[Qgis-user] Announce - migrate our mailing lists to Discourse

[Greg Troxel]

What I meant mostly is two things:

    People like me tend not to be happy about things turning into forums
  and are likely to participate less.  As an example, openstreetmap
  moved from mailinglists to forums and I have not, so I interract far
  far less and spend more time on other things.  I am probably somewhat
  unusual (started doing email in the 70s), and here probably only strk
  thinks I"m normal :-)

    My perception, perhaps off base, is that discourse facilitates
  people showing up, posting a question, and getting replies to the
  question, without also getting delivered to them everything else on
  the "mailing list".  Thus I expect a lot more help desk type
  interactions, where new people ask a question and don't really engage,
  rather than joining the community.
    Many projects have communities of long-term participants who get to
  know each other.  Partly from on-list, but partly from off-list
  converstations which are enabled by getting emails with the other
  person's email address.  I don't see this happening in a discourse
  world.  I'm not arguing there are no mechanisms and that people could
  not make it happen.  I am saying that I expect it to happen much less
  in practice.

I don't have any good ideas about the first pointl.

The second point could be addressed by allowing web signup, but allowing
posting only if one has email delivery of all messages, and having the
From: address be the person, and not breaking DKIM signatures.   In
short, having the email interface be a first-class non-broken
mailinglist, while also having a forum view.

(I've dropped psc because it doesn't allow non-members to send.)