Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

Development
1

Hi all,

As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's
the TL;DR:

So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum
software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've
been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and
I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts.

What?

Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to
migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups
from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions.
Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll
get to that.

Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please
keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email.
Your workflow may not be broken :slight_smile:

Why?

Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better
than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great.
The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let
me break it down:

foreman-users

When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can
ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For
those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way
rewarded for the work they do.

The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is
really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets
2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user
levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the
other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the
Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars
are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler …) so I can reach out to
them for help, questions etc.

Discourse also searches for likely similar topics while you're
typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing
support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :slight_smile:

For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic "trust
levels" (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators).
These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate
in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on
the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It'll also help me know who
to speak to when there's some swag to send out …

To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the
users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events
& CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would
have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose.
Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!"
but the reality is that people just don't. Discourse gives us the
flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the
need to.

Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at
things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has
bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not
investigated the bots too much yet).

foreman-dev

In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and
notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we'll see a
real benefit in a couple of areas.

Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the
criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support
(markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of
that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope.

Discourse also has "like" buttons which can be used in place of "+1"
emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the
community to click the like button, even when they might not have
emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I
hope this will help us to resolve discussions better than we have
historically.

The ability to create dedicated boards for popular plugins is also
pretty nice, if we decide to go that way.

foreman-announce

This list has historically been very low traffic. On Discourse, the
most useful feature for this purpose is the "global banner". This
allows a single post to be show at the top of every page, a global
pin if you like. Cleverly though, individual users can dismiss it once
they've seen it - so it's not that intrusive. This would be excellent
for new releases, but also CFPs etc, and would free up the announce
board for more general things like plugin releases etc.

General notes

Discourse has a lot of other things going for it. Here's a few I
found:

  • Great set of metrics and APIs which allow us to do all sorts of
    interesting things that I simply cannot do with Google Groups
  • Much better search support Private messages may be useful (although
    I can't really see a big use, but perhaps when people are offline on
    IRC?)
  • Groups support (think, writing "hey @packagingteam is this going to
    work?" in a post). People can self-select to join groups, or they
    can be invite-only.

There's almost certainly more nice things I havent found yet.

You said email would work?

For those who want to continue doing everything in their inbox, that's
fine. Discourse has a number of flags for how to email you with topic
updates (very similar to how Redmine and Github do), and it can be
told to only email you if you haven't been on the site recently (in
the last 10mins).

You can also enable "mailing list mode" which is the nuclear option
that mails you every update - this is global however, so unless
you're signed up to all 3 lists already you may get more mail that you
used to. Watching invidual boards whould probably be better in that
situation.

Discourse can also ingest email. I have a mailforward set up so that
you can email to Discourse (on the backend its a POP3 mailbox that
Discourse checks every 10 mins). Each board will get a dedicated email
address (eg community+dev@theforeman.org) that you can email new
topics and replies to.

That said, you won't get all the other shinyness, but the UI will be
there for you if you decide you want it :slight_smile:

What now?

The short version, then, is that I think moving from a closed,
limited, un-extendable mailing list to an open source, self-hosted
discussion platform gives us much greater flexibility in how to handle
things in the future.

To that end, I have set up community.theforeman.org[2] as a trial
server. I've imported all ~30,000 emails from our lists (I know,
right? It took 7 hours…) so you can see what it looks like. There's
probably a few quirks caused by the crawler, mostly in
foreman-announce, and some of the inline replies, so don't judge the
quality of Discourse by the quality of the importer (which is in turn
limited by the quality of Google Groups, so …). I have
been testing email replies, and things like in-line replies,
formatting etc. seem fine when processed natively. We can use the
"testing" category if others want to try this.

The site is currently private while we test, but if you've ever sent a
m
ail to the list, you have an account. For now I've "staged" all
accounts
so that we don't mass-spam people. I've unlocked the most
frequent
posters to dev-list. If that's you, just use your email
address that
you send to the list from as login, and select the Forgot
Password
option to get a reminder. If that's not you (i.e. you get no
email when
you click Reset Password) then contact me and I'll unstage
you.

This is a very unstyled out-of-the-box Discourse server - almost
everything is tweakable / themeable, but I didn't want to spend time on
it until I was sure it was worth it. Therefore, take visuals with some
salt, and focus on functionality.

Have a play and tell me what you think. If you want to see some other
Discourse setups try [3,4,5]. Then tell me if you'd be in favour of
moving to Discourse permanently. I have a follow-up email coming with
what I think will be common questions, and the answers to them.

[1] https://discourse.org/
[2] https://community.theforeman.org/
[3] https://meta.discourse.org/
[4] https://community.ubuntu.com/
[5] https://help.nextcloud.com/

Thanks, the-guy-who-wants-to-uproot-everything-just-now
Greg

2

OK, some questions I expect to come up:

  • Will the mailing list import be kept up to date?

Yes, I plan to update it every day or two. Happily it's incremental (no
7 hour import) but sadly it's not something that's easy to automate.

It's also why I've not renamed the categories yet, or fixed split-users
(where a person has used more than on email address) - since the import
recreates anything it can't find, we'd get duplicates.

The sync is one-way, nothing done on Discourse will go back to the
list, but I'd ask that you treat the list categories as read-only for
now, and play around in the Test category, in case it confuses the
importer.

