[ANN] Discourse to replace the mailing-list

[zimbatm]

Hi all,

we gracefully received a free discourse instance: https://nixos.trydiscourse.com/ . I propose that we try this out as a replacement for the mailing-list. The goal is to encourage even further discussion by lowering the barriers to discussion. If we are happy with it, move it to discourse.nixos.org .

## What is Discourse

Discourse[1] is an open-source forum-type discussion system with an email gateway. It is being used successfully by other communities like Rust[2], Elm[3], Mozilla[4] and is actively maintained. It supports Github auth.

## Why not Google Groups

Google Groups is not very well maintained, is generally clunky and plays tricks on users who don't own a Google account to force them to register. Email threads are also difficult to split and re-organize to improve the discussion.

## What next?

Go to https://nixos.trydiscourse.com/ and create an account. Github auth is enabled so that should be quick. Then start posting and leave your feedback. There are a few things to tune like categories and welcome messages. I am also looking for moderators if you are interested.

Best,

z

[1]: https://www.discourse.org/
[2]: https://internals.rust-lang.org/
[3]: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/
[4]: https://discourse.mozilla.org/

[Teo Klestrup]

I'm 100% for this move. I try to stay somewhat active here, but my inability to find a good email client ends up turning me off pretty quickly every time. Hopefully that should change now.

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[Matthew Bauer]

Definitely looks useful! As much as I hate googlegroups, I think a
mailing list is still useful for some things (especially "big" things
like announcements, alerts, etc.). Discourse seems closer to Reddit
than a true mailing list.

One thing I think would be cool is if we could start "dogfooding"
NixOS- that is all of our ecosystem run on NixOS services. Is there a
service in NixOS for Discourse? Could we get it put in? This is a long
way off but managing our own instances of these services would be
neat. GitLab instances, IRC instances, etc. Obviously this is costlier
- but also more "pure".

[Teo Klestrup Röijezon]

> As much as I hate googlegroups, I think a
> mailing list is still useful for some things (especially "big" things
> like announcements, alerts, etc.). Discourse seems closer to Reddit
> than a true mailing list.

Discourse can be configured in "mailing list mode", where it sends an email per message, and

allows replies the same way as well. Of course, users who find this annoying have an option

to either disable emails completely, or switch to daily/weekly digests (similar to GGroups).

> One thing I think would be cool is if we could start "dogfooding"
> NixOS- that is all of our ecosystem run on NixOS services. Is there a
> service in NixOS for Discourse? Could we get it put in? This is a long
> way off but managing our own instances of these services would be
> neat. GitLab instances, IRC instances, etc. Obviously this is costlier
> - but also more "pure".

I've got a NixOS module that I use for my WoW guild's forums (in a failed

attempt to get them to migrate away from Discord :/), at

https://gist.github.com/teozkr/ae017b89d4a0179ec211757aa92ff3a1.

That said, it's pretty hacky since Discourse uses a complicated docker-based

setup with their own auto-updates, and stores all settings in the database.

A proper NixOS module would probably have to break up each container,

as well as provide something similar to Jenkins Job Builder to declaratively

specify settings.

Another problem with my setup is the slow rebuild times: expect to spend

10-15 minutes waiting for it to rebuild and start. Letting Nix handle this

rebuilding would (hopefully) at least provide some sensible caching.

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[Teo Klestrup Röijezon]

Since this is a bit off-topic for this announcement I took the liberty of creating a Discourse topic

about improving the state of running Discourse on NixOS.

[David Izquierdo]

On 23/04/18 23:36, Teo Klestrup wrote:
> I'm 100% for this move. I try to stay somewhat active here, but my
> inability to find a good email client ends up turning me off pretty
> quickly every time. Hopefully that should change now.

I'm the exact oppsosite. The reason I can keep up with this (or any)
list is thanks to local clients. If I had to check a webpage for each,
I'm cutting down my reading time. A lot.

