Create a forum for users to interact

[BjarniRunar]

Before the 1.0, we need some venue for users of Mailpile to interact with each other, ask questions and help out. Gitub Issues is not a good venue for support or community. Our IRC channel (#mailpile on Freenode) is nice, but it's probably too geeky and it has the downside that since we're not logging it (by choice), experience doesn't accrue and old discussions cannot be discovered in the future.

The options I'm considering at the moment are:

• A mailing list
• A discourse forum, either self-hosted or provided by some service
• A subreddit

A mailing list would certainly be the most appropriate for an open source e-mail client project, but since Mailpile's UI for mailing lists isn't very developed yet this isn't a "no brainer" yet. There is of course also the problem that it may lead to a chicken-and-egg situation; if someone is having trouble with their e-mail client, requiring they send and receive e-mail to get help is maybe not super clever.

Discource is nice. Considering that I already struggle with my existing workload, hosting yet another thing ourselves doesn't seem wise. The flip side of course, is that if we host it ourselves we can make sure our users' privacy is respected. Maybe it's worth doing? People have volunteered to help, maybe I should take someone up on the offer!

Reddit is a lively boisterous place. I haven't used it enough to know whether it would be suitable. I do expect there would be a large overlap between Mailpile early adopters and reddit users, which is probably a good thing.

What do you guys think?

[taziden]

I'd prefer a self-hosted Discourse.

[gitbenb]

+1 for self-hosted Discourse -1 for mailing list (edit: enough with emails please? What I mean by that is nobody is going to use email for/between user interactions in my view it just add cluster to everyone where Discourse is going to allow users to subscribe to what they want, and get notification by email if they choose so but the engine has enough granularity so that everyone can use it the way they want it (as opposed to mailinglist on my experience) +/- for subreddit, not sure what would be the use case beside giving more visibility to existing Forum posts ?

[karlp]

maybe a mailing list would encourage mailpile to get better at lists? ;) but yeah, mailing lists attract and hold only a very very specific sort of person, I don't really think it's a great idea to use a mailing list. No opinions on the other forums honestly. Other options I see used are slack and gitter, LEDE went to discourse in the end iirc?

[loidor]

I'm for Discourse. Mail lists will always have the downside of extremely annoying archives when it comes to long or threaded discussions. Reddit has the potential to reach out to more people, but then, the ones wanting to be a part of developing will go to github anyway, so meh.

2017-01-04 17:28 GMT+01:00 taziden notifications@github.com:

I'd prefer a self-hosted Discourse.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile/issues/1755#issuecomment-270415063, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJY7hnAoUt-R53SbmqgNVNI-uxG7vP9Kks5rO8iwgaJpZM4LayiW .

[nils-werner]

In my experience forums do not work well for support questions. Threads drift off topic or the right answer is not immediately visible. I much prefer the StackExchange system and http://superuser.com/. The requirement for precise questions and precise answers makes it easy to handle and useful for people finding the same question on Google.

[lorenzschmid]

+1 for Discourse as the most user and beginner friendly solution of the three

[NoahAndrews]

Someone created a Mailpile subreddit, then deleted their account. I requested to be the new mod, and recently had it given to me by one of the Reddit admins. So /r/mailpile is ours if we want to use it as an official avenue for support and discussion. I'd be in favor of this option personally. I help out as a mod and support provider at /r/olkb, which is the official support community for a mechanical keyboard company and their open source firmware, and it does the job very well.

[herbsmn]

I think it is worth looking into Taiga.io You can see public projects at tree.taiga.io I've set up a self-hosted version of Taiga for a group in the past. It wasn't very hard. It is based on all free software. It is a much better version of Redmine. Also, it integrates with self hosted versions of Let's Chat and GitLab, so you could have an issue tracker, git repo, and "slack like" chatroom all in one, all self hosted.

[matthewbloch]

As I mentioned on Twitter I'm happy to host, manage & co-moderate (if desperate :) ) e.g. users.mailpile.is at Bytemark in York. We've got plenty of nice dedicated servers, we can keep it backed up etc. etc. so I promise there'd be zero server admin if you didn't want it.

IMO Discourse is more accessible to new users while also sporting a solid mailing list mode for die-hards that never want to see a web UI. It's indistinguishable from most mailing lists except for the 1-level threading (but Mailpile does the same, hooray!).

[dbrgn]

Note that Discourse is dead simple to host and maintain, if you use the Docker setup. It has built-in self-upgrading that can be done with a single click.

Also note that Reddit does not have to be a toxic place. Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/ for example, very civil and a strictly enforced no-memes rule.

[BjarniRunar]

Thanks for all the comments, everyone. I've given this some thought; it's absolutely silly of me not to accept help here and Discourse seems to be a pretty popular option.

So - @matthewbloch , let's make this happen! What's the first step? Is the second step me creating forums.mailpile.is and pointing it at an IP address under your control?