  • Can I use email?

Yes, entirely if you wish. The catgories will have direct in-bound
email address (only the Test category has one right now), and all
outgoing emails have a reply-to set. We've tested it, and things like
in-line replies, URLs, and formatting seem OK.

  • Can I log in with GitHub (or other)?

Yes, but the catch is that while the accounts are locked, GitHub login
will still work (unlike using password reset) - so you may see
weirdness if your account is not unlocked yet. Try it if you like
though, it's enabled. If we migrate fully over, then all accounts will
get unlocked and this will work fully.

  • Are there spam controls like Groups?

Yes, and we'll actually have a lot more control over automating this. I
can go into details if people want more detail

  • Won't it be hard to get people to update addressbooks?

Yes. We can mititgate this. Firstly, we'll obviously give appropriate
notice to the community - I don't expect us to migrate next week.
Second, once the groups are "closed" we could consider redirecting
mails to the Google groups addresses to Discourse, or bounce them back
with an appropriate message to the user. The categories will have in-
bound addresses, so they just need to update 2 addresses in their
contacts.

Hit me with more!
Greg

3

One more point, we're currently on a free tier of our SMTP provider,
which is limited to 6k emails / month & 200 mails / day.

I'm seeing if I can negotiate a free higher tier for a FOSS project,
but for now, go easy on the mail testing :smiley:

Greg

4

I admit, I skimmed the prior emails (they were tl). I just wanted to ask if
discourse is searchable/is indexed from the wider internet. I've often
found relevant mailing list discussions by searching from Google, and I
really value that.

  • Andrew
··· On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Greg Sutcliffe wrote:

One more point, we’re currently on a free tier of our SMTP provider,
which is limited to 6k emails / month & 200 mails / day.

I’m seeing if I can negotiate a free higher tier for a FOSS project,
but for now, go easy on the mail testing :smiley:

Greg

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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–
Andrew Kofink
akofink@redhat.com
IRC: akofink
Software Engineer
Red Hat Satellite

5

The site will be made public if/when we go live with it. I assume Google will index it then, I don't think it does any robots.txt stuff - certainly I'm using google to look up configuration questions on meta.discourse.org :slight_smile:

··· -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
6

I skimmed the site over, played with configuration, clicked and tried to
play with various part of it. There are parts I'll have to get used to, and
there are parts I wish were done slightly different but overall I like the
advanced power behind it.

Thinking a loud, it seems like this might allow us to more easily expanded
topic areas in the future? For example, if we wanted to have infrastructure
focused/tagged emails, or plugins specific, or design discussions that are
marked as such?

··· On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Greg Sutcliffe wrote:

The site will be made public if/when we go live with it. I assume Google
will index it then, I don’t think it does any robots.txt stuff - certainly
I’m using google to look up configuration questions on meta.discourse.org
:slight_smile:

Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

–
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"foreman-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to foreman-dev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Eric D. Helms
Red Hat Engineering

7

That's indeed one of my aims. One common piece of Discourse wisdom is not to have too many categories, so I don't for see one per plugin - but the system also has tags which would work well in the Support category (I.e. foreman-users)

A category for Infra might well make sense separate from dev discussions. I could also see this being limited by trust level.

I can also see us making more use of Announcements, for events and plugin releases.

Greg

··· -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
8

I appreciate I tend to write a thousand words when pictures might do.
Here's one shot from the metrics (which may or may not be accurate as
it depends on the MBOX importer being correct, but you get the idea),
one from the foreman-users list index, and one from the markdown
version of this post (to which I added a poll… because I can).

Greg

9

I thought about this some more overnight - we're actually gaining here.
We often see users quoting old posts which are no longer accurate
because the code has moved on - with a list we can't do anything about
that. With Discourse we can update or flag those posts in some way and
redirect users to a better/newer one.

Greg

··· On Wed, 2017-11-01 at 14:15 -0400, Andrew Kofink wrote: > I admit, I skimmed the prior emails (they were tl). I just wanted to > ask if discourse is searchable/is indexed from the wider internet. > I've often found relevant mailing list discussions by searching from > Google, and I really value that.
10

Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:

We’re sorry, but your email message to
[“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8299@gmail.com”]
(titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
work.
Reason:
Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
If you can correct the problem, please try again.

I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
"yes" is still a valid one.