However, as soon as I finished typing that, I re-read the original post:

On 23/04/18 22:22, zimbatm wrote:
> Discourse[1] is an open-source forum-type discussion system with an
> email gateway.

This is news to me. If the email gateway can be set up, my one concern
is gone.

On 23/04/18 22:22, zimbatm wrote:
> ## Why not Google Groups
>
> Google Groups is not very well maintained, is generally clunky and
> plays tricks on users who don't own a Google account to force them to
> register. Email threads are also difficult to split and re-organize to
> improve the discussion.

Agree on everything. Google Groups is the reason I signed up with my
spam email, and not the fancy one. Not even intentionally.

I don't think I made a very useful post, but hopefully it'll help other
fools like me that can't read :)

[Bryan Richter]

+1 to the move! I am part of another community that recently switched from Mailman to discourse, and even as a curmudgeonly email advocate, I saw the benefits immediately. Community participation went up markedly.

One comment on this:

On Monday, April 23, 2018 at 6:00:48 PM UTC-4, Matthew Bauer wrote:

Definitely looks useful! As much as I hate googlegroups, I think a
mailing list is still useful for some things (especially "big" things
like announcements, alerts, etc.). Discourse seems closer to Reddit
than a true mailing list.

This may be true in appearance, but not in experience. Like mailing lists, discourse fosters in depth, focused, asynchronous discussions. Discourse is even better because moderators can clean things up after the fact rather than rely on perfect behavior from participants. Reddit, on the other hand, is designed as entertainment, where the most superficially popular ideas rise to the top, encouraging groupthink and stifling minority opinions. It's fine for what it is, but discourse is definitely something different, so I hope the visual similarity doesn't turn anyone off this migration.

[David Kleuker]

+1

I really like using Discourse, but never get used to Mailinglists or old Forums.

It combines top usability in the webinterface and standard ML behavior, so everyone should be happy.

kind regards
davidak

[Leo Gaspard]

On 04/23/2018 10:22 PM, zimbatm wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> we gracefully received a free discourse instance:
> https://nixos.trydiscourse.com/ . I propose that we try this out as a
> replacement for the mailing-list. The goal is to encourage even further
> discussion by lowering the barriers to discussion. If we are happy with

> it, move it to discourse.nixos.org <http://discourse.nixos.org> .

I think this would be just great!

Just, there must be a downside, so let this be it: would it be possible,
in Discourse, to Cc: someone not subscribing to the forum? I don't think
this is a widely used feature of the mailing list, and so I don't think
it's a reason for postponing the change, but I guess this point had to
be raised.

That said, I do look forward to a http://discourse.nixos.org !

[Teo Klestrup Röijezon]

> Just, there must be a downside, so let this be it: would it be possible,

in Discourse, to Cc: someone not subscribing to the forum?

Yes and no. It's of course possible to CC an individual message (if you're

using the email interface), but they won't be kept in the thread afterwards.

On the other hand, you could just email them a link to the thread, which

will (of course) let them read through current and future posts as they

please, as well as to sign up and subscribe if they so desire.

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[Wout Mertens]

+1, just start using it to get critical mass I would say?

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[Roland Koebler]

> I'm the exact oppsosite. The reason I can keep up with this (or any)
> list is thanks to local clients. If I had to check a webpage for
> each, I'm cutting down my reading time. A lot.

Same here.

For "heavy-users", mailinglists are much more efficient than webpages.
I can efficiently read several mailinglists with minimal effort and
minimal overhead with mutt. Webpages/web-forums would take much more
time, and so I would not read them.

If the mailinglist-interface of discourse is good (including threading,
which is cruical for mailinglist, but discourse unfortunately seems to
prefer a "flat style"), and I can continue to use it with mutt, I agree
on moving.
Otherwise I would not read the discourse-group any more, but probably only
read/post when I have a problem with Nix/NixOS. I guess the same would
be true for nearly every mutt-user. ;)

best regards,
Roland

[Wout Mertens]

I don't see why it has to be one or the other. What's wrong with a mailing list _and_ a discourse? We already also have a stack overflow tag, subreddit, IRC and in-person meetings.

