[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Nicholas Chammas]

Two big problems with moving primary discussions off the mailing list are
discoverablility and community fracture.

Agreed, though consider: Community fracture is a always risk when changing
the discussion medium. On balance, we have to consider whether the risk is
outweighed by the benefits of a new medium.

As for discoverability, let me make a brief case for why Discourse is head
and shoulders above mailing lists.

Among many well-designed features <http://www.discourse.org/about/>,
Discourse has the following things going for it in the discoverability
department:

   - You can mention people by @name from posts and they’ll get notified,
   like on GitHub. No need to wonder if people will miss something because
   they haven’t setup their email filters correctly.
   - We can unify the various lists under a single forum and separate
   discussions with categories. This would hopefully lend better to
   cross-pollination of discussions across different categories (e.g. ideas
   vs. dev), while still letting people narrow their focus to a single
   category if that’s what they want. For examples of how categories can be
   used, see Discourse Meta <https://meta.discourse.org/> and this category
   on the Docker forum <https://forums.docker.com/c/open-source-projects>.
   - People starting new posts on Discourse automatically get shown
   potentially related discussions, similar to what Stack Overflow does. It
   makes it much harder to miss or forget to look for prior discussions before
   starting a new one. Naturally, generalized search is also a first-class
   feature.
   - Regarding the potential proliferation of logins, Discourse supports
   single sign-on
   <https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse/13045>,
   so if we want we can let people login with Google, GitHub, or perhaps even
   a Python-owned identity provider.

These features (and others <http://www.discourse.org/about/>) are really
well-executed, as you would expect coming from Jeff Atwood and others who
left Stack Overflow to create Discourse.

Finally, as a web-based forum, Discourse takes the burden off of users
having to each independently come up with a toolchain that makes things
manageable for them. Solutions to common problems like notification,
finding prior discussions, and so forth, are implemented centrally, and all
users automatically benefit. It’s really hard to offer that with a mailing
list.

And to top it all off, if for whatever reason you hate web forums,
Discourse has a “mailing list mode” which lets you respond to and start
discussions entirely via email, without affecting the web-based forum.

Nick
​

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 4:22 PM Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> > On Jan 30, 2016, at 4:17 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> >
> > Any new forum will mean another login, a new work flow, another slice of
> the
> > ever diminishing attention pie, and discussions that occur both on the
> > traditional site and the new site.  Some people will miss the big
> announcement
> > about the new forum.  There will be lots of cross-posting because people
> won't
> > know for sure which ones the people who need to be involved frequent.
>
>
> For what it’s worth, another thing I want to do is setup id.python.org and
> consolidate all the logins :)
>
> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372
> DCFA
>
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