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List:       kde-community
Subject:    Re: Discourse
From:       Andrew Crouthamel <andrew () crouthamel ! us>
Date:       2018-10-30 3:50:24
Message-ID: _pStm2P43KYVk9bphyFeExS69sI3HVQZxE4SUjUtv-Odmwhm0fmFdMbuwU8ySRnAwwzpW16DopBBtoyezX4lpOfTUJNCh9P-dKdCahiIJEU= () crouthamel ! us
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Thank you for that link, that was an interesting read.

I am heartily in favor of migrating discussion to Discourse. The features page has a \
good breakdown of why one would use it over phpBB, so there is no need to reiterate \
that here. But I would like to offer my observations as a relatively new contributor.

As much as it pains me to say so, IRC is dying. Even Freenode, which used to buck \
that trend. New, younger contributors don't want to load IRC clients (or go through \
the hassle of installing Telegram and trolling our wiki to find an invite link). They \
want to use discussion sites like reddit, and stackoverflow, where they can make a \
post, maybe with Markdown formatting, and get notifications when someone responds. \
Not monitor a real-time chat, waiting for the discussion to proceed. Even with \
clients that offer username notification, you then have to be connected to the IRC \
server constantly. Even using Riot, with a-sync connections and chat history, is a \
slow, nuisance to use. You also can't easily have separate discussions at one time, \
and end up with a big list of @user: in your message to keep notifying people you are \
responding to them. It's messy. Great for real-time issues (help, I'm in a boot \
loop!), but I don't think it fits well in modern communication needs for other \
purposes.

As for mailing lists, I'm not a fan. It also appears from the statistics out there, \
not many others are fans either. Personally, I use email like sending a letter. I \
only write one when it is important, as I know that my email will appear directly in \
your inbox, without consenting to it. Even though I know this is a purpose-built \
mailing list, for discussion. There's something more invasive to it in my opinion. I \
might have ideas and smaller thoughts that might be worth discussing in a forum, \
where people can go look and discuss if they deem it worthy, but not necessary to \
blast to hundreds of people on a mailing list. Just look at reddit's /r/kde. It \
receives lots of discussion on all sorts of small topics, yet this mailing list, \
which is supposed to be the entire KDE community, is very quiet. I certainly believe \
the data from Foreman regarding an increase in discussion threads. I know I would.

Additionally, lots of emails are annoying. As a new contributor, I dreaded having to \
subscribe to mailing lists to be involved. I might only want to be involved in \
certain topics. Ones I could set up a filter and notification for. Not everything. \
Using a mailing list forces me to receive lots of discussions that are of no interest \
to me. Rather than skipping over a topic name in a forum, I now have to receive every \
post in that thread, whether I want to or not. Switching to a forum system puts the \
power in the users hands, to decide what to receive.

This would be a good opportunity to update our infrastructure we use for community \
discussion, and standardize on a smaller, more modern set of systems.

Andrew Crouthamel

------- Original Message -------
On Monday, October 29, 2018 6:28 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org> wrote:

> More information on Fedora use experience, the graphs are impressive
> for those who think it's important to keep people in KDE
> 
> https://theforeman.org/2018/07/discourse-6-months-on-impact-assesment.html
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 18:32, Jonathan Riddell jr@jriddell.org wrote:
> 
> > Discourse is modern forum and mailing list software. Examples at \
> > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ or https://discourse.ubuntu.com/ I went to \
> > a talk at the Embedded Linux Summit about how Fedora moved to use Discourse. \
> > Similar to the discussion of moving away from IRC we had last year I see people \
> > moving away from mailing lists and new contributors not wanting to get into them. \
> > Our KDE Forums also look quite old school. In Fedora they moved to Discourse and \
> > mailing lists and forums and saw a marked increase in engagement. I think KDE \
> > should consider moving away from mailman and onto Discourse and at the same time \
> > forum.kde.org could move to this more modern software. It might also help cover \
> > Boud's use case of a user support method for people with queries before the \
> > report a bug. More coverage on last week's LWN
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/768483/
> > Discussing it in person it was pointed out that we do already use
> > Phabricator Workboards for much discussion and it might well overlap
> > there, although I don't think that would be any more of an issue than
> > mailing lists overlapping.
> > Jonathan


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