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[Alexandre Peyroux]

In fact, I have the impression that the question is more like: How can
we no longer host our mailing list through Google?

I don't see the point in changing our maillist with a tool like a
discourse.

[Benjamin Staffin]

I don't wish to be overly contrary, but what is actually the problem with using google groups as a mailing list host?  I don't understand why people refuse to create any sort of google account, for that matter.  It's not like you have to actually tell them anything about yourself - isn't it effectively just a username and password for managing your list subscriptions if that's all you want it to be?  The list archives work properly and are easily accessible, they seem to do a decent job of controlling spam, the platform is generally trustworthy against spoofing and hijacking, and they don't require you to interact with it via anything except an email client once you subscribe to a list.  I'm all for avoiding lock-in and proprietary platforms, but google groups seems to be just fine as a mailing list host.  What's the big deal?

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[Leo Gaspard]

On 04/26/2018 02:09 AM, Benjamin Staffin wrote:
> I don't wish to be overly contrary, but what is actually the problem with
> using google groups as a mailing list host? I don't understand why people
> refuse to create any sort of google account, for that matter. It's not
> like you have to actually tell them anything about yourself - isn't it
> effectively just a username and password for managing your list
> subscriptions if that's all you want it to be? The list archives work
> properly and are easily accessible, they seem to do a decent job of
> controlling spam, the platform is generally trustworthy against spoofing
> and hijacking, and they don't require you to interact with it via anything
> except an email client once you subscribe to a list. I'm all for avoiding
> lock-in and proprietary platforms, but google groups seems to be just fine
> as a mailing list host. What's the big deal?

I've lived at least three issues. One is the one I think you dismissed
at the beginning: Google insists on you logging in your google account
in order to look at the archives. I don't know whether it's possible to
see them without hitting a login page, but last time I tried I didn't
manage to. Now, it's been something like a year since I last subscribed
to a googlegroups so I'm using only my local archives, but it has been
an issue at least to me.

Another issue is google makes it hard to have several google accounts
for compartmentalization of one's life on the internet. I've already
ended up noticing I was logged in as two google accounts at the same
time, at some point (don't ask me how, I have no idea, likely a google
docs shared with only one of my accounts?). So much for
compartmentalization.

The last issue is the one you actually raised in “they seem to do a
decent job of controlling spam”. At some point, for a reason unknown to
me, my mailserver (of which I was the only user at that point, and that
had not been an open email relay for at least several months, as I don't
know who owned it before me) has been spam-listed by google groups. This
led to mails just vanishing into emptiness (good practice is to at least
bounce the mail). After ~24 hrs, I contacted a google mail engineer, and
he told me that, when mails are detected as likely spam, they are put in
a queue, waiting for moderator approval, without any notice to the sender.

So my mail just reappeared ~1 week after, when, I guess, some moderator
for the mailing list passed through the web interface. Obviously the
comments weren't really relevant any longer at that point.

So yes, they do a good job at controlling spam, but lots of other
mailing lists don't have antispam systems as [insert here a
politically-correct term] as google's, and do manage to run with really
few spams passing through. And at least they notice the sender when they
are put into the moderation queue.

[Michael Raskin]

>using google groups as a mailing list host? I don't understand why people
>refuse to create any sort of google account, for that matter. It's not
>like you have to actually tell them anything about yourself - isn't it
>effectively just a username and password for managing your list
>subscriptions if that's all you want it to be? The list archives work

I dunno, every time I create any Google-related account it eventually
blocks me (I… don't sent much email, let's put it like that, so it is
not for spam), starts demanding phone number and whatnot, or does
something else equally user-friendly.

