From my understanding, the point of Discourse was to be simply a Q&A site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's a place to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips, spitball ideas to make life easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A section of the site is also devoted to listing professional services for hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and consulting]] on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining support. There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that forums don't quite meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give flexibility in how to view the content, the on-wiki support desk allows anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts as well on the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there was a large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means and ability to fill in that hole. It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is unfortunately not FOSS software, however I felt that the feature-set and end user experience it offered surpassed any of the FOSS alternatives. Regards, Skizzerz [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Professional_development_and_consulting -----Original Message----- From: MediaWiki-l [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sam Wilson Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 3:56 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing new MediaWiki forum Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the moment!) But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-) What software is it using? On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: > All, > > > > Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion > about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas. > > * This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers, > but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions. > The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots > difficult. > * [[Project:Support desk]] on mediawiki.org is serviceable, but > long-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due > to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots > to illustrate problems is difficult. > * The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easy > for newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC > meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such > organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support > methods, screenshots are also difficult. > > > > As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims > to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to > the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where > people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share > tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group” > outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and > content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly > good answers can be used to bolster documentation on mediawiki.org. > > > > I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let > me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊. > > > > Regards, > > Skizzerz > > > > [1] https://mwusers.org > > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
