it helps with announcements

We currently don't have a dedicated announcements platform, making it impossible for any organizationally relevant news to be shown to many new users. Currently, our only option is to send it to the mailing list, which is what we currently do, but that leads to important information being lost among the other threads. Discourse has supports for sticky posts and a global announcements banner we can use to get important messages across.

## More general notes

Discourse has a lot of things going for it, as a platform. Groups support for example, can help segment our members into groups we can use for notifications, etc. If there's a change to the root zone for example, a quick ping to @tier2ops from our Tier 0 administrator can notify them all right away. Groups can be invite-only or users can self-select to join them, depending on configuration.

Additionally, private messages may be useful, especially if somebody is offline on IRC, which happens often. It also has a privacy benefit over the mailing list: many users are a lot more comfortable sharing usernames versus their email address.

## But I love mailing lists!

Discourse does offer a per-user "mailing list mode" you can enable. Now, I'm not going to try and sell this as a 1:1 replacement for this mailing list, but a lot of the core functionality can remain the same. Creating new topics, replying to posts, and getting individual replies via email should all work. Threading works too, so the basic functionality of a mailing list should work fine.

Is it a perfect replacement for this use-case? No. Is it a worthwhile tradeoff? I think so, you tell me :)

## How will this server work?

@fusl (Katie) will be hosting a Discourse server for us. (As an aside, she also hosts the wiki, our two active anycast servers, and a lot of backend stuff for this organization). I'm hoping to get Discourse online within the next week or two at community.opennic.org that we can test out, which would become our live server if this proposal is approved.

## What's next?

Nothing immediately. I want to gather a lot of feedback on this proposal before we proceed. I'll be here to answer any questions, and you can also email me privately with any questions/concerns at jonah AT triplebit.net. 

After some time, exactly how long depending on the amount/type of feedback we get on this proposal, we'll be able to look at everything and come to a decision, and bring it to a vote here. This time around I don't want to rush anything, and I want to make sure we consider everything before coming to a conclusion, so please voice any feedback you may have. It's a pretty big change, organizationally, and I want to make sure we get everything right.

I very much hope everyone here will support me on our journey to the modern world. Change isn't easy for anybody, but I genuinely believe we need this to happen. Let me know your thoughts!

Thanks everybody,

Jonah