LZ

··· On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe wrote: > Hi all, > > As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's > the TL;DR: > > * What: move Google Groups -> Discourse > * Why: https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/ > * Can I try? - Scroll to the end for login details > > So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum > software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've > been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and > I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts. > > # What? > > Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to > migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups > from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions. > Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll > get to that. > > Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please > keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email. > Your workflow may not be broken :) > > # Why? > > Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better > than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great. > The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let > me break it down: > > ## foreman-users > > When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can > ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For > those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way > rewarded for the work they do. > > The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is > really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets > 2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user > levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the > other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the > Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars > are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler ...) so I can reach out to > them for help, questions etc. > > Discourse also searches for likely similar topics *while* you're > typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing > support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :) > > For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic "trust > levels" (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators). > These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate > in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on > the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It'll also help me know who > to speak to when there's some swag to send out ... > > To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the > users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events > & CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would > have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose. > Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!" > but the reality is that people just don't. Discourse gives us the > flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the > need to. > > Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at > things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has > bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not > investigated the bots too much yet). > > ## foreman-dev > > In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and > notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we'll see a > real benefit in a couple of areas. > > Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the > criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support > (markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of > that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope. > > Discourse also has "like" buttons which can be used in place of "+1" > emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the > community to click the like button, even when they might not have > emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I > *hope* this will help us to resolve discussions better than we have > historically. > > The ability to create dedicated boards for popular plugins is also > pretty nice, if we decide to go that way. > > ## foreman-announce > > This list has historically been very low traffic. On Discourse, the > most useful feature for this purpose is the "global banner". This > allows a single post to be show at the top of *every* page, a global > pin if you like. Cleverly though, individual users can dismiss it once > they've seen it - so it's not that intrusive. This would be excellent > for new releases, but also CFPs etc, and would free up the announce > board for more general things like plugin releases etc. > > ## General notes > > Discourse has a lot of other things going for it. Here's a few I > found: > > * Great set of metrics and APIs which allow us to do all sorts of > interesting things that I simply cannot do with Google Groups > * Much better search support Private messages may be useful (although > I can't really see a big use, but perhaps when people are offline on > IRC?) > * Groups support (think, writing "hey @packagingteam is this going to > work?" in a post). People can self-select to join groups, or they > can be invite-only. > > There's almost certainly more nice things I havent found yet. > > # You said email would work? > > For those who want to continue doing everything in their inbox, that's > fine. Discourse has a number of flags for how to email you with topic > updates (very similar to how Redmine and Github do), and it can be > told to only email you if you haven't been on the site recently (in > the last 10mins). > > You can also enable "mailing list mode" which is the nuclear option > that mails you *every* update - this is global however, so unless > you're signed up to all 3 lists already you may get more mail that you > used to. Watching invidual boards whould probably be better in that > situation. > > Discourse can also ingest email. I have a mailforward set up so that > you can email to Discourse (on the backend its a POP3 mailbox that > Discourse checks every 10 mins). Each board will get a dedicated email > address (eg community+dev@theforeman.org) that you can email new > topics and replies to. > > That said, you won't get all the other shinyness, but the UI will be > there for you if you decide you want it :) > > # What now? > > The short version, then, is that I think moving from a closed, > limited, un-extendable mailing list to an open source, self-hosted > discussion platform gives us much greater flexibility in how to handle > things in the future. > > To that end, I have set up community.theforeman.org[2] as a trial > server. I've imported all ~30,000 emails from our lists (I know, > right? It took 7 hours...) so you can see what it looks like. There's > probably a few quirks caused by the crawler, mostly in > foreman-announce, and some of the inline replies, so don't judge the > quality of Discourse by the quality of the importer (which is in turn > limited by the quality of Google Groups, so ...). I have > been testing email replies, and things like in-line replies, > formatting etc. seem fine when processed natively. We can use the > "testing" category if others want to try this. > > The site is currently private while we test, but if you've ever sent a > m > ail to the list, you have an account. For now I've "staged" all > accounts > so that we don't mass-spam people. I've unlocked the most > frequent > posters to dev-list. If that's you, just use your email > address that > you send to the list from as login, and select the Forgot > Password > option to get a reminder. If that's not you (i.e. you get no > email when > you click Reset Password) then contact me and I'll unstage > you. > > This is a very unstyled out-of-the-box Discourse server - almost > everything is tweakable / themeable, but I didn't want to spend time on > it until I was sure it was worth it. Therefore, take visuals with some > salt, and focus on functionality. > > Have a play and tell me what you think. If you want to see some other > Discourse setups try [3,4,5]. Then tell me if you'd be in favour of > moving to Discourse permanently. I have a follow-up email coming with > what I think will be common questions, and the answers to them. > > [1] https://discourse.org/ > [2] https://community.theforeman.org/ > [3] https://meta.discourse.org/ > [4] https://community.ubuntu.com/ > [5] https://help.nextcloud.com/ > > Thanks, the-guy-who-wants-to-uproot-everything-just-now > Greg > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "foreman-dev" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foreman-dev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Later,
Lukas @lzap Zapletal

11

A quick update on some testing John Mitsch & I did today. It seems
@groups support is pretty nice.

We created a Katello group with John in it, and then I created a post
and mentioned @katello in the text. This correct notified John by both
UI and email (as per his preferences, thats confiurable ofc).

In short, creating groups for plugins, packaging, UI, etc is very much
possible and should work well.

Greg

12

> Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:
>
> We’re sorry, but your email message to
> [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8299@gmail.com”]
> (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
> work.
> Reason:
> Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
> If you can correct the problem, please try again.
>
> I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
> "yes" is still a valid one.

Hope so :slight_smile:

··· On Thu, 2 Nov 2017 at 19:35, Lukas Zapletal wrote:

LZ

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe greg@emeraldreverie.org > wrote:

Hi all,

As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it’s a habit. Here’s
the TL;DR:

So, as some of you know, I’m a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum
software - I use it for another community, and it’s just lovely. I’ve
been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and
I think it’s time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts.

What?

Firstly, the “what” - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to
migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups
from further emails and using Discourse for our “written” discussions.
Obviosuly there’s data migration that needs to happen there, but we’ll
get to that.

Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please
keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email.
Your workflow may not be broken :slight_smile:

Why?

