Re: Community Forum: Discourse?

Much of the features are listed on their site
<https://www.discourse.org/features>, but below are some that feel like an
improvement to current platforms:

   1. Topic categorization, which allows filtering of posts based on things
   such as *frameworks*, *general discussion*, *code questions*.
   From a user's perspective they aren't posting into a separate channel,
   just attaching headers to their topic.
   2. Social-based login - users don't have to sign up to the application
   and can easily just use their own gmail, GitHub, or other social accounts.
   3. Modern UI. I feel this is a given but there is something to be said
   when it comes to first impressions of a platform. Being told that IRC or
   lispforum <http://lispforum.com/> is where people communicate becomes a
   hard pass for those that are familiar with Modern Web UIs. With the revamp
   of https://common-lisp.net/ and creation of https://lisp-lang.org/, it's
   at least become apparent that to help grow the Common Lisp community there
   is some change that needs to be made on that front.
   4. Open Source - and not just that but an ability to gain these items
   and more by just talking to the Discourse team and seeing if they would
   provide a hosted solution for Common Lisp. There are more details on this
   free hosting here <https://free.discourse.group/>. We may be able to
   reserve *https://common-lisp.discourse.group/
   <https://common-lisp.discourse.group/>*. Should we need to scale up
   there are discounts for Open source projects, as well as a means to perform
   migrations to a self-hosted platform.

I assume when you refer to a plan to reach "critical mass", you're
referring to how we're going to increase adoption of this forum. We would
need to make modifications to the aforementioned https://common-lisp.net/
and https://lisp-lang.org/ community pages to include this discourse forum
as the forum for general Common Lisp discussion, and advertise its creation
in the lang Google Group/Reddit/IRC.

I do have concerns on community splitting, as we'd now have a subreddit,
google group (wasn't aware of this one), and now a Discourse forum. Though
with this requirement being posted in the contributions needed
<https://common-lisp.net/contribute> list I'd initially assumed the
pros/cons had been evaluated.

Altogether though, if adoption fails, Discourse will shut down the forum
after two-three months of no usage.

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 5:48 PM Daniel Herring <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> There have been many community forums over the years.  comp.lang.lisp,
> irc.freenode (now #lisp on libera.chat), lispforum.com (locked after
> conversations stopped), ...
>
> Two questions:  1.  Why Discourse?  2.  How will you achieve "critical
> mass"?
>
> Thanks,
> Daniel
>
>
> On Sat, 11 Jun 2022, Chris Moore wrote:
>
> > Hey folks -
> >
> > In CL's contribution list one of the open items is for establishing a
> community forum.
> >
> > Coming from Elixir, much of the community has fallen under Elixirforum,
> with Rust, Clojure, and even recently Racket opening their own Discourse
> forums.
> >
> > Altogether, I get a lot of use out of it w/ Elixir, and it seems to be a
> popular solution for establishing a community hub.
> >
> > They provide free hosted solutions for Open Source projects, which we
> can infer Racket received based on their URL. I can discuss with the
> Discourse team what our options are given there is no real Common Lisp open
> source project. If all else fails I can check out
> > self-hosted solutions as $100/month is pretty hefty.
> >
> > If no one has already begun work on a community forum, I can take this
> up.
> > --
> > CHRISTOPHER [email protected]
> >
> >
>


-- 
CHRISTOPHER MOORE
[email protected]
501- 842- 5551