At FOSDEM, a few of discussed how to proceed with this service. In order to improve the “user experience” on this Discourse instance, there are a few things we would like to tackle first before announcing it widely within our community (list below will be kept up-to-date):
To push Discourse, we want to “mirror” fsfe.org news items to Discourse and add a “comment” link below the article on fsfe.org. So if people want to discuss the article, they can use Discourse and get used to it.
Before a larger announcement, we want to add a FAQ about Discourse: Why is Discourse great? How to make it usable via email? Is there a small intro video perhaps?
Change of categories: “Uncategorized” and “Playground” out, instead something like “Meta”
Jan makes a few design improvements (see Discourse thread , he already applied some magic)
Open question: Connect with out LDAP server? Max investigates the pros and cons, but we said that we can also live without it
Max checks whether the mailing list mode works also only for selected categories
Deadline for a large announcement, e.g. via news item, newsletter and news comments etc shall be end of March.
We have also aggreed that it’s unrealistic/unwanted to turn large mailing lists like translators, discussion and team to Discourse forums, and we don’t want to introduce a duplicated structure. For event planning, new activities or smaller teams, Discourse might be a good option however.
Do you have other ideas how we could improve this service? Please add them in this thread and let’s discuss!
The conclusion at the end, how I understand it: They are not against mailing list mode per categories but nothing is implemented yet. The current solution they suggest:
Either keep disable mailing list mode and set catgeories you like to follow to “watch” to get notifications for everything in this category. Not 100% like mailing list but maybe close enough…
Or enable mailing list mode and mute the categories where you don’t want to get mails. Drawback: you also wont get notifications if someone mentions you in this categories because you muted it.
So more or less the same situation I remembered from a few years ago.
Regarding LDAP, one argument for LDAP might be that we might be able to also import the group membership (needs to be checked). This way we don’t need to manage group memberships like “stuff”, “ga”, “core-team”,… manually, give that such groups already exists in the LDAP. This is not a big issue for now, but if we want to use Discourse more over time we might have Categories with different privacy levels which will make it necessary to map users to their correct groups.
did we had any progress on this issue? Originally we set a deadline for end or March and we now reached end of April.
I’m especially interested in this point:
I think this could be done independent from the general questions like LDAP integration, mailing list mode, etc. Using Discourse for more interactive news items and newsletters is not really related to the question to what extend Discourse can replace other communication tools (where LDAP integration, mailing list mode, etc might be more crucial).
I would like to avoid that we wait until everything is perfect and therefore never move forward.
Is there anything missing to give it a try and let people discuss our news items here at community.fsfe.org? Anything I could help with?
Thanks for the reminder! The specific point you asked for is basically done already in the form of a pull request, and I have a procedure in mind how to prepare the Discourse thread beforehand.
However, a blocker is the FAQ. I think this is a necessary precondition so we can handle a lot of questions before they pop up (and also discussions about “Why do we need that, do you want to replace mailing lists?”). We thought about creating a section in our Wiki, and perhaps also link a video explaining Discourse in 1-3 minutes.
Erik wanted to propose a few questions which we could answer together. But of course, if you would like to help, feel free to start with collection and answering the most common questions you would imagine, e.g. on https://wiki.fsfe.org/TechDocs/Discourse
Great to see that there is already a pull request for it!
Is this really a blocker here? I see the point of a FAQ if we would like to migrate mailing lists over to discourse. But if we start a completely independent thing, a “commenting feature” for our news I don’t see a missing FAQ as a blocker. Why not start it, see if we get questions and then use them for the FAQ, then we are answering real “frequently asked questions” and don’t have to think about what people might ask?
~ Björn Schießle via FSFE Community [2019-04-25 18:03 +0200]:
Is this really a blocker here? I see the point of a FAQ if we would like to migrate mailing lists over to discourse. But if we start a completely independent thing, a “commenting feature” for our news I don’t see a missing FAQ as a blocker. Why not start it, see if we get questions and then use them for the FAQ, then we are answering real “frequently asked questions” and don’t have to think about what people might ask?
Perhaps I am a bit pessimistic or cautious here, but I think that this
feature will attract quite many people to Discourse. It will be, at
least mid-term, the biggest push we can create since a replacement of
large existing mailing lists will probably a longer way to go.
That’s why I think making the first impression excellent and giving as
much help as possible, and reducing friction by directly providing the
most important information critical minds want to have, is important.
To make a start, I especially think of:
What is Discourse?
Why is the FSFE using it?
Is Discourse Free Software?
Can I use it with a mail client?
Does the FSFE plan to replace all mailing lists with Discourse?
Who can register? Is it connected with my FSFE account?
Fell free to adjust it, add additional question, etc… But I would still vote for moving forward as fast as possible and don’t wait until everything is perfect, this will never be the case.
Great, thanks a lot! Indeed, this was the last real blocker in my opinion.
I added the FAQ as a global banner now. For the next news item, I think we are ready to start with a discussion link at the bottom. This just needs a small edit of PR #801 which I cannot do right now but be ready as soon as we need it.
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