I'm pretty much 100% on board with either HyperKitty or GroupServer. As for a redesign of the home page, if possible, I'd like it to:
1) Show whichever forum system we switch to, so prospective players can actually see what play looks like without switching between three pages or subscribing. 2) Link to a filter that shows all posts marked as "[OFF] Ruleset" or whatever, so players can immediately find the newest ruleset without a manually updated link or tracking it down themselves. 3) Link to a page with all the history/background that's currently included in the front page, and including recent history. I also don't know who manages what, wrt the site and the lists, but if we could use one of the three existing lists (agora-official?) with the new software that would make the transfer that much less painful. On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 5:50 PM, omd <c.ome...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 6:10 PM, Sprocklem <sprock...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Adding reddit will mean one of two things: either I need to remember to > > check the Agora subreddit regularly (whereas with email, I am notified > > of new messages by my email client), or people will be required to send > > a link to (important) reddit content to another forum, possibly > > resulting in a lot of link-only messages (which I may still need to > > check on regularly to see the actual discussion). > > It's possible (since a few months ago) to get email notifications from > Reddit for replies to your posts and comments, but I'm not sure if you > can arrange to get everything in a subreddit... of course, Reddit has > an API and we could do something custom. > > Personally, because I'd like to avoid (a) fragmentation and (b) > dependence on external services if possible, I'd like to stick with > one forum which can be accessed by both email and the web. To expand > on the options I mentioned: > > == > > Hyperkitty: reasonably pretty; I'm not a big fan of their design > decisions though. Demo at: > https://lists.fedorahosted.org/archives/list/de...@lists.fedoraproject.org/ > > GroupServer: just found this by searching; haven't heard of it before. > Looks reasonably sane. > http://groupserver.org/ > > Google Groups: I didn't think of this in my original post. It does > provide a usable web interface, but it's a centralized service and I'm > not a fan of their UI. I assume everyone's seen what it looks like, > but: > https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.unix.programmer > > Discourse: a quite competent open source web forum; has an email > interface but, as I said, it sucks. > https://users.rust-lang.org > > Custom: web forums aren't rocket science, and neither are mailing > lists; I could spend some time to write a custom one, which would have > a better interface than GroupServer or Hyperkitty (live updates and > such). > > == > > Regardless of what we use, we shouldn't keep requiring people to > manually sign up for three separate mailing lists - it's intimidating, > regardless of how much actual time it takes. Besides, the web > interface should have all types of posts (reports, actions, > discussion) combined. With Google Groups (or Reddit for that matter), > that means there would have to be a single forum: we could either > standardize some tag in the subject line or something to distinguish > "business" from "discussion", or just drop the distinction and expect > people to read all messages. With the self-hosted options, the > software could be modified to preserve the current separate list > address system while still requiring only one signup, but we should > probably still consider whether that's actually a system we want to > continue using. >
