Discourse instance for the user community?

[Supermathie]

I would absolutely love to see the saltstack community on a Discourse instance instead of Google Groups.

Mailing lists are just archaic today - we (Discourse) have quite a few projects that migrated. It would also let us easily paste code snippets/examples/etc.

An awesome, modern, forward thinking engine like saltstack deserves a modern forward-thinking community environment!

disclosure: I'm the sysadmin on the Discourse project

[techhat]

Thanks for bringing this up again @Supermathie, in the manner than you did. The discussion has been raised before, and it quickly became decidedly uncivil. Let's keep it friendly this time, folks!

First big question: does Discourse support a mailing list type format? Archaic as it may or may not be, mailing lists are what a lot of people are used to, and if you try to replace it with a forum, people will balk. With some people, things will turn ugly, and everyone involved will get a black eye. I expect you have been asked this before, and have an answer.

For my part, even though there is a forum-style web interface for Google Groups, I don't use it; I use email every day and it's comfortable to me. This is an opinion I expect to see expressed from a number of people.

disclosure: I work for SaltStack

[Supermathie]

Ah! Had no idea you'd discussed it before. :)

does Discourse support a mailing list type format

Yes - it's been addressed already and there's lots of options now. You can choose to receive an email for every single new post, receive a digest, only receive emails from certain categories, etc. Plus, it only emails you when you haven't already read it on the site.

Oh, and mobile is awesome. Which is when I tend to casually browse postings, especially tech-related.

mailing lists are what a lot of people are used to

"We've always done it this way" is perhaps too far of a reduction, but email sucks. It's not a mailing list though, if you try to treat it as a mailing list you won't get that. People would need to change their workflow at least a bit.

But you can get emailed every posting and you can reply to the post by email. You can pick and choose. You can have a combination of both. We've recognized that this is important for some users and have worked hard to keep that.

I suspect that the biggest users of a mailing list would be the people that read every post - great, we can have them get emailed every post. But for the users that don't… for example, this is what I see when I go into my samba list:

Ick. Plus, in order to easy search the list for previous posts or try and find similar questions/topics I have to keep the entire list history in my email client. As an occasional user of many lists, it's a nightmare.

you try to replace it with a forum, people will balk

Yes, I would never recommend replacing it with a legacy forum cough phpBB cough, but this is far cleaner.

I expect you have been asked this before, and have an answer.

There is no answer that pleases everybody, but as you can see there's been lots of work to make it work.

Try it!

[techhat]

Thanks for addressing those concerns, @Supermathie.

I don't know if Discourse was around the first time this was discussed; the concern at the time was that "Google is evil" and therefore we shouldn't use Google Groups. The discussion began aggressively, and got no friendlier until it ended.

My concerns have been addressed, and I do not currently have any objections from a functionality standpoint. However, this is subject to intense review since this, GitHub and IRC are by far the most popular contact points for our users, and this kind of change will throw off a lot of people. @saltstack, it's time to chime in.

[cro]

@Supermathie I have been looking at Discourse for some time now. Unfortunately I haven't had the opportunity to use it to participate in discussions. I know another SaltStacker, @basepi, participates in some Discourse-based forums so he can speak to the specifics.

I think my two issues would be 1) being able to authenticate with Google's OAUTH2 to avoid yet another username and password and 2) cleanly importing all the content from the existing mailing lists. Can you speak to those?

One more issue I might have would be hosting. Right now we get google groups for "free" and we don't need to worry about hosting issues. We have plenty of access to CPU, etc, what we are short on often is extra hands to handle the hosting and sysadmin part.

[basepi]

I don't feel strongly either way. I also have concerns about content importing, but my bigger concern is getting people to switch over. I feel like we would lose a lot of users in the switch, and just need to get a better idea of how the majority of the community feels -- this decision should not be made in a vacuum.

I will say this: I will vote strongly against having both. We need to commit to one or the other, and make it the only source of truth.

I'm mostly happy with salt-users on Google Groups. It has the forum view if you're into that, and the only thing it's really "missing" is easy code markup.

We would also have to sell it from a price perspective -- Google Groups is free, and takes no upkeep. I'm not a fan of self-hosting, as I don't feel like we have the engineering bandwidth. I have no earthly idea what kind of pageviews salt-users sees, so I don't know how much it would cost to host our Discourse instance. Just another thought I had.

[Supermathie]

1) being able to authenticate with Google's OAUTH2

Out-of-the-box Discourse supports Google, Github, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, … maybe one or two more.

2) cleanly importing all the content from the existing mailing lists

We do offer this service with a hosting plan, @ZogStriP has handled a lot of importing from internal systems / other forums / etc. Have we done a Google Groups?

Here's a good example - we imported old mailing lists and newsgroups for McNeel - feel free to check out that community. FreePBX is another one that has had massive use since switching.

Right now we get google groups for "free"

Email is free, yes. :( LOTS OF PAIN! And you get what you pay for, which is a lot of noise:

Google Groups leaves a TON of artifacts around that make life miserable, as I've totally scientifically proved above. Also, as a member of the user community I don't like email for this.

only thing it's really "missing" is easy code markup And links between topics, and branching topics, and automatic summarization, and categories… all the things you didn't realize you were missing. :)

just need to get a better idea of how the majority of the community feels

Absolutely - this needs to be a decision endorsed by the community. Discourse is all about community

I don't know how much it would cost to host our Discourse instance.

We have various plans and I suspect the Business tier would suit you well.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

If this issue is closed prematurely, please leave a comment and we will gladly reopen the issue.

[Supermathie]

Going through my old notifications and realized this was closed as stale.

If you are interested, we now do offer free hosting for OSS projects such as yours

Just get in touch! ♥