Thoughts So Far On Discourse?

So, the folks at VCL are contemplating moving away from a mailing
list. I’ve suggested Discourse, as it seems to be working pretty well so
far for us.

I’m going to talk about it a bit at their AGM next week, and I’d like to
get some feedback from VHS to present. What do you guys think so far of
Discourse? Likes, dislikes, love, hate, let me know! If you’ve got an
opinion that you think might be inflamatory or draw down ire like the
fist of an angry god, feel free to PM me.

Also, what are the costs like so far for Discourse? How much bandwidth
is being used, and how much is the hosting cost? Do we have any figures
on how much it costs ( roughly ) per month to run and host?

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Yay, Can of worms.

$20 per month instance from DigitalOcean (referral code)

The problem isn’t the hard costs is the dev costs. Discourse takes a decent amount of sysadmin to setup and maintain. Ask @TyIsI and @garthomite how much time they put in on the install. If they were being paid we it would probably cost $3k in development hours alone.

After its set up, a hobbiest like myself can handle most of the sysadmin tasks until something breaks then it gets expensive again.

There are 3rd party hosting options, I never looked in to them.

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Love it, it has quirks but they far outweigh the problems we had with the mailing list.

Maybe VHS can make a section on our forums for VCL? This would reduce the sysadmin cost and maybe we can get more synergy between our two groups.

I don’t have a problem with it myself but you would probably have to make a new topic and ask that directly.

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I’m a sincere convert with Discourse over the last little while since things have been migrated over for VHS. I used to be mailing list or nothing, I didn’t want yet-another-forum but Discourse does it right.

I used to be involved with another hackspace for a number of years before recently moving to Vancouver. We tried a few years ago to eliminate our mailing list in favour of Discourse. They tried to run it in parallel and it ultimately failed. To put it bluntly, you have to force people over to it, and I was one of those people that had to be forced over. I loved my mailing list.

Mailing list allowed me to interact easily with my phone via email and I had all my fancy gmail filters and multiple inboxes, etc. Then I discovered the email features in Discourse and they are absolutely exactly like using a mailing list if you set them to those settings, which is super easy to do.

I thought I’d stick with the email way of things since I had it running identical to my mailing lists. Then I started to discover the little things: How many views your post received, how many times people opened links in your posts, the ability to favourite a post that helps reduce the awkward single track sequence of noise when people are replying to only express support, the reply underneath a particular comment to help keep tangents from spoiling a thread. The list goes on.

I must also do an honourable mention of the auto suggestion features when you’re posting a new topic. It searches while you’re writing your post to find stuff that is similar to what you’re about to ask. This is so important in two ways: reduces noise and helps bring new people up to speed. On the note of bringing people up to speed - the history is much more indexable/searchable and persistent for new members.

I was afraid of the typical forum feel you get with most alternatives out there, but I can’t say enough good things about Discourse - they did it right.

For an organization like VHS, Discourse is an ideal fit.

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On the tech side if you’re an organization with enough coders/sysadmins around, I’d say discourse is a good choice.

On the culture side, discourse has definitely improved how we communicate with each other (e.g. avatars/more identify/more respect/ability to split off threads/liking posts/protected areas for private communication/direct messaging/etc.)

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Personally I like it. While not perfect it does add some benefits that we never had with the mailing lists, the biggest one is having access to all the previous information as a new user.

When I first joined the mailing list there was no good way to see all the previous conversations, topics etc. They had mailing list archives but they were not very readable/searchable. I didn’t want to post in fear of duplicating something or wasting everyones time with my little questions.

Now with Discourse I can post my projects, ask my questions knowing that the potential new members can see these.

Regarding its usage for VCL, that would be awesome for someone like me. I’m currently interested in VCL but I would like to more about them before I join aside from what is on their website. I would like to see what people do there on a daily basis or topics on tips and tricks or do’s and don’ts.

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Discourse has issues for mailing list uses.

Reformatting messages! This is most annoying

Blocking attachments such as pdf.

