New Openmod Initiative Discussion Forum

[Tom Brown]

Dear openmodders,

The Open Energy Modelling Initiative now has a Discussion Forum:

https://forum.openmod-initiative.org/

The purpose of the forum is to hold discussions on topics that go into
more detail than the mailing list allows, and for people to discuss
freely without fear of over-spamming the group.

Please sign up and open new topics so we can get some good discussions
going!

This follows suggestions on the list for a discussion forum:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openmod-initiative/3ALva6O0lOw

and the wiki:

http://wiki.openmod-initiative.org/wiki/Discussion_server_options

and at the workshops.

There are some technical details on the forum below.

I'd still consider it in a testing phase - we'll have to see how well
the performance scales once more people start using it.

In principle the forum could reduce the use of the mailing list to just
a place for announcements; it may even make the mailing list redundant
in the longer term.

Best wishes,

Tom



Now some technical details:

The site is running Discourse:

http://www.discourse.org/

This was chosen because it is modern, free software that is widely
supported and widely used for discussion sites.

It's currently running on a server I already have for other websites, so
it's not costing anything at the moment; if it needs to be upgraded
because of high traffic we can discuss how to pay for that then. Here
are the specs of the machine:

https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx20

It was set up in a Docker instance following the instructions here:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md

It is therefore easy to port to another server if the need arises.

Full backups are currently made every week but I think we should raise
this frequency to every day.

The email delivery is handled for free by SparkPost:

https://www.sparkpost.com/

If you have any further questions, just drop me an email.



--
Tom Brown
Postdoctoral Researcher
Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies
https://fias.uni-frankfurt.de/physics/schramm/renewable-energy-system-and-network-analysis/
Personal site: https://www.nworbmot.org
Phone: +49 69 798 47693