Hi all TL;DR lets migrate to Discourse (forum software, self-hosted). I hope you'll read the rest of this mail though :)
This is a big proposal. If you prefer audio/video to huge posts, I've also put some of my thoughts in the latest community demo: https://youtu.be/QHzNIFjMpTM?t=2103 (12min watch) # Not confirmed, only a proposal so far Lets get the important bit out of the way first - this is a *proposal*, it's is not guaranteed. No final decision has been taken. I'm posting this to get feedback from the community about whether it's a good idea, and I really (really really) want to hear what you've got to say. # What am I proposing? I want to migrate our mailing lists to a self-hosted Discourse instance. We have that Discourse instance set up, you can go play with it right now (see below for details). I want everyone to try it out, and tell me your thoughts. # Why do we need this? Let me start with a graph: https://imgur.com/a/jjPJI This is the volume of mailing list posts (users, dev, and the totals) over the last 6 years, grouped by month. As you can see, that traffic has been declining for the last 2 years, and that's a trend I also see in the IRC data too. This worries me. For some time now, I've been wondering if a mailing list is the right fit for our needs as a community. Times change, and I believe there's a significant group of people that would be willing to be part of our project, but do not want to join a list. In modern times, people expect a UI, and are more comfortable there. This is a thought I have heard repeated from other community members too, so I'm not alone. Specifically though, why a forum? I'm proposing we use Discourse, so let me link to https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/ and pull a few examples out (in no specific order) * Easier for new users to get started withClean and simple interface * Better search and search engine indexing * Post creation tries to be helpful, suggesting similar topics * 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 Broadly, a forum gives us both many new features out of the box, plus flexibility for the future. This post is long enough, but I went into much greater detail in my post to foreman-dev a few weeks ago, please do read it if it interests you (and maybe come to the AMA next week): https://groups.google.com/d/msg/foreman-dev/xSS1mNKpRQg/uFSmDNK6CAAJ # I like mailing lists though Discourse does offer a "mailing list mode". I'm not going to try and sell this to you as a 1:1 replacement for a mailing list, but the main features in terms of creating new topics in by mail, receiving new topics by mail, and getting/replying to new posts by mail should all work. Threading is there too, so the basic functionality should work fine - but I'd love to test this more. Setting up mailing list mode is covered in my intro notes to Discourse notifications here: https://community.theforeman.org/t/configuring-mail-notifications/7513 Is it a perfect replacement? No. Is it a worthwhile tradeoff? You tell me :) # How do I help test this? Glad you asked. Start at: https://community.theforeman.org Everyone who has ever mailed foreman-users or foreman-dev already has an account (importing the lists creates those users) but all outbound email is disabled by default so we don't spam people. To recover your account, simple log in with your mailing list email address, and then hit Recover Password. If you're a mailing list lurker (never posted) then you won't have an account yet - never fear, signups are available, or you can log in with your GitHub account. Once logged in, you'll be shown my FAQ to help orient yourself, and you can visit the docs for configuring mail (see above) # What's next? Nothing immediately. Next week I will hold an Ask Me Anything on our YouTube channel, and you're welcome to come ask your questions. Obviously questions are welcome here too, and you can email me privately (or private message @gwmngilfen on Discourse :P) if you like. After some time - exactly how much depends on how quickly we get feedback - we'll be able to take a look at the feedback so far and come to a decision. I absolutely do *not* want to rush this - I want to listen for a while first. It's a big change, and we need to get it right. I very much hope you'll join me on the expedition to the future. Change isn't easy, but I genuinely believe we need this. Let me know your thoughts! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Foreman users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/foreman-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
