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

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

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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?

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/
>

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