Being able to review history is nice. But need to be able to search history by submitter, subject line and content, and attachments. I am not sure how to do that, Does any one know?

PDFs can be enabled, I think just the default images and zip files are enabled at the moment.

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In the search box “user: foo” searches for users. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be able to search for subjects or content, that’s the default.

I don’t think there’s support for searching attachments, because discourse can’t parse them.

I too was wary of discourse, but didn’t say much about it (simply because I wasn’t in a position to maintain my preferred solution).

That said - I feel discourse has worked out pretty well. I still don’t have it quite sending me the topics I want, and not sending me the ones I don’t, but that’s tunable. At this point, I think its better/more effective than the mailing lists were.

I’m a fan. I think @laftho hit the nail on the head. With some very minor tweaking I had set it up initially to duplicate the feel of a mailing list and that is how I primarily use it, but the web version does offer a lot of little things that makes it very handy, all of which have been more or less commented on.

One thing I love about the web interface is the persistent reply box. I can start typing a reply to this one, with quotes and all, then open a new thread in the main window to research or quote from that one and when I hit send it will be posted to the correct thread. The ability to spin off tangental threads is also a HUGE pus to me.

The only real down side I have seen is the inability to mute a thread from the email. Even gmail’s mute function doesn’t work for whatever reason. If you want to mute a thread you have to click the link to open the thread in the web version and mute it from there. Or I suppose an inbox filter to autdelete based on subject line could work, but you get the point. I’ve come to consider it a mild annoyance, but it did bug me a lot at first.

All told, there was a lot of pushback about people like @laftho clinging to their mailing list, but I think it is a solid alternative and it does seem to win people over. As mentioned, if you go this route, don’t do it as an option. Commit to it and people will enjoy it

All that said, I haven’t heard any real complaints since it was established other than the reformatting of reply-by-mail posts. I does auto-trim whitespace so you can’t, for example, put two blank lines between paragraphs… does anyone who has switched over have any constructive negative comments?

We just launched our community forum for MODLAB (Kamloops Makerspace) this Monday, so I thought I add my two cents to this discussion.

I initially was looking at discourse, I have been following its development for over a year, and had used it a lot. Discourse offers a very polished and solid experience, which is critical specially when you have a large community. Discourse is by far better than a mailing list. However, as a modern forum solution there are still a few things I think it is missing

  1. it is hard to extend (hack) it
  2. It is hard to setup and maintain (which was already mentioned)

So I started looking at alternatives, and after trying NodeBB for a couple of weeks, I decided to go with it. NodeBB is an even younger project compared to discourse and as such still missing some features. First let me get the down side of using NodeBB out of the way:

  1. Email integration still needs some work. Daily digest is there, but email reply is not implemented yet (is planned)
  2. It is under heavy development, and when new major releases come out it may take a bit of work to upgrade

On the positive side, here are a few things I really like about NodeBB:

  1. It is very hackable. You can extend NodeBB by writing a custom theme or plugins much like the wordpress model. Oh and everything in NodeBB is an npm module
  2. It has a very active developer and support community. The core developers are very active in the community and people are very helpful to support you in your NodeBB installation

For us, those two key advantages were really the defining factor. We are still a small community (just above 30 people) and so our forum can grow slowly with us. I have already implemented a plugin for our forum, and plan to develop more. Take a look at NodeBB as well, depending on your situation, it might be a good alternative. I have high hopes for it’s future.

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Discourse is great, but you need to be careful how you migrate. Apply migration/move management in order to not alienate members that prefer mailing lists over Discourse. It is true that Discourse can serve as a mailing list, but it should not be considered to be a drop-in replacement. I would suggest a good beta test, doing your best to involve, and actively inviting and acquiring feedback from the biggest nay-sayers. Once it does what your organization needs it to do, then start migrating your users to the new platform, before hard shutting down the old platform.

Remember that most of these solutions (like NodeBB and Discourse) are relatively new and still under active development. Like any solution, it’s not a silver bullet; you will need to actively update it, and make sure that you make it fit to your organization.

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