I'm unable to access the discourse site due to some CORS issues. Is there work still being done?
On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 10:28 AM Ed Cable <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I've alluded to this in a couple posts but wanted to formally announce and > soft-launch the new forum tool hosted by Mifos for both the Mifos and > Fineract communities. You can check it out and begin posting at > https://discourse.mifos.org. http://forum.mifos.org should redirect to > there as well. Just click sign up to get going! Yo > > Discourse blends the best of both worlds of forums and mailing lists along > with added tools for gamification and badging. This forum will provide a > robust and user-friendly medium of collaboration that will nicely > complement and augment the Fineract developer mailing list and Gitter > chatrooms we already have. It will allow us to consolidate over time some > of other collaboration channels like the Mifos mailing lists and > MifosConnect Q&A platform. It will also enable new forms of collaboration > by providing an effective medium for free-form discussion across the > community beyond just developing or using the software, i.e. industry > trends, etc as well as power our jobs and services marketplace to help > connect users with paid support offerings. > > *How to Join * > We are in the process of migrating user accounts from Google Groups but > right now the best means to start using the forum is to click Sign Up from > the top link - you can create an account using your existing Facebook, > Google, or Github logins. After creating an account, feel free to edit your > profile too so others can know more about yourself. > > *Share Your Feedback* > This is a soft launch - we're working on user migration, migration of old > posts/content, continuing to refine categories and topics, badges - we > welcome any and all feedback and bugs or usability issues to fix. Old > content still needs to be cataloged as well. Feedback on the Forum itself > can be added in the Meta Category. If interested in acting as a moderator, > please let me know and I'll add you. > > Read on below for some of the benefits of the tool. We'll put all this in > a blog post with a few more details (namely around notifications/emails, > etc.) to help you get the most out of the tool. > > Thanks to Kerlyn who led the setup and configuration of Discourse along > with migration of content from our Google Groups as part of her Outreachy > internship. > > *Improved User Experience Over Mailing Lists* > > - Highly Searchable and Indexable - posts are both very discoverable > via the forum itself but also positioned well in Google searches (which is > a downside of the Apache mailing list archives) > - Ease of Posting - WYSIWYG editor > - Mailing List Functionality - You have a range of options to be > notified- for each topic you create you will automatically get > notifications, you can also watch topics to get notified, and get notified > when someone tags you in the topic (@username). To modify the settings for > a topic, click the box below and select "Watching, Tracking, Normal, or > Muted". You can also get notifications at category and subcategory levels. > To enable these notifications via email, you must navigate to your personal > settings --> email and turn on mailing list mode. You'll then receive an > email per post and can reply via email or create new topics via email. > - Better Navigation - topics are organized by category and > sub-category along with tags. > - Better moderation of topics > > *Augments other Communication Channels* > Discourse will nicely augment the fineract mailing list and the Mifos > Gitter chatrooms - there's been a lot of interest in a community-wide slack > channel and we a more robust asynchronous communication channel is better > than a real-time chat tool. > > - Reduce noise and chatter that's on the public mailing list > - Provide a more interactive and widespread channel for communication > than the mailing list but not as open-ended as Slack or Gitter. > > *Consolidation* > > - With the Fineract Dev list as the main community mailing list, the > intent of the Mifos Discourse forum is to phase out our Mifos developer and > user mailing lists by providing a forum-like tool that you can reply to via > email. With it's Q&A features and ability to mark posts as solved, we're > going to use the Support Section to replace our Q&A Platform, Mifos > Connect. > > *Improved Collaboration* > Discourse' feature set and library of plug-ins will help to improve > collaboration > > - Working Groups - categories and/or groups can be used for our > specific working groups like DFS, Scalability & Performance, etc. > - Improved community identity - Profiles and in the future badges can > help community members better self-identify and discover others. > - Jobs & Services Marketplace - the forum like-capability and > centrality of Discourse will allow us to reinvigorate our previous attempt > at a jobs marketplace which never took off on mobile.io. > - Polls and other features - a wide variety of other tools like polls, > events etc can be explored to help the community. > > Discourse is used by a lot of our peer projects like ODK and OpenMRS so we > can share in the many lessons learned and best practices they've attained. > > Cheers, > > Ed > -- Scott Dunbar Cell: 303 667 6343
