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

[Michael Shand]

Another great mapping list bites the dust.
I used CartoSOC for over 20 years which was great for info and connecting with like minded cartographers, after a merger it became a Forum and died a slow death.

Sent from Samsung mobile

On 4 Apr 2024 21:29, DancesWithCars via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
I won't be making the transition.
Bye


On Thu, Apr 4, 2024, 14:06 chris hermansen via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
Régis and everyone else,

My apologies; I try not to top post but my response is more an overall reaction to your announcement rather than a point by point response.

I was a member (??) over at opensource.com<http://opensource.com/>'s Discourse instance until RedHat decided to shut down support for opensource.com<http://opensource.com/>, so I have some experience with that Discourse configuration, also plenty of experience with mailing lists.  Also familiarity with the Ubuntu Forums, Stack Exchange etc.

In my experience, Discourse "out of the box" doesn't offer any net benefit to its users.

It's quite possible that people interested in, and willing to invest time and effort into customizing their usage profile would benefit more from Discourse than from a mailing list.  I have no experience with that.

You may be correct when you say that we will attract more new users by offering them Discourse than by maintaining a mailing list.  I guess the question that begs to be asked is, will those new users thereby turn into contributors, or will the biggest Discourse channel be "how do I install QGIS on my new Mac"?

I suppose, perhaps wrongly, that most of us on this (and other) mailing lists are here because the list provides a sense of community, an opportunity to pay back by offering a bit of help, an opportunity to stumble on something new and useful from time to time... what else?  I'm pretty sure none of us participate in this list to learn how to participate effectively in lists.  Moreover, we don't really have the tools to "only pay attention to topics X, Y and Z".  So all of us get to see the beginner questions, and the responses, and sometimes we find ourselves in the situation of starting fresh with something that, because of this broad familiarity, is not a total blank.

In contrast, in my experience, moving to Discourse, or any other similar forum-type structure, allows or even encourages us to stick to certain topics that we think may be of interest and avoid all others.

I would argue that we thereby cheapen and diminish our contribution back to the forum, simply because we miss real opportunities to help while we avoid reading certain topics; and by doing so, we reduce the sense of community we get by belonging to the list.  I would further argue that we run the risk of not learning many new things because by streaming topics into tens or hundreds of specialist channels, we inevitably miss things that might benefit us.

Finally, we have the "opportunity" to spend more of our limited time learning about configuring our participation in this mechanism, rather than just participating.  Your example of learning how to treat Discourse like a mailing list by following the Mozilla tutorial addresses this situation precisely - instead of helping a person with their configuration issues, or learning more about how to structure the queries used in QGIS, we are tweaking the Discourse knobs and levers to get the "optimum" experience.

I guess you can tell that I'm negative on this concept.  I don't feel that the mailing list is a be-all and end-all.  But I am pretty sure, again based on my experience, that the lovely community we have here on qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> will not be the same collection of good things once migrated to Discourse.  I do hope that I am wrong!

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 7:04 AM Régis Haubourg via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:

[Message sent to all QGIS's lists. Sorry for crossposting - **please reply only in PSC list**  ]

[stuff deleted]


Any thought from you is more than welcome, from ranting against modernity to thanking SAC for their hard work.

 And thank you, SAC, for your hard work!

--

Chris Hermansen · clhermansen "at" gmail "dot" com

C'est ma façon de parler.
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