Google Groups replacement needed

[Matthew Butterick]

Last month, Google inadvertently deleted my administrative access to this `pollenpub` group.

They cannot restore my access. After speaking to a tech there, it seems the group may soon be deleted altogether.

So, there needs to be a new group. Though I suppose I could set up `pollenpub-2-the-revenge` on Google Groups, for what are probably apparent reasons, I'd prefer to go elsewhere.

1) Any recommendations for a different service? Over time I've heard that being able to read & respond via email is a key feature for many. But otherwise, I'm not picky.

2) Of course, everyone will have to re-confirm themselves as members of the new group. I regret the inconvenience, but it is out of my control.

[Sorawee Porncharoenwase]

Wow... this is alarming. It's their fault and yet they couldn't do anything?

A quick Googling (welp) led me to:

- https://groups.io/

- http://librelist.com/

These are free of charge.

Personally, I really like https://www.discourse.org/, but it's not free (unless you host it on your own server).

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[Tom Brooke]

One that is more Slack like but works pretty well is Zulip. A lot of Clojure stuff has moved there and it is free for open source https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/

[Matthew Butterick]

Thanks for the suggestions Tom & Sorawee.

Let me ask the dumbest possible question (a pastime of mine): 

What if I just created a `pollenpub` repo on GitHub and we used its Issue system strictly as a forum for posting questions & answers? 

+ We're all using GH already, I think.

+ Anyone who wants to be notified for every new topic can "watch" the repo (rather than being subscribed to a mailing list)

+ Otherwise, people can peek in as they wish.

+ Outbound & inbound email support.

+ Web interface.

+ No new costs, complexities, or corporate entanglements.

Are there boxes it doesn't tick? Is there a downside I'm missing? (Other than being idiosyncratic, but since we're all publishing with Lisp, I think we're beyond that particular shame)

[Sorawee Porncharoenwase]

+ We're all using GH already, I think.

Not all people have GitHub accounts. 

- They may not be developers.

- They might use other services like GitLab or BitBucket instead.

As GitHub is pretty easy to register, I'd say these are not big issues. Note that the second point also applies to Google account, which is required for posting to the current Google Groups.

You might want to read GitHub's term of service to make sure that it's OK, but judging from the fact that https://utteranc.es/ exists, I think using it as a mailing list should be fine.

[Tom Brooke]

I was somewhat reluctant suggesting Zulip because while a lot of Clojurists like it I find the layout kind of busy and I'm not sure about the whole chat like Slack thing - for some reason it doesn't seem to fit Pollen

I was reading through the Racket2 discussion and noted how clear and easy to follow it was on Github (BTW and off subject I've noted the hand wringing about the possible loss of s-expressions - but if you follow the discussion it is a world class lesson in language design from masters and to paraphrase Socrates "An unexamined s-expression is not worth having")

But back to Github one thing about the Racket2 repo is the number of issues which are sort of hard to follow and I am not sure how to get e-mail notice set up - I would like notice about everything - it would take some organization and instructions about how to get set up

As to corporate entanglement some folks are wringing their hands about Microsoft's purchase  of Github but I don't see any evil intent so I think we would be ok there.

It would create a more permanent record and Github has all kind of tools that we could add in -- maybe we could leverage some Pollen and while I'm not ready to submit a pull request to Pollen, yet, I think by just having the discussion on Github I would feel more part of the project 

I like the Github idea I think there are a lot of possibilities.  

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[Joel Dueck]

GitHub works pretty well and is probably the only zero-admin option that ticks all the boxes and works by default for most of us.

I think it's important to be able to “mark” useful threads in some way, and/or help them surface in Google search results. To that end, the GitHub repo could include a separate Markdown file with links to issues that talk about the more common questions.

Having our own Stack Exchange site might help with the Google search thing, but the process[1] looks geared toward much larger audiences.

[1]: https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

[Joel McCracken]

If you wish to be notified of all discussion on github, all you need to do is "watch" the repository.

I like the idea of using github as a forum, even as I now personally use gitlab for my personal projects now.

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[Matthew Butterick]

On 13 Aug 19, at 9:15 AM, Joel Dueck <dueck...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it's important to be able to “mark” useful threads in some way, and/or help them surface in Google search results. To that end, the GitHub repo could include a separate Markdown file with links to issues that talk about the more common questions.

I'm open to whatever thread-hacking needs to happen to make it useful. 

On 13 Aug 19, at 9:27 AM, Joel McCracken <mccrack...@gmail.com> wrote:

I like the idea of using github as a forum, even as I now personally use gitlab for my personal projects now.

I no longer have my private repos at GitHub either. I don't love the MS ownership. But there's a lot of community pressure to keep GitHub healthy for open-source projects. So for public repos, I can see it has value.

[Matthew Singletary]

It might be worth investigating SourceHut (https://sr.ht / https://sourcehut.org/). The hosting isn't free (as in money), but is a very modest fee. Contributors don't have to pay and it has lots of neat stuff (no js required, built in wiki, mailing lists, etc)

It's actually more email oriented than github/gitlab, but should hit most of the marks that have been mentioned so far.

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[Matthew Butterick]

Though I appreciate the candor of the warning "Here be dragons!", it tends to deter further scrutiny, much like actual dragons.

[borja...@gmail.com]

I can also recommend sourcehut, having followed the author's work for a while. Here's an example of how a mailing list there looks like: https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/public-inbox

I'd rather stay away from Slack and Discourse, as I personally find the interface rather terrible. I'd choose gitlab/github issues instead if that were the case