Hi friends, I'm thinking about moving Google Group to a self-hosted Discourse.
Discourse is an online discussion kit, http://www.discourse.org, very much like a forum version of Stack Overflow. It's founded by the founder of StackOverflow. I think it is beneficial for several reasons. 1. It promotes better organization of topics through "category". 2. It has a better editor for writing posts. It supports several formats including markdown, code snippets, and link preview. I think those features promotes a better way of presenting ideas/questions/tutorials. 3. It has a better search functionality, though not just search, but also inter-post links, that make archived posts alive again. 4. It support "wiki" post, which means a post can be collaboratively edited. This may be useful for examples/tutorials and other discussions. 5. It also have support for reply-from-email, new-topic-through-email, and subscripting to new topics in email. It needs some configuration on the server side, but it should make transition from mailing list easier. 6. It comes with other cool features too, like plugins and APIs. 7. It is founded by CodingHorror, one of the founder of StackOverflow. I consider that as trustworthy. 8. and it looks cool. :) just kidding. There official website provides a better advertisement about their product. Downside being 1. Need to be self-hosted. There is a maintenance cost, both time and efforts. Currently it is hosted on a school machine (VM). 2. Although having a good support of email, it is still considered web-centric. That being said, pure terminal email-list users may feel uncomfortable using it. 3. Google group messages can be ported into Discourse, but it's currently not easy to sync back to Google group, unless someone develop some Discourse bots to do the sync upon events. That being said, the transition has to be a clean cut. That's my initial thoughts on this. I took some time and setup a demo sandbox at http://ats-lang.steinwaywu.com. If you are interested, please take a look and post whatever you want to test it out. Also, you can try out at their official sandbox https://try.discourse.org If you want to try something that needs more trust level, just leave a message here and I will do it. Please register using the same email address as here in Google Group so that your old post will link to your profile. It is a just sandbox for you to try out and let me collect feedbacks, I will eventually *delete* all posts and re-import Google group posts if you think Discourse is a good idea. Comments, suggestions, critics, any thoughts are welcomed. Please post feedback here in the Google groups. Thank you! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ats-lang-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ats-lang-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to ats-lang-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/ats-lang-users. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ats-lang-users/1cc5f533-bef6-4fb5-ab08-b6686d6f6182%40googlegroups.com.
