Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Andreas Rossberg <rossberg@mpi-sws.org>]

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 22:58 , Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup a Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator there?

To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the “flashiness” thing:

- participation without having to constantly log into yet another account (with potential tracking),
- all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
- offline reading & writing,
- proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
- no annoying gamification,
- open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years from now.

Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more comprehensive discussion style.

Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed very usable.

It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to hop onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next thing. I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with Rust). I’m less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.

/Andreas


> The Rust people have experience with Discourse as their main user forum (I just created a topic ( https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-are-rusts-discourse-hosting-plans-and-time-requirement/6462 ) to ask about the specifics of their hosting plan), and closer to home the Unikernel community also adopted discourse:
>   
>   github issue about the move:
>     https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/25
> 
>   Discourse forum:
>     https://devel.unikernel.org/
>   
> (I'm adding Amir Chaudhry, who organized the Unikernel, transition, to the loop. He had excellent feedback when the ocamlbuild community asked similar questions -- https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/issues/31 )
> 
> I would be ready to finance a six-month experiment of using Discourse for the OCaml community, to see what it gives, but I'm not interested in doing the setting-up and other administration work myself, so we would need to have volunteers for that.
> 
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> > I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I think that
> > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which is a
> > forum that would be hosted on 
> ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum
>  ?). I used to go on
> > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something like
> > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary website). Such
> > forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to answer questions
> > immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and still be able to come
> > from time to time and look at former discussions.
> 
> 
> If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I personnally
> quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the rust
> people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> 
> I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also not so
> fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is usually
> quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
> structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the 500k+
> lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.
> 
> — Armaël
> 
> [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
> [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/
>