Why do I want this? The short version is “because anything is better
than Google Groups”, but more seriously, I think Discourse is great.
The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let
me break it down:

foreman-users

When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can
ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For
those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way
rewarded for the work they do.

The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is
really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets
2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user
levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the
other new user’s reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the
Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars
are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler …) so I can reach out to
them for help, questions etc.

Discourse also searches for likely similar topics while you’re
typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing
support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :slight_smile:

For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic “trust
levels” (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators).
These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate
in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on
the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It’ll also help me know who
to speak to when there’s some swag to send out …

To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the
users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events
& CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would
have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose.
Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!"
but the reality is that people just don’t. Discourse gives us the
flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the
need to.

Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at
things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has
bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not
investigated the bots too much yet).

foreman-dev

In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and
notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we’ll see a
real benefit in a couple of areas.

Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the
criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support
(markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of
that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope.

Discourse also has “like” buttons which can be used in place of "+1"
emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the
community to click the like button, even when they might not have
emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I
hope this will help us to resolve discussions better than we have
historically.

The ability to create dedicated boards for popular plugins is also
pretty nice, if we decide to go that way.

foreman-announce

This list has historically been very low traffic. On Discourse, the
most useful feature for this purpose is the “global banner”. This
allows a single post to be show at the top of every page, a global
pin if you like. Cleverly though, individual users can dismiss it once
they’ve seen it - so it’s not that intrusive. This would be excellent
for new releases, but also CFPs etc, and would free up the announce
board for more general things like plugin releases etc.

General notes

Discourse has a lot of other things going for it. Here’s a few I
found:

  • Great set of metrics and APIs which allow us to do all sorts of
    interesting things that I simply cannot do with Google Groups
  • Much better search support Private messages may be useful (although
    I can’t really see a big use, but perhaps when people are offline on
    IRC?)
  • Groups support (think, writing “hey @packagingteam is this going to
    work?” in a post). People can self-select to join groups, or they
    can be invite-only.

There’s almost certainly more nice things I havent found yet.

You said email would work?

For those who want to continue doing everything in their inbox, that’s
fine. Discourse has a number of flags for how to email you with topic
updates (very similar to how Redmine and Github do), and it can be
told to only email you if you haven’t been on the site recently (in
the last 10mins).

You can also enable “mailing list mode” which is the nuclear option
that mails you every update - this is global however, so unless
you’re signed up to all 3 lists already you may get more mail that you
used to. Watching invidual boards whould probably be better in that
situation.

Discourse can also ingest email. I have a mailforward set up so that
you can email to Discourse (on the backend its a POP3 mailbox that
Discourse checks every 10 mins). Each board will get a dedicated email
address (eg community+dev@theforeman.org) that you can email new
topics and replies to.

That said, you won’t get all the other shinyness, but the UI will be
there for you if you decide you want it :slight_smile:

What now?

The short version, then, is that I think moving from a closed,
limited, un-extendable mailing list to an open source, self-hosted
discussion platform gives us much greater flexibility in how to handle
things in the future.

To that end, I have set up community.theforeman.org[2] as a trial
server. I’ve imported all ~30,000 emails from our lists (I know,
right? It took 7 hours…) so you can see what it looks like. There’s
probably a few quirks caused by the crawler, mostly in
foreman-announce, and some of the inline replies, so don’t judge the
quality of Discourse by the quality of the importer (which is in turn
limited by the quality of Google Groups, so …). I have
been testing email replies, and things like in-line replies,
formatting etc. seem fine when processed natively. We can use the
"testing" category if others want to try this.

The site is currently private while we test, but if you’ve ever sent a
m
ail to the list, you have an account. For now I’ve “staged” all
accounts
so that we don’t mass-spam people. I’ve unlocked the most
frequent
posters to dev-list. If that’s you, just use your email
address that
you send to the list from as login, and select the Forgot
Password
option to get a reminder. If that’s not you (i.e. you get no
email when
you click Reset Password) then contact me and I’ll unstage
you.

This is a very unstyled out-of-the-box Discourse server - almost
everything is tweakable / themeable, but I didn’t want to spend time on
it until I was sure it was worth it. Therefore, take visuals with some
salt, and focus on functionality.

Have a play and tell me what you think. If you want to see some other
Discourse setups try [3,4,5]. Then tell me if you’d be in favour of
moving to Discourse permanently. I have a follow-up email coming with
what I think will be common questions, and the answers to them.

[1] https://discourse.org/
[2] https://community.theforeman.org/
[3] https://meta.discourse.org/
[4] https://community.ubuntu.com/
[5] https://help.nextcloud.com/

Thanks, the-guy-who-wants-to-uproot-everything-just-now
Greg

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Lukas @lzap Zapletal

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13

True enough. Of course, that can be altered (seriously, there's a
setting for everything) but I'll give you the Discourse reason for
that being 20 by default:

Since Discourse is intended as web-first, the idea is that instead of
"me too", "I like this", "+1" style replies, you should be encouraged to
click the "Like" button instead. From a discussion viewpoint, a simple
"yes", while valid, doesn't add to the debate, only to the weight of a
previous opinion, and instead of the topic author having to manually
count up the '+1' posts, (s)he can just look at what got the most likes.

Of course, it's tricky to click a Like by email, so I've reduced it 1
character minimum for now. Please do test it again.

