Re: forums, mailing lists and other tools

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

> I think you're speculating. Please state clearly what parts should be
> patched (it's GPL software!).

I have started a detailed review in [1]. Discourse has a revision
currently approved in the FSD (from 2015, according to the page's
history), but this was long before the JavaScript trap article (and
issues pointed there) came to exist.

Anyways, in [1] there is shown the output of LibreJS in a demo instance
of Discourse. There is also a more detailed evaluation in a posterior
section, but only raw results are there (no cleaning was made so far).

> Well, the good thing with Discourse is that you can use it by email
> when it's properly setup to do so.

I hope it's not one of those no-reply emails. ;)

[1] .
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Re: subdomains for testing things

[Florian Snow]

Hi Daniel,

You are mingling several different ideas here, so let me try to separate
them to keep this discussion productive:
1) Should tools not ready for production live under a (sub-) domain
   separate from fsfe.org?
2) How do we switch teams over?
3) Is Discourse a suitable replacement for E-Mail?

Your original question was 1) and now you are starting to bring up 2)
and 3).


Daniel Pocock  writes:
> Git is designed from the ground up as a distributed tool so that is
> vastly different.
> Each project that uses Git can do so without impacting other projects.
> Communication tools (Mailman, Discourse, XMPP) are a special case though
> because everybody needs to use them.

I guess this refers to 2) above.  Yes Git is distributed, but everyone
in a team that uses Git, needs to use Git.  This is the same for a
platform such as Discourse.  That is why we have team coordinators that
can ask the team.


> But it is not that simple.  If you start using it for a campaign, you
> are either
> a) forcing everybody who interacts the campaign to use it too, or
> b) isolating the campaign from the rest of the community.
>
> Neither is ideal.
>
> Consider the impact by Metcalfe's Law, imagine we have 200 volunteers
> using a single communication tool for all campaigns:
>
> Value = 200^2 = 40,000
>
> Now imagine if you have 150 volunteers using email and 50 using Discourse:
>
> Value = 150^2 + 50^2 = 25,000
>
> What Metcalfe's Law is telling us is that an organization committed to a
> single platform is stronger than an organization that spreads itself
> over different platforms.  It works either way: even if 150 volunteers
> switch to Discourse and only 50 remain on email, the organization is
> still weaker.

By this logic, we would need to decide for either email or phone or XMPP
communication.  That is not what this is about.  Different teams might
want different tools and that is fine.  There have been no decisions
about anything yet.  This is a test and we will see how the community
feels.  If there is an influx of new interested people because they are
more attracted by Discourse then by Mailman, then great, if it is not
the case, we will also know.  At least until then, the two two tools can
coexist.


> It is also worth remembering that FSFE needs to communicate with people
> beyond the community: once again the global email network has a value
> with Metcalfe's Law, but each forum instance is like a little island.

This refers to 3) and I tend to agree.  However, that says nothing about
your original question, 1).

Happy hacking!
Florian
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