A group of Slicer community members have extensively discussed the advantages of updated forum software, and developed a consensus at the 1/2017 Project week that we test Discourse as a new home for questions and discussion by users and developers of Slicer and any extension/topical communities who are interested.
Here is a proposed schedule to transition from mailing lists:
3 days testing by small internal group.
Announce testing period on mailing lists.
Suggested strategy to seed content: copy interesting new posts onto Discourse manually, reply on Discourse, and post link to the reply on mailing list.
Send training email with link to instructions for how to use Discourse exclusively by email (the initial setup is slightly clunky, but reply-by-email works great).
After [1 week?] testing, announce that mailing lists will be put in read-only mode after [1 additional week].
Disable new posts to mailing list.
Send daily, no-reply forum activity summaries to the mailing list for 1 month, then weekly summaries for [1 month?].
[high] Get email notification about specific themes (releases, announcements, sub-community, such as shape analysis, RT, …)
[high] Import existing users
Discourse supports bulk invite. However, I would suggest we wait until after the testing period at least.
[high] Code highlight
[high] indexing by Google
[medium] Authentication with github
plus Google, Facebook, etc.
[medium] Option for yearly billing
N/A since we were able to get free hosting.
[medium] Polls (vote on features to be developed, collect community feedback for decisions, etc)
[medium] Permalinks of thread for easy sharing by email
[low] Answer posts through email
By default any @-pings, threads where the user interacted, or Watched categories/threads will receive email notifications. Right now Announcements is configured as a default Watching category for all users. Users can also set “mailing list mode” in the preferences and will receive emails for all threads.
Maybe I misunderstood the intention of that bullet point. But what I was referring to by the checkmark was that Discourse will show a short summary when it sees a Github issue URL on its own line. e.g.:
I’m not aware of any auto-complete or back-referencing feature (i.e. showing a cross-link to Discourse in the GitHub thread). I suppose the second one could be done with a robot, but I’m not sure how useful it would be.
I was initially thinking of having autocomplete of any string that looks like org/project# … to get a result similar to what was rendered by simply copying the URL. Simpler is better. We are all set.