Longer term, I hope we do move to using the UI features such as likes,
polls, etc, but I accept that isn't going to happen overnight :smiley:

Greg

··· On 02/11/17 18:35, Lukas Zapletal wrote: > Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting: > > We’re sorry, but your email message to > [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8299@gmail.com”] > (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t > work. > Reason: > Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters) > If you can correct the problem, please try again. > > I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of > "yes" is still a valid one.
14

Greg, I have not interest in moving to any kind of web UI. I want to
send another millions of emails, including those "+1". I think we all
agree that any kind of migration must not disrupt way we work today -
a plain mailing-list we all know and use for decades.

Thanks for decreasing it. I still have concerns about the non-standard
special per-thread address way of replies which I get.

How do I start a new thread via email? Can I do that, can't I?

LZ

··· On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Greg Sutcliffe wrote: > On 02/11/17 18:35, Lukas Zapletal wrote: >> Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting: >> >> We’re sorry, but your email message to >> [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8299@gmail.com”] >> (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t >> work. >> Reason: >> Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters) >> If you can correct the problem, please try again. >> >> I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of >> "yes" is still a valid one. > > True enough. Of course, that can be altered (seriously, there's a > setting for *everything*) but I'll give you the Discourse reason for > that being 20 by default: > > Since Discourse is intended as web-first, the idea is that instead of > "me too", "I like this", "+1" style replies, you should be encouraged to > click the "Like" button instead. From a discussion viewpoint, a simple > "yes", while valid, doesn't add to the *debate*, only to the weight of a > previous opinion, and instead of the topic author having to *manually* > count up the '+1' posts, (s)he can just look at what got the most likes. > > Of course, it's tricky to click a Like by email, so I've reduced it 1 > character minimum for now. Please do test it again. > > Longer term, I hope we do move to using the UI features such as likes, > polls, etc, but I accept that isn't going to happen overnight :D > > Greg > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "foreman-dev" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foreman-dev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Later,
Lukas @lzap Zapletal

15

> Greg, I have not interest in moving to any kind of web UI. I want to
> send another millions of emails, including those "+1". I think we all
> agree that any kind of migration must not disrupt way we work today -
> a plain mailing-list we all know and use for decades.

And I have absoluetly no interest in breaking your workflow. We're on
the same side here, mostly :wink:

> Thanks for decreasing it. I still have concerns about the non-standard
> special per-thread address way of replies which I get.

Embedding a token in the reply-to is pretty standard, I've seen other
projects doing it. The alternative is a token in the body which I
think is worse. I'm hoping to get a proper wildcard mailforward in place
so the reply-to is community+<token>@theforeman.org instead of the
underlying Gmail account at some point.

What concerns do you have with this approach?

> How do I start a new thread via email? Can I do that, can't I?

Of course. Email community+test@theforeman.org for the Testing category.
If/when we go live, there will also be community+dev and community+users
set up to email to - for now these are disabled so that we don't get
duplicates from the list imports.

Greg

··· On 03/11/17 10:32, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
16

Quick update…

A few people have been posting to the users/dev categories on Discourse,
so let me quickly clarify - there is no sync Discourse -> List. Anything
you post there will not make back to the lists.

To help prevent that, for now I've locked those 3 categories. Admins can
still post, but everyone else just has See permissions. Obviously we'll
unlock that if/when we move over.

Greg

17

I was planning not to reply, but I can't sorry.

>>> I don't like Discourse at all. <<<

I was hoping to get rid of Google Groups in favour of - wait for it -
GNU Mailman! Yeah, you might think this would be step backwards, but
let me explain.

GNU Mailman is the core of open source. It's the heart, really.
Similarly as git or other things. It helps to communicate millions of
people for decades and it is nothing wrong with it. What is
problematic and old is the entry barrier (it's a list) and the default
mailman archival tool you may have already seen. This is how it looks
like:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/weechat-dev/

Yeah, old, clunky interface and there is a need for new users to
register into the list to be able to post. But hey, this has been
already solved! It's called HyperKitty and Fedora already migrated to
a year ago! Look, nice and clean interface with ability to send
message right away from your browser:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/

When you click on Sign In, there are about a dozen of account
integrations including Google Plus, OpenID, GitLab, GitHub, Twitter,
Facebook or StackExchange. That's plenty, way enough for our users to
get started.

Then click on an archive (not list) and click on Start New Thread.
Yes, as easy as that. You can test on this testing mailing list:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-mailman3%40lists.fedoraproject.org/

I sometimes use this for lists I don't want to get into my inbox on a
daily basis and it works just fine. To start a thread, it's just a
simple link and HyperKitty will just ask you to Sign-In with one of
your existing accounts. Super fast:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-mailman3@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/new

Benefits? Mailman works great over email, it's not just some hack, it
its main purpose. You also have a lot of options when you are
receiving mail (daily, weekly, no copies etc), data is yours and not
somewhere in cloud if you want to, archives are very fast and
searchable via Google or anything pretty much. And your whole history
is just bunch of emails, data liberation in practice. When I compare
this to Google Groups or Discourse it also loads faster as there is
less JavaScript I think.