Oh hey, let's have a bike-shed-colouring session about the name!

• support.mailpile.is
• forums.mailpile.is
• discourse.mailpile.is

(I have already ruled out community.mailpile.is, because that needs to be reserved for interacting with our donors and backers)

[matthewbloch]

Hooray! On naming I'd go with support which (unlike others) has a clear purpose i.e. Mailpile users supporting each other. Once I've got a server & done the install, I could make a few decisions on the Discourse admin, write some community engagement rules based around & share the details with you @BjarniRunar for review - does that sound OK? (or I can just hand over the install with zero config done if you'd prefer to do that yourself, but trying to take some work off your hands :) )

Anyhow I'll find a server and come back to you when the install is done. But are you happy with support. as the name? (that would probably be a faff to change shortly afterwards)

[BjarniRunar]

@matthewbloch That all sounds great to me - and the more work you take off my hands the better! I think support.mailpile.is is a fine name. Thanks again.

[BjarniRunar]

Hey @matthewbloch, are you still willing to own this? We were discussing on IRC and I think it's time for us to make this happen. I will be on stage at SHA2017 in August, hopefully announcing our first release candidate and I'd like to have something like this in place before that.

[JocelynDelalande]

hurray for a discourse, or anything like that, accessible to the most people. Let's get out from our nerdy cave and keep track of our discussions instead of letting them vanish in the IRC ether. @matthewbloch very nice if you have time to spare for setting that up <3

[matthewbloch]

Hey there, sorry for the delay, this had slipped off my plate but I'll pick it back up again in about two weeks when I'm back from my holiday.

[JocelynDelalande]

@matthewbloch bump :-) Did you manage to spare time on this ?

[jeaye]

Since this hasn't happened yet, I'd put my vote in for a mailing list. If people are having issues with mailpile, using another client, account, or setup to ask the mailing list shouldn't be an issue (like Thunderbird or Proton mail).

While Discourse attempts to sell itself as a mailing list replacement, to my knowledge it neither handles attachments nor GPG signed data. The latter being my biggest concern.

Furthermore, any new service, which requires a new account signup, is going to deter people from contributing. Staying on Github's issue tracker, fine. Moving to a subreddit, probably ok (many people have Reddit accounts). Hosting a new Discourse server? Inconvenient for everybody. Hosting a mailing list? Anyone can send in without registration.

If they're using Mailpile, we can probably assume they know how to use email.

[Kabouik]

It's true that having to create a new account will filter the initial number of contributors (readers?), but on the other hand this is supposed to be a long term plan and at the end, when it becomes the obvious place where all the information and documentation is, people would likely feel more comfortable asking/contributing there. A mailing list or subreddit won't be as tidy as a well administrated forum, with sticky topics for documentation and organized sections, a powerful search engine, ways to filter by topics or posters, a better feeling and UI overall when browsing archives (mailing lists archives are terrible for that), etc.

Mailing lists also seem to be a bit intimidating compared to forums. Don't ask me why, I'm not sure, but I sure know some people who would never use mailing lists but wouldn't mind posting on forums. To be totally honest I also know people who would do the exact opposite because they are not comfortable with online tools/forums, but got to understand e-mails over time (probably not going to use Mailpile though). I myself feel more comfortable posting here than sending the same content as an e-mail. Even if subscribers of a mailing list did commit to subscribe, it doesn't mean they are interested by everything, yet new messages are "imposed" to them anyway, while subscriptions to forum threads are flexible and enabled on demand.

Another thing is e-mails are most often not anonymous. Even when encrypted, most people will use their real identity and real name in the address, they may even sign them as you mentioned. Even if they don't use their real name and use these addresses anonymously, most people are still tightly tied to their e-mail accounts because they won't exactly use them for a single purpose or mailing list, therefore their "identity" on the mailing list depends on what else they are doing with this e-mail address, and vice versa. In that sense, not having to create a new account (as would be required for a Discourse forum) may be a double-edged sword. I'm not saying this is a big deal, I'm mostly using the same nickname on different forums for instance so I don't really care, but I'm not sure mailing list would attract more people than a more modern (popular) tool.

Regardless of the solution that will be chosen in the end, I think in the case of Mailpile it's really important to have a tidy place where solutions to problems and how-to and documentation can easily be sorted and archived, so that devs or experienced users do not explain the same things over and over because they are lost in IRC (Github allows that in a way, but focuses on questions to developpers/bug reports, not really open help between users).

(On the other hand, I really like the way Mailpile handles mailing lists and I'd be happy to use the functionality.)

[JocelynDelalande]

@matthewbloch Any hot news about the forum ? :-)

[BjarniRunar]

I think we may need a new volunteer. :-) Or I need to add this to my list...

[BjarniRunar]

Update: This ball is rolling again. We should have a Discourse up and running soonish...

[BjarniRunar]

This is launched. Now we just need people to use it! https://community.mailpile.is/categories