Thanks for resurrecting this topic David! After our discussions at the June meetup I had intended to create an account with Discourse for the Solr project using their free for open source hosting <https://free.discourse.group/>. Unfortunately, I became ill for an extended period and that endeavor went on the back-burner. I'm fairly recovered now and still interested in helping, if desired.
Initially, I was going to set up the account using my email address and then transfer it to an official Solr address once it had been set up. In light of the universe's recent reminder of my mortality I would want to see it start off using an official email address. If someone with an official account wants to create the account and add me as an admin once it is set up, I'm happy to assist. Or if there is a generic account I can be given access to, I'm happy to perform the setup myself. I liked your idea of running the two systems in parallel and syncing between them. I spent some time today researching how this could be accomplished and from what I've seen it appears theoretically possible but practically quite difficult. Folks have expressed interest in doing it but I found no successful implementations. What is fairly straightforward is: 1. Importing <https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-a-mailing-list-to-discourse-mbox-listserv-google-groups-etc/79773> the existing mailing list archives 2. Setting up an ongoing, read-only sync <https://meta.discourse.org/t/continuing-to-run-mailman-and-discourse-using-the-exact-email-addresses-as-mailman-in-parallel/217854/5> of new mailing list messages to Discourse. This reduces some fragmentation - forum users would be aware of all discussions - but mailing list users would miss out on forum messages. Alternatively, we could make a hard cut over to Discourse, setting us...@solr.apache.org to be ingested by Discourse. Along with an import of all the existing messages this would ensure that all discussions were occurring through a single channel. We'd have to use the mailing list mode <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-mailing-list-mode/46008> to force Discourse to send all the messages to all subscribers if we wanted to imitate the mailing list behavior. This could be done for a short period but I'd recommend against doing it long-term as it recreates one of the main weaknesses of mailing lists - a lack of scalability. Mailing lists work well with small groups but as the size of the group increases the volume of messages increases until it becomes impossible to manage. Users could still enable mailing list mode for their personal accounts if they desired to receive all the messages long-term. Jan, regarding your suggestion that we not rule GitHub Discussions out - I'm not strongly opposed to GHD. I agree that most Solr users are likely developers but I also hope that this won't always be the case and that is why I haven't been wholeheartedly in favor of GHD. I feel like GHD would limit Solr long-term or would force another migration as Solr grew beyond its developer-centric roots. On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 2:57 AM Jan Høydahl <jan....@cominvent.com> wrote: > > > GitHub is developer-centric and as such would likely, exclude most, > non-dev, users. > > Last time I checked, (direct) users of Solr were developers. Not > necessarily solr or java devs but tech people integrating or operating solr. > > So I’d not exclude GH discussions. The barrier to joining the solr-user > list discussions is higher than visiting our GH page and browsing > discussions. How many already have a GH account vs a discourse account? But > I agree we could have several channels. > > Jan Høydahl > > > 17. okt. 2023 kl. 07:27 skrev David Smiley <dsmi...@apache.org>: > > > > GitHub is developer-centric and as such would likely, > > exclude most, non-dev, users. >