>>> My proposal is: Let's move to Fedora mailing lists with HyperKitty, it's a reliable infrastructure. Problem solved. <<<

I am sorry Greg, I know you invested a lot in this and you have some
positive experience in the past. Well my experience with Discourse is
rather bad, mostly from https://forum.turris.cz/ but if there is some
chance to fix our terrible Google Groups, let's do it the "right way".
I also understand you might not be fully available for couple of next
months and it's just you if I understand correctly with experience
maintaining Discourse. I would rather preferred hosted solution on a
free as in freedom service (Fedora lists).

··· On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe wrote: > Hi all, > > As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's > the TL;DR: > > * What: move Google Groups -> Discourse > * Why: https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/ > * Can I try? - Scroll to the end for login details > > So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum > software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've > been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and > I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts. > > # What? > > Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to > migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups > from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions. > Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll > get to that. > > Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please > keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email. > Your workflow may not be broken :) > > # Why? > > Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better > than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great. > The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let > me break it down: > > ## foreman-users > > When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can > ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For > those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way > rewarded for the work they do. > > The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is > really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets > 2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user > levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the > other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the > Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars > are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler ...) so I can reach out to > them for help, questions etc. > > Discourse also searches for likely similar topics *while* you're > typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing > support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :) > > For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic "trust > levels" (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators). > These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate > in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on > the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It'll also help me know who > to speak to when there's some swag to send out ... > > To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the > users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events > & CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would > have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose. > Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!" > but the reality is that people just don't. Discourse gives us the > flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the > need to. > > Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at > things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has > bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not > investigated the bots too much yet). > > ## foreman-dev > > In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and > notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we'll see a > real benefit in a couple of areas. > > Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the > criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support > (markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of > that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope. > > Discourse also has "like" buttons which can be used in place of "+1" > emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the > community to click the like button, even when they might not have > emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I > *hope* this will help us to resolve discussions better than we have > historically. > > The ability to create dedicated boards for popular plugins is also > pretty nice, if we decide to go that way. > > ## foreman-announce > > This list has historically been very low traffic. On Discourse, the > most useful feature for this purpose is the "global banner". This > allows a single post to be show at the top of *every* page, a global > pin if you like. Cleverly though, individual users can dismiss it once > they've seen it - so it's not that intrusive. This would be excellent > for new releases, but also CFPs etc, and would free up the announce > board for more general things like plugin releases etc. > > ## General notes > > Discourse has a lot of other things going for it. Here's a few I > found: > > * Great set of metrics and APIs which allow us to do all sorts of > interesting things that I simply cannot do with Google Groups > * Much better search support Private messages may be useful (although > I can't really see a big use, but perhaps when people are offline on > IRC?) > * Groups support (think, writing "hey @packagingteam is this going to > work?" in a post). People can self-select to join groups, or they > can be invite-only. > > There's almost certainly more nice things I havent found yet. > > # You said email would work? > > For those who want to continue doing everything in their inbox, that's > fine. Discourse has a number of flags for how to email you with topic > updates (very similar to how Redmine and Github do), and it can be > told to only email you if you haven't been on the site recently (in > the last 10mins). > > You can also enable "mailing list mode" which is the nuclear option > that mails you *every* update - this is global however, so unless > you're signed up to all 3 lists already you may get more mail that you > used to. Watching invidual boards whould probably be better in that > situation. > > Discourse can also ingest email. I have a mailforward set up so that > you can email to Discourse (on the backend its a POP3 mailbox that > Discourse checks every 10 mins). Each board will get a dedicated email > address (eg community+dev@theforeman.org) that you can email new > topics and replies to. > > That said, you won't get all the other shinyness, but the UI will be > there for you if you decide you want it :) > > # What now? > > The short version, then, is that I think moving from a closed, > limited, un-extendable mailing list to an open source, self-hosted > discussion platform gives us much greater flexibility in how to handle > things in the future. > > To that end, I have set up community.theforeman.org[2] as a trial > server. I've imported all ~30,000 emails from our lists (I know, > right? It took 7 hours...) so you can see what it looks like. There's > probably a few quirks caused by the crawler, mostly in > foreman-announce, and some of the inline replies, so don't judge the > quality of Discourse by the quality of the importer (which is in turn > limited by the quality of Google Groups, so ...). I have > been testing email replies, and things like in-line replies, > formatting etc. seem fine when processed natively. We can use the > "testing" category if others want to try this. > > The site is currently private while we test, but if you've ever sent a > m > ail to the list, you have an account. For now I've "staged" all > accounts > so that we don't mass-spam people. I've unlocked the most > frequent > posters to dev-list. If that's you, just use your email > address that > you send to the list from as login, and select the Forgot > Password > option to get a reminder. If that's not you (i.e. you get no > email when > you click Reset Password) then contact me and I'll unstage > you. > > This is a very unstyled out-of-the-box Discourse server - almost > everything is tweakable / themeable, but I didn't want to spend time on > it until I was sure it was worth it. Therefore, take visuals with some > salt, and focus on functionality. > > Have a play and tell me what you think. If you want to see some other > Discourse setups try [3,4,5]. Then tell me if you'd be in favour of > moving to Discourse permanently. I have a follow-up email coming with > what I think will be common questions, and the answers to them. > > [1] https://discourse.org/ > [2] https://community.theforeman.org/ > [3] https://meta.discourse.org/ > [4] https://community.ubuntu.com/ > [5] https://help.nextcloud.com/ > > Thanks, the-guy-who-wants-to-uproot-everything-just-now > Greg > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "foreman-dev" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to foreman-dev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

–
Later,
Lukas @lzap Zapletal

18

Some updates from the weekend testing:

  • Inbound email should work properly now (community-test@theforeman.org
    to start a topic)

  • A few people have brought up threading - I'll take this upstream once
    we've isolated the issue (see reply to Martin). It's actually using a
    fork of the GitHub email parser, hence why it looks very similar to
    those threads.

