[Qgis-psc] Migration to discourse

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi PSC,

After the last very busy weeks with the french QGIS FR days (cool event, 
I'll make a summary when I find some time) , I finally wrote an announce 
for Discourse migration.

I plan to send this, are you ok with it ?

I'll reach SAC to announce a more precise calendar before sending it to 
all the lists.


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Topic: Mailing lists to Discourse migration for QGIS


Hi all,
as you may know, we traditionally use a lot mailing lists in QGIS project.

All those mailing lists are server by mailman, a venerable piece of code 
written by Richard Stallman. Those mailing lists are hosted by OSGEO team.
Mailman is end of life and all FOSS project are looking to its successor 
(see [0] for GNOME project) .
Additionally, mailing lists are not used anymore by younger folks.
Reason are numerous, from competition with instant messenger tools, the 
lack of a nice responsive interface, difficulty to search and explore 
mails on the web, or simply because the monopolistic Outlook client does 
not make it easy to use mailing list correctly.

OSGEO team has deployed Discourse instance and after 4 months of tests 
with some early adopter, we think the project is mature enough to start 
discussing about migrating QGIS's lists.



## What is Discourse ?

Discourse [1]  is an open source only project built to support community 
discussions, started in 2013 and thought to address the gap between 
dying mailing list, forums and the rising instant messenger tools 
dragging all discussions into private and locked-in spaces.

It allows advanced moderation, advanced notification settings, and is 
thought to streamline discussions.

It is already used by tons of community projects, you probably already 
know it, from Gnome to Mozilla.

Want to have a look ? The already migrated lists are there : 
https://discourse.osgeo.org/

## What are the benefits of using Discourse ?

It is searchable on the web, and can be explored lot better than our 
mailman archives.

It is extremely easy to subscribe to a category. No more need to have 
one subscription per list.

Receiving mails and answering from your mail client is fully supported.

You can copy paste images, videos, code and can react via emojis.

There is a basic instant chat, based on matrix. We prefer at this stage 
to use a dedicated channel to avoid confusion. (We are already present 
on IRC and Matrix - see [3] )

## What if I prefer mailing lists ?

See Mozilla's tutorial :
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/how-do-i-use-discourse-via-email/15279

## What calendar and steps for this migration ?

We plan to ask System Administration Committee to :

- Import mailing list history into QGIS general category, and triple 
check we have all the history
- Announce the  several times for a month we are going to switch, and 
ask everyone to create an account on Discourse via OSGEO LDAP connector. 
Channels will be lists themselves, blog, QGIS desktop feed, and asks for 
communities and user groups to relay in their dedicated channels.
- Do some tutorials around how to handle notifications and advanced options
- Do the switch
- Put old mailing list in archive mode with disclaimers.



[0]https://discourse.gnome.org/t/common-questions-re-mailman-to-discourse/11841 

[1] https://www.discourse.org/
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