On the other hand, mailing list subscription does work without all that
with Google Groups.

>properly and are easily accessible, they seem to do a decent job of

Discourse list archives are viewable without scripts on weak devices,
Google Group archives are not.

>controlling spam, the platform is generally trustworthy against spoofing

That sounds funny this week when some spam got into people's _Sent_
folder on GMail… But I agree that this is more of a coincidence and one
more bug than loss of data.

[Wout Mertens]

I think the main argument in favor of Discourse is that the data on it as well as the service running it is/can be ours, and we can move it wherever we want, whenever.

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[Matthias Beyer]

On 24-04-2018 17:53:09, David Izquierdo wrote:
> On 23/04/18 23:36, Teo Klestrup wrote:
> > I'm 100% for this move. I try to stay somewhat active here, but my
> > inability to find a good email client ends up turning me off pretty
> > quickly every time. Hopefully that should change now.
> I'm the exact oppsosite. The reason I can keep up with this (or any) list is
> thanks to local clients. If I had to check a webpage for each, I'm cutting
> down my reading time. A lot.
>
> However, as soon as I finished typing that, I re-read the original post:
>
> On 23/04/18 22:22, zimbatm wrote:
> > Discourse[1] is an open-source forum-type discussion system with an
> > email gateway.
>
> This is news to me. If the email gateway can be set up, my one concern is
> gone.
>

I want to +1 this.

I want to use my email client for this, because I expect to be offline
in the next 12 months (going on a sabatical with a motorvan in two
weeks time until early 2019).
I don't want to access a webpage for reading the community discussions
- I want to download them all at once (like email) and then read them
and reply to them and then send out at once.
And that reading and replying should be completely offline - if I have
no ability to connect to the internet for two weeks, I still want to
be able to access the discussions!

So, with an email gateway, this sounds like a good idea. Maybe we
could even "couple" the mailinglist and discourse? Is such a thing
possible? So that topics get replicated on eachother?


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Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

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It adds value to your life.
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[Matthias Beyer]

On 25-04-2018 15:04:36, Roland Koebler wrote:
> For "heavy-users", mailinglists are much more efficient than webpages.
> I can efficiently read several mailinglists with minimal effort and
> minimal overhead with mutt. Webpages/web-forums would take much more
> time, and so I would not read them.
>
> If the mailinglist-interface of discourse is good (including threading,
> which is cruical for mailinglist, but discourse unfortunately seems to
> prefer a "flat style"), and I can continue to use it with mutt, I agree
> on moving.
> Otherwise I would not read the discourse-group any more, but probably only
> read/post when I have a problem with Nix/NixOS. I guess the same would
> be true for nearly every mutt-user. ;)

Exactly same opinion here. +1!

[Teo Klestrup Röijezon]

You can activate "mailing list mode" under your user preferences, which will send you an email for each post people make:

You can reply to these emails, which will post them to the Discourse topic.

You can also mute certain topics, to no longer get emails about them:

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[Anderson Torres]

​YES! +1 to this!

It will be perfect to me. It joins the best of forum and mailinglist worlds.

But, what about to transfer all mail from Google lists to it? Is it a hard work?

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[zimbatm]

We are discussing the import at https://nixos.trydiscourse.com/t/import-the-mailing-list/66/5

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[Matthias Beyer]

Just a quick question:

If I register now and the site moves later - will my account
automatically be moved and all the content as well? Or will I have to
do something (like re-registering)?

Kind regards,
Matthias

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[zimbatm]

I actually already moved the forum and it's available on both addresses.

[zimbatm]

Okay, I think it's time to make the switch official. Are there any remaining concerns?

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/220

[zimbatm]

Discourse is now the official forum / mailing-list now!

https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/220 has been merged.

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[Bas van Dijk]

The forum is dead, long live the forum!

Op ma 20 aug. 2018 14:44 schreef zimbatm <zim...@zimbatm.com>:

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