  • I've enabled tags and (for now) everyone can create tags for posts.
    I'm not sure we'll use these long term, but lets try it out. Tags can be
    made into something you're notified on in your personal settings.

  • I've added a bunch of groups:

    • katello
    • core
    • ui
    • packaging
    • infra

These are self-select (you can join them from the Groups link in the
hamburger menu) with the exception of infra (which is request-to-join,
just for testing that function) and notify them with @group in posts.
Feel fee to try it out.

Neil, Eric, thanks for the positive vibes. There are indeed costs to
this transition but I hope we can conclude that it's worth it. In case
anyone is interested, I found some notes from another group who did
exactly this, and were pleased with the result:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/opendatakit/gG6D4Gfwh44/discussion

Several people have now said we need more traffic. I'd like to ask if
there's a subgroup that would be prepared to use Discourse as a primary
communication method for a while in order to generate this? My
suggestion would be the infra team - which is mainly myself, Ewoud, Eric
and Michael. It won't be the largest amount of traffic, but at least it
would be some. Thoughts?

Greg

19

Thanks Lukas - I wanted a healthy debate, and now I've got one :slight_smile:

This is indeed constructive - you've forced me to go back and examine my
starting post more than a few times while writing this. That's a very
good thing - we need to be sure of our goal here.

There's a lot of good points here, and some not so good, so let me try
to return the favour of some constructive criticism. I'll start with the
points addressed to me, and then move on to comparing Hyperkitty with
Discourse.

> I was planning not to reply, but I can't sorry.
> I am sorry Greg, I know you invested a lot in this and you have some
> positive experience in the past.

Don't be sorry. This is a big change thats proposed, and we're not going
to make everyone 100% happy. It well may be that I'm one of the people
that's not happy with what we come to agree on :slight_smile:

Protyping things and working to improve the community is my job. It's
not time wasted if the community decides to go another way. Again, no
need to be sorry. We all want a good outcome.

>>>> I don't like Discourse at all. <<<
> Well my experience with Discourse is
> rather bad, mostly from https://forum.turris.cz/

So I'll go into your arguments for Mailman / Hyperkitty further down,
but you don't really say why you dislike Discourse - is it solely that
it's not a mailing list, or is there more to it?

> I also understand you might not be fully available for couple of next
> months and it's just you if I understand correctly with experience
> maintaining Discourse. I would rather preferred hosted solution on a
> free as in freedom service (Fedora lists).

You comment makes it sound like you're not aware of this (apologies if
you are), but Discourse is also open source, and the hosting is on our
own infra.

As for myself, I will not be entirely gone, I'm just going to be a
normal community member with a dayjob for a bit. I would expect to reply
to urgent things within a few hours at most, there will be a decent
selection of admins & moderators, and other people will have root access
as per our base Puppet users module that goes on all our servers - I
wouldn't be that irresponsible with something so critical to our
operation. It's also true that we'd want to migrate in the early hours
of the morning when all is quiet, and I'd be available for that for sure.

OK, lets talk about software :slight_smile:

Rather that reply to each point individually, I want to try and gather
your points and then compare them, so please do correct me if I miss
anything.

So I think you're saying:

  • Mailing lists are fine
    • email-centric
    • Open / data liberation etc
    • indexed by Google
  • Hyperkitty has
    • Social logins
    • Web-based message sending

In addition, playing with the Fedora instance (admittedly briefly) I
also see:

  • Some thread metrics (days inactive / old, tags, etc)
  • Participants in thread
  • some list metrics (active posters, list activity

I can't see the list from a manager's point of view, so I'm not sure
what level of metrics it can provide, but in general I'm sure that its
better than Google Groups. Did I get everything? I hope so, I don't want
to misrepresent you.

Lets start by removing the things that Discourse also does. It's open
source (https://github.com/discourse/), self-hosted on our own infra,
and will be indexed by Google once I make it public. It also supports
all the same social logins - I just kept it to GitHub to match Redmine.
So that leaves us with:

  • Mailing lists are fine
    • email-centric
  • Hyperkitty has
    • Web-based message sending
    • Some post & thread metrics
    • Tag support (presumably UI only)

There is, however, an interesting conflict in your mail - you say you're
happy to start threads and manage a conversation entirely in the
Hyperkity UI:

> I sometimes use this for lists I don't want to get into my inbox on a
> daily basis and it works just fine. To start a thread, it's just a
> simple link and HyperKitty will just ask you to Sign-In with one of
> your existing accounts. Super fast

So if I understand, you're OK with a web interface for creating /
managing a conversation that you don't want in your inbox in Hyperkitty,
but not happy with exactly the same workflow in Discourse? I find that
hard to resolve, can you clarify?

