Re: Discourse

[Andrew Bernard]

Some final thoughts, since we are not going to do this at this point. 
With all the pushback I am seeing, I have little further interest in 
giving my time and resources to implementing this. To a certain extent I 
regret even bringing up the topic.

People should go back and read my posts as this is in answer to today's 
posts, as I have discussed these points. The way I set up email in 
Discourse it works great, it's one click to subscribe, it has subject 
lines which give the topic and the category for easy filtering, and I 
can see no difference between the the email functionality it provides 
and the functionality that GNU Mailman 2 provides, none. You can 
initiate topics by email, you can reply, you can include images and 
file, it's normal email readable in anything from emacs to your personal 
mail client, all the headers are correct, and if you are careful on the 
admin side and which email SMTP provider you use you can avoid being 
classed as spam and also avoid backscatter (though this takes some work, 
but so it does with mailing lists).

Many of my users use the email interface exclusively and never touch the 
web interface. I have never had a complaint about the inadequacy of 
Discourse email. If people have some issues with other Discourse forum 
email functions, let me know, as it may help me with my forums.

So lilypond will be on GNU Mailman 2 always as far as I can see, which 
seems a pity as the software is advancing rapidly but not the community 
software. In the past, I was mostly successful in importing 25 years 
worth of posts from a LISTSERV mailing list into a GNU Mailman 2 list, 
the same as lilypond. But (contrary to a false statement I made about 
import into Discourse) you can't import mailbox format lists into 
Discourse simply, because, for example, the creation of users from 25 
years ago who most probably no longer have the same email addresses is 
very problematic for various reasons. Therefore the current history 
could not be supported in Discourse, and would have to remain separate. 
I can see that this is a strong objection. But again, insisting on that 
means there is no possibility to ever change. Maybe that's a good thing. 
I don't know. Maybe the history of bugs from ten versions ago is not 
that important to have instantly online.

With regard to country based censorship, my unstated proposal would have 
been to run it on a linux server at Vultr or DigitalOcean and as far as 
I know there is no country filtering or censorship done by those 
services. But I may be wrong.

Interestingly Discourse (and yes people please do not confuse it with 
Discord, and entirely different service) supports polls builtin, so you 
can easily gauge opinion in a community with, but email lists do not 
have a convenient way to do this. :-)

I could go on but I have already asked to drop this topic as we are not 
going to do it, so people can relax. Perhaps the prevailing mood will 
change in the future.

Andrew