I like that we now have a modern and accessible replacement for our mailing lists. But I still search for the best option to integrate it into my workflow.
In theory Discourse has a mailing list interface, but it’s not activated, and I definitively don’t want to suggest activating it because it would bring back all the administrative problems of mailing lists (like sending mass mails).
Some projects have the mailing options enabled I don’t think it’s worth it for us. It’s better to have one unified experience posting to Discourse is trivial and creating rich-text posts is just as easy.
RSS feeds by their nature are linear it would be up to your reader to thread but I don’t think that’s very common.
The app at best just manages your login as you said it opens the communities/posts in a web browser which isn’t very useful. As a notification and quick scanning tool it does have utility.
As far as the workflow goes – there is none yet. I’ve been part of many communities using Discourse and they are all handled differently. I just set it up this way as a first guess as to what may be useful because creating new communities and changing the order is easy.
The reason we decided to set this up is due to the incredible amount of useful, user and developer knowledge that gets buried on Discord. We decided to keep Discord for RTEMS development and setup a forum for users. This way the posts can be indexed by search engines and we can curate the knowledge over time. It’s easy for us to pin posts that can have year-long erratas attached to the bottom.
We also discussed moving some of the more technical conversations to here to serve as documenting the process and decisions behind development.
Ultimately the goals are to:
Provide a way to record conversation so it’s useful for users and discoverable.
Give us a long-term archive of those discussions.
Let the wider community know that we don’t live in a bubble!
I have been pointing user questions to the forum and while we’ve had a lot of signups I think it will be a slow ramp up as we see more useful content being posted here.
Like you most likely noted: I agree with not enabling the mailing list functionality. I would expect that it adds a maintenance burden that is not worth it.
You say that you are part of many communities. Basically that’s exactly what I’m interested in: How do you keep track of new topics? By opening the website every day or two? By mail notifications (and if yes: how did you set them up to not miss anything interesting and don’t get overwhelmed at the same time)? By a feed? Using something that I haven’t discovered yet?
Basically keeping up with discussions is something that is incredible hard for me on Discord. The only method there would be to read through everything and there are far too many discussions and too few structure on Discord so that I don’t manage that. So I more or less gave up to stay up to date there and more or less only react on mentions.
I would like to avoid that the same happens to me here on Discourse. Therefore, I search for a good workflow. For that it’s always interesting to hear about how other people handle that.
The great thing about Discourse is it’s real-time. If you have a topic open and someone starts replying it will tell you. You can have a conversation if you know the other person is there responding. That can be very useful.
Thanks for the replies. As long as it’s low volume, I would love to have a “send me a mail on every new topic” option. The Watching First Post in the tracking options let me only select that for each category. I would expect that our categories will change during the next time depending on the usage?
The tags seem to be an interesting option to filter as soon as we have a higher volume.
This was disabled in-server and after reading about it this was done due to the incredibly high volume of emails this can cause for example sites with 1,000 posts a day that’s at least 1,000 emails per subscriber. We host our own MTA so this is not a concern for us.
I’ve used this before for low volume sites it works well! Had no idea it had been disabled by default in the admin.
