Sample Forum

[Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>]

Hi guys, today I have set up a sample Discourse forum for everyone to use.
You can find it here: http://groovy.trydiscourse.com/

This forum is configured to behave almost exactly like a mailing list, for
those who want it. You can mail in topics. For example, send an email to:
groovy+users@discoursemail.com - you should not have to create an account
for this to work. It will create one for you. 

In addition, if you create an account on the forums, you are by default
subscribed to the categories of the forums, just like the mailing list. New
topics will trigger an email sent straight to your inbox, to which you can
reply. Obviously you can reply to them on the forum as well. When replying
via your email client, you should take advantage of using Markdown syntax.

I've also created a sample topic (copied from the mailing list) for you to
view on the forum, so you can appreciate the modern forum experience that
Discourse offers:
http://groovy.trydiscourse.com/t/improving-named-argument-support/15. I
encourage you to look at the current equivalent here:
http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Improving-named-argument-support-tp5746753.html
for comparison.

Please feel free to make your own topics and see how they interact with your
email client and let me know if you have any problems. Quick note: when you
post a topic, there is a 2 minute window in which you can make edits before
it is sent out to email subscribers, so if you experience delay that is why.



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Re: Sample Forum

[Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au>]

My position hasn't really changed much but I spoke to Apache infra and here
is the overall summary:

* Apache infra don't have a huge appetite for hosting an Apache internal
copy of Discourse. They could set us up a VM and we could host it ourselves
but they wouldn't encourage it since often when projects do this they
underestimate the resources required to maintain and keep it up to date and
they end up with lots of unmaintained services lying around hardly being
used.
* They'd encourage us to use Pony Mail instead of nabble as something to
encourage people to use which is backed by the Apache mailing lists:
  https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@groovy.apache.org
* They'd happily accept pull requests/patches to get things like pretty
code formatting happening within Pony Mail.
* They'd recommend using the external hosting service just for the users
list. Most of our "conduct all official business" on the mailing lists
obligations are with respect to the dev list. Wrt the users list, if we
conduct a poll or something like that we'd need to summarise the results
back in the users list, similarly if people start posting patches into the
forum we should encourage them to go via other channels, PRs, pony mail,
the Apache users mailing list directly etc.

So, it get's back to whether we can support yet another channel. I am happy
to give it a try but already find myself stretched across the existing
channels, so can't promise super fast feedback in such a forum.

Cheers, Paul.

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 2:29 AM, Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Bump. The forum will only be up for another week. Paul, any more thoughts
> on
> this?
>
>
>
> --
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>

Re: Sample Forum

[Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>]

Bump. The forum will only be up for another week. Paul, any more thoughts on
this?



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Re: Sample Forum

[Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>]

As far as I am aware, it is not possible to have Discord post to the mailing
list. The "mailing list" abilities of Discourse far outpace the standard
mailing list that Apache has set up, due to the configuration options and
formatting abilities, etc.  I'll be talking to them about this as well to
see if they have any suggestions.

As for these other requirements, I'm 100% confident that Discourse meets
them.

1. If a linked email is adequate proof, this is already perfect. Discourse
accounts are based on an email account which is publicly visible on all
profiles. If Apache has it's own account system that is OAuth2 compatible,
Discourse offers SSO capabilities for this as well.
2. All edits are visible to the public. For example, view this thread
http://groovy.trydiscourse.com/t/improving-named-argument-support/15 and
click the small pencil icon in the top right of the post. You will be able
to see the diff between edits. This is of course on top of the fact that
Discourse is completely open source and Apache is able to host it
themselves.
3. I suppose this requirement is somewhat fulfilled because of the tight
email integration that makes it behave nearly identical to current mailing
lists.
4. Of course this is possible!
5. Yes, there are private categories on the forums.

Thanks for having an open mind.



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Re: Sample Forum

[Paul King <pa...@asert.com.au>]

Nice work Nathan, that certainly is a more pleasant user interface than
nabble but I don't ever use nabble but rather just email clients. I'd
certainly be happy advertising something like this as another alternate
informal channel for Groovy communication alongside Slack and StackOverflow.

If there was a way to make emails show up on the mailing list we could
possibly take it further. Would this only be possible if Apache hosted
their own discourse instance? Is that possible? I suspect that is what is
really needed.

We have a requirement to conduct all official project business using Apache
mailing lists but really I believe the underlying requirements are:
* Being able to link users back to an Apache user id is useful for checking
CLA agreements have been signed etc. PMC members/Committers have a
responsibility to check this.
* Having Apache Infrastructure being able to vouch that messages haven't
been tampered with which is important from an Apache Legal point of view.
* Hard requirement for Apache Members and Apache Board members to be able
to peruse our mailing lists in the same way as other projects.
* Single point of call for anyone to go to see all official decisions made
by the project.
* An ability to also have a private list so that things like security
issues can be discussed before being made more widely available.

Cheers, Paul.


On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 2:20 PM, Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> The delay can be removed, no worries :). The posts from the forums do not
> show up on the mailing list, but they show up as emails as if they were
> part
> of a mailing list. Basically the idea is that people don't have to leave
> their email client if they don't want to. Apologies if that was unclear.
>
>
>
> --
> Sent from: http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/Groovy-Users-f329450.html
>

Re: Sample Forum

[Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>]

The delay can be removed, no worries :). The posts from the forums do not
show up on the mailing list, but they show up as emails as if they were part
of a mailing list. Basically the idea is that people don't have to leave
their email client if they don't want to. Apologies if that was unclear.



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Re: Sample Forum

[Daniel Sun <re...@hotmail.com>]

Hi Nathan,

> When you post directly from your email client, there is no intentional 
> delay. 

  I wish no intentional delay whether we post directly from email client or
not :-)

  BTW, I can not find my post in any groovy official mailing list(e.g.
dev@groovy.apache.org, users@groovy.apache.org).

Cheers,
Daniel.Sun



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Re: Sample Forum

[Nathan Harvey <na...@gmail.com>]

Let me clarify the two minute delay. When you start composing your post (on
the forums, not from email) you of course have an unlimited amount of time
for writing your post. Once you post it on the forums, it is posted to the
forum instantly, but the email to people receiving emails alerts is not yet
sent. After two minutes the email alert will be sent. This gives you time to
fix a mistake , if you made one, before the email is sent out.

When you post directly from your email client, there is no intentional
delay. 

I see your post in my email! Thanks for giving it a try :)




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Re: Sample Forum

[Daniel Sun <re...@hotmail.com>]

Hi Nathan,

      Thanks for your spending time on setting up the forum. I tried just
now, it's amazing!

       As for the following feature about delay sending, I wish you could
remove it(and wish send the mail without any delay)... because if we are
editing and have not completed in 2 minutes but the mail is sent, then the
mail is not complete...
```
Quick note: when you 
post a topic, there is a 2 minute window in which you can make edits before 
it is sent out to email subscribers, so if you experience delay that is why. 
```

       P.S. I replied your "Improving named-argument support" thread,
looking forward to seeing it in mailing list ;-)

Cheers,
Daniel.Sun


Cheers,
Daniel.Sun



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