Re: [orca-list] Our list will be moving to Discourse

[Kyle <kyle free2 ml>]

As web forums go, Discourse is probably the easiest to read. That said, 
if I had to go to websites for every discussion I may want to 
participate in rather than just seeing the messages come to my email, 
well, that does get a bit hard to handle; I just wouldn't be able to 
keep track of everything as easily as I do now. Web forums are great if 
I'm looking for something specific that could be anywhere, as a simple 
Google search can usually turn up 5 or 6 forums where people have 
already discussed the exact issue I'm having and someone on at least one 
of those forums most likely found the solution and posted it. But 
well-indexed list archives can do the same thing, and an email list 
tends to be easier to follow, especially if a topic comes into my inbox 
and I already have the solution, in which case I just hit reply and post 
it straight from my inbox instead of having to check a website several 
times a day to see whether or not something has been posted in the 
category or topic where I can possibly be of some help or otherwise 
contribute to the discussion. There is supposed to be a mail list mode 
in Discourse settings, but apparently that emails every post in every 
topic in every category in the whole forum, which would obviously cover 
far more than just Orca, how to use it, how things work with it, how to 
make things work better with it, etc. I for one don't want to think too 
much about the politics of the board of directors and governance of the 
GNOME foundation; that kind of thing makes my head hurt, so I probably 
wouldn't want all that stuff in my inbox. On the other hand, if we will 
be able to subscribe to a category by email, say Orca for example, and 
then every topic regarding Orca just gets emailed, and if it's possible 
to email a new post about Orca and it just goes to the right place, then 
it does seem like it could be a workable solution that at least has the 
potential to perfectly balance the web forum and the email list, much 
like groups.io seems to be able to do, but the web forum portion will 
probably be easier to read, as Discourse appears to display the entire 
thread with each post title on its own heading, which I find to be very 
nice indeed.

~Kyle