Suggestion to consider employing Discourse as a means of communication at all levels

[Anton Andriyevskyy]

Hello community and its leaders who make decisions about the means used for communication within the community.

May I draw Discourse to your attention as a possible replacement to the current mailing list?

It is a very sophisticated open source solution that not only replicates all mailing list features, but also acts as a public forum with lots of features, from categories/tags to per-topic notification levels, with all features you can think of from syntax highlighting to reply-by-email.

Having used it to help setup and run multiple communities over the years, I am certain that using it helps any community flourish and draws more attention to the target product around which the community is formed.

Here is the introductory post that highlights main features:

https://www.discourse.org/about

This FAQ compares Discourse to mailing lists:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-lists/54298

If you would like to give it a try, I can help setup an instance of Discourse at a VPS of your choice. Or you can apply for a free hosting for Open Source projects.

Finally, one example of Discourse running as a discussion platform for an accounting software would be the Manager Forum.

After familiarizing myself with Ledger, HLedger, and eventually Beancount, and after reading your article about the conceptual / phylosophical difference between Beancount and the others, I fell in love with Beancount immediately - because of the fundamental principles the author put at the core of the product.

Then my attempt to dive into discussions followed, which made me feel a bit lost and confused as Google-based mailing list lacks some of the great features that Discourse offers out of the box. Hence my immediate irresistible will to write this email and let the community leaders consider the possibility of using Discourse.

Do you think it is worth the time discussing this?

Many thanks,

Anton

[tbra...@gmail.com]

I am just a lowly newbie member (not making many contributions to the knowledge base). However, I want to weigh in on this saying I greatly appreciate that this community is more open than the typical "Stack Overflow" model. In particular, I appreciate that one can ask a question here no matter how simple or throw out a wild idea without having the thread closed and being thrown out into the darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth :)

From what I can tell, Discourse doesn't appear to have the same proclivity for "over-moderation" as the Stack Overflow sites. I haven't used Discourse very much. So, I don't know very much. Still, I wanted to provide this insight on the behalf of the newbies who need a little mercy.

-Tim

[Martin Blais]

I have a really low bandwidth these days and the mailing-list is already hitting my attention quota limit regularly.

I'm not sure I have time to monitor another stream of communication. Actually, that's not right, I'm pretty sure I don't.

You're welcome to start something; if you need my attention, just make sure to ping me via email,

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[Anton Andriyevskyy]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. The key point of my suggestion is not to introduce "another stream of communication", but to replace this mailing list by Discourse, which can still act as a mailing list for those who prefer via-email-only communication.

If you're willing to give it a try, we can setup a test instance and import the existing mailing list into Discourse, so that it is indexed and searchable, and can be further categorized and tagged by the community leaders.

While with mailing lists you can quite easily get overwhelmed by the bandwidth, with Discourse you could control the frequency of notifications you get per-category, or even per topic. E.g. get messages immediately from the developers and community leaders group, and get a weekly digest of new topics from the Support category - i.e. you can fine-tune the traffic according to the degree of the engagement you want.

I definitely don't want to suggest anything that would eat more of your time. Vice-versa, it could allow the community to self-organize and produce a knowledge base, faq, cookbook, etc. With a mailing list, though, there isn't much you can do to make the community self-organize and self-develop and self-moderate.

If my arguments are appealing to you, let me know and I can help setup the test Discourse instance. If not, I'm happy to keep using Google Groups while finding the solution to my own problem for which I originally wanted to employ Beancount. I wouldn't setup any side-community owned and curated by me though, as it not the type of contribution I had in mind.

Thanks,

Anton

[Daniele Nicolodi]

On 30/11/2020 02:09, Anton Andriyevskyy wrote:
> It is a very sophisticated open source solution that not only replicates
> all mailing list features, but also acts as a public forum with lots of
> features, from categories/tags to per-topic notification levels, with
> all features you can think of from syntax highlighting to reply-by-email.

I strongly disagree on the fact that Discourse is a sophisticated
solution that replicates all mailing list features. I use discourse to
interact with the CPython development community and the experience is so
poor I really don't understand how the CPython developers manages to use
it as their main communication channel.

Discourse replicates the experience of using a mailing list only if your
interaction with email is via a web email client of the late 90ies:
there is no support for threading of the replies, the HTML email sent by
tre system have an horrible formatting where emphasis is on the
decorative parts rather than on the content, etc..

Email notifications are also delivered with completely unpredictable
criteria or at least so if feels without spending too much time tweaking
settings. I now enable the "mailing list mode", maybe it will work better.

Finally, I don't see why Discourse (by default, at least) needs to give
Facebook the opportunity to track all my activity on the platform.

Cheers,
Dan

[Daniele Nicolodi]

And I really hate the "gamification" of the interface. Why should I
receive useless notifications about earning equivalently useless badges
such as "Welcome", "First quote", "First mention", "Editor", "Basic" for
every Discourse instance I join? What's the purpose?

Cheers,
Dan

[Anton Andriyevskyy]

Hi Dan

* Badges are easily turned off. Those are On by default because it is a forum platform, more than a mailing list.

* How notifications look is just a piece of HTML in the settings, can be tuned to the liking if needed.

The sophistication I was talking about when it comes to interacting with the community are:

* there are 4 levels of "intensity" of notifications that one can configure individually per topic, or per category, or per tag - from "silent" to "normal" to "watching" to "tracking"

* can reply both via email or via Discourse web interface - so covers both world; for example, I personally communicate much more productively over the web interface, while others prefer email

* all the knowledge is well organized in categories and with tags, as well as indexed and searchable with all the filters one could need

* interlinking between topics, aka building a wiki-style knowledge base

* summarization mode for long topic

* wiki messages (everyone can edit - or people with certain level of access can edit)

* Q&A with "Solution" checkbox for category(ies) of your choice, aka Support channel (aka Stack Overflow mode turned on for particular categories)

* plenty of self-regulated community features, i.e. people can "flag" spammy or rude messages (and those hide them once certain amount of flags

All this, in my experience, helps the community to thrive exponentially by having those bits of engagement, searchability, knowledge-base ability, self-regulation etc - without the need of too much moderation.

Well, of course I don't have an intention to pursue this idea - just sharing a suggestion. Organizing knowledge and keeping it up structured and up to date is nearly impossible in emails. With Discourse you could have everything in one place - from Cookbook to Q&A to Documentation to Wiki to internal developer discussion etc. So I'd suggest at least familiarizing yourself with the reading I shared above. I genuinely think it can make the community more public and discoverable, and easier to interact with.

Thanks,

Anton

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