Discourse

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le mercredi 22 février 2023 à 22:45 +1100, Andrew Bernard a écrit :

If people think an email list presents a barrier to people, I'm willing
to offer to set up and host the list as a Discourse server, the modern
way which has a superb web interface and also supports at the same time
95% of the functions of a traditional email list for people who want
that. Many companies use Discourse now for their forums, a notable
example of which is Steinberg. Something I have been wanting to suggest
for some time.

[Changing the subject line since this is a new topic]

A few years ago, there was a Nabble interface to all LilyPond mailing lists. When Nabble was discontinued, there was quite a bit of disappointment (especially on the -user-fr) list. For example, I recall one of the reactions was roughly "I don't want to receive tonnes of emails in my inbox" (someone who obviously didn't know about mail filters).

So a Discourse forum has been on the back of my mind for quite some time now.

However, I'm kind of attached to the GNU list infrastructure — while old-fashioned (not just mailing lists, but mailing lists running on the unsupported Mailman 2), it is very stable and has served us without interruption for 25 years now. During that time, the mailing list for translations on lilynet.net was discontinued and the archives lost when lilynet.net expired without being renewed (I don't even know who owned it, maybe Valentin Villenave ?), Nabble was discontinued as well, Google Code (previously used for LilyPond development) was shut down, lilypondblog.org similarly went away, and openlilylib.org too. So my own idea wouldn't be migrating the list to Discourse entirely, but making a bridge with Discourse like Nabble used to be. I think it's possible, but I never took the time to really try.

(And yes, while I initially disliked Discourse compared to mailing lists, after getting used to it on https://discuss.python.org, I have to admit it's quite nice. You can always interact with it by email if you wish.)

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