Discourse

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 8:38 PM Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
>
> On maandag 29 oktober 2018 19:31:54 CET Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> > Discourse is modern forum and mailing list software.  Examples at
> > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ or https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
> >
> > I went to a talk at the Embedded Linux Summit about how Fedora moved to use
> > Discourse.  Similar to the discussion of moving away from IRC we had last
> > year I see people moving away from mailing lists and new contributors not
> > wanting to get into them.  Our KDE Forums also look quite old school.  In
> > Fedora they moved to Discourse and mailing lists and forums and saw a
> > marked increase in engagement.
> >
> > I think KDE should consider moving away from mailman and onto Discourse and
> > at the same time forum.kde.org could move to this more modern software. It
> > might also help cover Boud's use case of a user support method for people
> > with queries before the report a bug.
>
> I don't think it's really comparable. Discourse might be a good alternative
> for mailing lists and forums, where people have discussions, but it doesn't
> look like a good alternative for a solution where people who have a problem,
> ask about it, and get a (semi-automatic) answer because it's been asked a
> hundred times before. It's the latter we really need :-)
>
> But when it comes to mailing lists and forums...
>
> kimageshop at kde.org basically only gets used for announcements. All discussions
> happen on Phabricator or on IRC. Almost nobody with a question subscribes to
> the mailing list. The only thing that gets less used than the mailing list is
> the FAQ.
>
> We also do get user support questions on IRC, through the web interface, but
> it's clear that it confuses people horribly. They come, ask and leave, or
> don't know what to do once they're in the channel. Much as it pains me, for
> user support, IRC is the wrong tool. It's still find for project
> collaboration, though.
>
> As for the forum, it would be good to replace that with something more modern.
> We get a lot of traffic on the forums, People don't understand the layout of
> the forums, but because there's only an RSS feed, no email integration, I miss
> a lot of questions, and it's often very unclear what the current questions
> are. And the process of registering and logging in to the forum confuses
> people a lot, too.

The login and registration experience is something that is being worked on.

Regards,
Ben

>
> --
> https://www.krita.org