Discourse

[Ben Cooksley]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 5:25 AM Lays Rodrigues <lays.rodrigues at kde.org> wrote:
>
> Let's not go in that way.
> As a ~new person~ on KDE, 3 years only, we need to move to a modern web. At least in my point of view, I really think that using old stuff doesn't attract new people. In that I have a few ideas for some KDE websites go modern, but that is a project for the future.
> Discourse is a way to do that. I don't have much idea on how is the cost to maintain such an application, but in the field to setup it, I don't
> think that is hard since we just need docker and Postgres.

Before we look into deployment, has an initial evaluation been done to
determine how individual communities around specific applications
would work with Discourse?

Usually these communities only want to look at posts for their
specific application, and in some cases we have customisations to
support their specific usecases - which our existing forum supports
(see https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=276 for instance).

Once we're satisfied that's all okay and can accommodate everything we
need, we then can look into deployment. At this point we'd:

1) Look into the actual technology stack they use (seems to be Rails
based in this case) to make sure there aren't any potential snags
there
2) Evaluate what support it has for authentication options (Identity
requires LDAP at the moment, but will move to OAuth2 at some point
using a custom API)
3) Determine what's needed to import existing data we have
4) Ascertain how best to structure things to make it easy for
end-users to work with
5) Investigate what anti-spam options are available and how
maintainable any customisations we need to support KDE specific
workflows will be

At a very quick 15 minute glance, I already have immediate concerns on
point 1 of the above.

My main one here is the lack of any options for installation other
than Docker which makes no sense for a Rails application. Looking into
their Docker image installation script I see that they build both
Nginx and Imagemagick themselves (and stepping outside of package
repositories is generally a bad idea). Imagemagick is of grave concern
as this project has had numerous security advisories in the past and I
see the version they're using isn't the latest one. I have further
concerns for Nginx as they include a third party compression module,
Brotli, whose codebase hasn't been touched in 2 years (plus it's a
compression method, so you have the risk of CRIME/BREACH attacks)

>
> So Ben and other sysadmins,
> Ben, you had some concerns that others answered on this thread.
> What do you think?
>
> Also, I found this ansible to deploy discourse with and without docker, that can be a starting point:
> https://github.com/jamielinux/ansible-discourse
>
> Let's think about how this can help all the KDE users, and push our community forward. If we have old stuff that is hard to maintain, and it is outdated, we should move forward.
>
> ** My opinions can be simple, because I think that the situation is simple, also because I may not have a macro view of everything**
>
>
> Cheers,

Cheers,
Ben

>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 7:04 PM Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Montag, 26. November 2018 18:03:55 CET Martin Flöser wrote:
>> > Am 2018-11-26 09:23, schrieb Ilmari Lauhakangas:
>> > > The main problem in any case will be getting enough engagement. I
>> > > don't think I have ever received a reply from a KDE developer in the
>> > > current forums.
>> >
>> > And that's good! Do you want that developers spend time answering simple
>> > support questions any other user could answer or do you want developers
>> > to code? No company would put their expensive developers on the front
>> > line for support.
>>
>> No company would publish their precious IP (aka source code) as Free Software.
>> Luckily, KDE is not a company but a community of people where everybody, even
>> the most precious developers, can be at the front line for support if they
>> want to be there.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Ingo
>
>
>
> --
> Lays Rodrigues
> KDE
> Atelier - atelier.kde.org
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