[Evolution] Thoughts on Discourse and use as a mailing list

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

I thought I would put together some of my thoughts about using
Discourse that I have gained in just a day of using it. A day is not
very long and I may not have fully understood everything - but there
again, I am, apparently, the top poster on the topic with most replies
in the Application category on Gnome Discourse!

I'm sorry, but this will be a lengthy post.  TL;DR: I'm not convinced
that Discourse is a useful replacement for a mailing list.

First, a thought about the demise of the Mailman mailing list. From
what I can see the excuses are just that. Redhat use Mailman for some
of their big lists - the CentOS list uses Mailman for instance. If the
future of Mailman was in doubt, they would have plans in place!  Spam
is largely a solved problem these days - various accounts I have use
different spam flagging techniques and they all function perfectly
adequately - from personal SpamAssassin to high volume corporate spam
and malware blocking.  They just didn't want to have mailing lists
anymore.

Using the forum.
===============

My issues are largely down to not particularly liking forum type
things. I don't think all are exclusive to Discourse:

   Posts are displayed linearly and no option to have a tree-like message
   list.
   
   You can show the replies to a message, but you can't see their replies.
   It looses context very quickly. Similarly you can only show the message
   that a reply refers to and no more than that.  In a large discussion,
   if people don't quote anything, it's impossible to know what they are
   replying to without furiously clicking around and scrolling.
   
   OK for quick discussions - up to 5-10 posts. Beyond that it becomes
   difficult to follow.  Certainly seems to not be suitable for lengthy 
   technical discussions.
   
   Sub-categories would make things easier, but are not wanted
     https://discourse.gnome.org/t/sub-categories/11733
     
   Gamification of the whole thing is puerile and annoying.  I do not see
   it as an achievement to gain "badges" and nor do I strive to earn more.


As a mailing list replacement.
=============================

We have been told that we just need to login once to Discourse and set
things up, then all interaction will be by email and we won't notice
any difference. Really? What planet are they on?

   No topic tags on emails. So no easy way to filter topics. If you
   watch more than one topic, all mails are the same. 
   
   Own posts not notified of. It removes context for a mailing list. I
   keep copies of mailing list posts as a sort of private archive -
   mainly so I can see what I've answered to queries before. That's
   gone.
   
   Slow or sporadic email notifications make discussion difficult.
   
   No or broken threading on emails. This one is so annoying.  Doesn't
   any of the people who use Discourse use threading anywhere. Context
   is everything.
   
   Plain text emails sent to Discourse have formatting mangled (white 
   space isn't honoured). There's no point in nicely formatting plain
   text, it will be mangled. (These indents will be lost - if I sent it
   there.)
   
   Mails are really just notifications - there's no nested quoting of
   content to provide context. You can choose to have previous replies 
   at bottom or include an excerpt, but that's not contextual quoting.

I'm sure there is much more. It would be nice if there was someone who
engaged with us properly a while ago to sort things out, but all I've
had so far is to point me to meta.discourse.org - but that is clearly
aimed at admins and not users.

Clearly many of my issues are because I'm coming from a mail / mailing
list perspective. But if we hadn't been told that it was a direct
replacement, and if we hadn't been told to shutup and just use it, then
I would have perhaps been a bit more lenient. But also, I would never
have started using it in the first place.

Is it a direct mailing list replacement? Definitely not.

Is it useful as a community support tool? Possibly.

Will I continue to use it? Jury is out on that one.

P.