Suggested mailing list -> Discourse schedule

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.

https://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/2017_Winter_Project_Week/UpdatingCommunityForums

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?].

Per the discussions from Project Week, the following wish-list was identified. Checkmarks and comments indicate how Discourse meets each item:

https://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/2017_Winter_Project_Week/UpdatingCommunityForums

  • [high] Get email notification about specific themes (releases, announcements, sub-community, such as shape analysis, RT, …)
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [high] Import existing users
    • :heavy_check_mark: Discourse supports bulk invite. However, I would suggest we wait until after the testing period at least.
  • [high] Code highlight
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [high] indexing by Google
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [medium] Authentication with github
    • :heavy_check_mark: 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)
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [medium] Permalinks of thread for easy sharing by email
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [low] Answer posts through email
    • :heavy_check_mark: 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.
  • [low] Vote for good answers, mark accepted answer
    • :heavy_check_mark:
  • [low] Support cross referencing of Github issues
    • :heavy_check_mark:

How does that work ? I tried to type Slicer/Slicer# hoping it would propose the list of recent issues …

Where you thinking of these:

Comment and example of @ihnorton posted below addresses the question.

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.

Thanks for the example. That works great. :thumbsup:

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.

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