Forum

[Zaid Abdulla]

Hi,

First off, apologies for not being active here for a number of months
now. Last year has been a very busy and stressful year for me and I was
barely able to keep up with work from the commercial side. I hope I'll
be more active now that I'm a little more on top of things :)

That said, I want to hear your thoughts about possibly moving to a
forum software for the community discussions. I like mailing lists, but
I have two major gripes with them:

1) Formatting and threading. Most email clients use HTML emails and
have different formatting quoting styles. Then there's those corporate
email footers with a wall of text and logos! Worse yet, some email
clients don't handle threading properly. All that may not be a deal
breaker during the conversation, but it doesn't help make the email
archive into a good reference for future readers. These issues can be
*partially* mitigated by enforcing plain-text in Mailman (the mailing
list software), stripping attachments, and generally being anal about
posting rules.

2) This may not be a problem per-se, and maybe it's just me, but IMO
email is best for thorough and complete responses while in a forum a
back and forth exchange of short messages is perfectly okay. With
email, after a few exchanges you end up with a deeply nested thread and
the quoted text becomes an unreadable mess.

With regards to the forum software of choice, I really like Flarum.
However, Discourse, which I also like, offers a hosted version and that
is a big plus for me as I'd rather not deal with maintenance and
upgrades. I went ahead and started a trial with Discourse. It's
available at forum.genieacs.com. Feel free to sign up and give it a
spin.

-- 
Zaid Abdulla <zaid at genieacs.com>