> Benefits? Mailman works great over email, it's not just some hack

I disagree with the word "hack" here, I think Discourse also works fine
over email. In all the testing I've done, the only thing I'm seeing is a
minor issue with format=flowed URLs (and tbh not all mail clients
support that either). You can set the mailing-list mode flag and it will
email you everything, you need never log into the UI again. I've had
that flag set for the last week, and can confirm that I was recieving
everything and could reply/start threads just fine. How is this
different to a mailing list?

It has to be said, I do like Hyperkitty, and I agree it would be an
improvement over Google Groups. However, it doesn't address many of the
use cases in my original post (and followups):

  • user identification (i.e this person is, say, a discovery dev)
  • powers for dedicated community members, ideally automated
  • Help in finding existing similiar topics
    • note - its not the quality of search separate search options, its
      the suggestions while creating a new post that helps users
  • subgroup support for notifying people of a thread they maybe missed
  • flexibility in creating new categories as needed (eg events)
    without creating a new list
  • (hopefully) improvements in holding and closing discussions
    • This is me being hopeful, but we do suck at closing discussions
  • extra ways to announce important things to users (pins & banners)
  • ability to update outdated information in old posts
    • how often do we see people quoting very old irrelevant posts…

I've probably missed a few… if Hyperkitty can handle any of those, let
me know (and sorry for missing it in the docs).

I don't think I've been very clear in my original post (and for that I
apologise), but what I've been trying to say is this: Google groups may
be awful, but it's actually the core feature set of a mailing list
that I find lacking. My usecases above cannot (I think) be solved by a
plain mailing list, it's not designed for it (except maybe the search
one, Hyperkitty could probably do that - it just doesn't at the moment).

The summary seems to be that Discourse can do everything Hyperkitty
can, and from my testing, even the email support is first class. Both
are open, both can be hacked on if needed, both can be hosted or
self-hosted. But only Discourse brings more power and flexibility to the
table, both immediatiely, and for anything other needs we may have in
the future.

You've presented a valid option, and thanks for that. I think we have a
choice - to change a little and fix a little, or to change a lot and fix
all the usecases. I've put this discussion off for years because of
the cost to users - it's a big ask, and on that basis I think the
benefits of Mailman / Hyperkitty will be too small to be worth the cost.
If we're going to do it, lets go the whole way.

I'm very interested to hear others views though!

Cheers,
Greg

··· On 03/11/17 10:52, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
20

> So if I understand, you're OK with a web interface for creating /
> managing a conversation that you don't want in your inbox in Hyperkitty,
> but not happy with exactly the same workflow in Discourse? I find that
> hard to resolve, can you clarify?

All I want is standard mailman-like list experience. This is a
regression in behavior, a change from a list to forum. Let me explain
down below.

> I disagree with the word "hack" here, I think Discourse also works fine
> over email. In all the testing I've done, the only thing I'm seeing is a
> minor issue with format=flowed URLs (and tbh not all mail clients
> support that either). You can set the mailing-list mode flag and it will
> email you everything, you need never log into the UI again. I've had
> that flag set for the last week, and can confirm that I was recieving
> everything and could reply/start threads just fine. How is this
> different to a mailing list?

I understand how this is supposed to work technically, but will my
gmail.com handle this correctly? This is not how e-mail lists are
supposed to work. Will my MUA work correctly? Won't I see broken
threads because folks will introduce new shiny feature into Discourse
that does not play with plain emails anymore? I can't tell. Yeah you
set up a testing instance, but there is almost no real traffic and I
really don't know how it will look like with thousands of emails. My
MUA handles millions of them just fine.

Mailman will be here for another 20 years and more. It will work as
long as e-mails are alive. And I do believe it's not going anywhere.

> It has to be said, I do like Hyperkitty, and I agree it would be an
> improvement over Google Groups. However, it doesn't address many of the
> use cases in my original post (and followups):

All of these are nice things, Greg. But these are irrelevant.

What we are running is a mailing list here. It's a mailing list, we
are open source developers and this is our way of communication.

People do not need "powers". Powers to do what with? Lock topics?
Create complicated sub-groups structures? Mute people or delete posts?
This is what I hate about forums. Pins and banners? Totally hate
these. Ever been to XdaDevelopers searching for Android ROM? God
that's awful, this is how it all ends - complicated pinned neverending
threads with things like "This post is reserved". And dozen of
"recommended topics" which are always totally irrelevant.

Let's just run a mailing list please. If you want to do your
statistics or gamify this, take this offline. There are tools
generating mail statistics. Fedora have concept of badges, it is all
doable.

> The summary seems to be that Discourse can do everything Hyperkitty
> can, and from my testing, even the email support is first class. Both
> are open, both can be hacked on if needed, both can be hosted or
> self-hosted. But only Discourse brings more power and flexibility to the
> table, both immediately, and for anything other needs we may have in
> the future.

You are comparing apple and orange here. A forum with a mailing list.
I say let's stick with an orange, a mailing list.

My response is not about "look here is an alternative HyperKitty". I'd
be fine with any other mailing list (*) with nice user archive with
easy entry for newcomers. It's about keeping our discussion where it
belongs.

(*) mailing list - a software that keeps emails in plain form not in
some kind of a database

> I'm very interested to hear others views though!

Yeah, feels like I am the only one. Not a good feeling, really.

··· -- Later, Lukas @lzap Zapletal