RalphCorderoy
commented
4 years ago I've no experience of Discourse. I am used to everything funnelling through email: mailing lists, RSS feeds, etc. https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-lists/54298 says Discourse can be used as a mailing list if configured appropriately.
Discourse could attract users who like to point and click, slowly. We'd need to be careful not to push away those who will only use a mailing list, not a web forum, because they may be the key experienced users who provide much assistance within the LUG's online community.
Offering both would increase maintenance. But I assume mandating all LUGs switch would make some LUGs unhappy.
gwestwood
JonTheNiceGuy
Mailman3 has, I seem to recall, significant issues, and is far from "feature complete" compared to what we want.
An alternative I'm looking into is replacing Mailman2 with Discourse. I know that HacMan moved from Mailman2 to Discourse, and it's entirely possible to do this, including importing the full mbox files from the existing mailman instances. (Reason for looking at this)
Now, one criticism I've seen about even editing the mailman2 indexes is that quite often the indexes are referred to in external indexes. It's possible (although, to be fair, I don't know how much work it would entail) to set up redirect links to the discourse site for those links which would be "lost".
Perhaps one other alternative would be to offer the option to the lugs - migrate to Discourse, or stick with Mailman... but that then means maintaining two systems.