Hi Bill,
On 2020-03-12 13:28, Bill Stephenson wrote:
I’ve recently pointed a few people on Reddit to this mailing list who were
asking questions there. A forum would probably be a good thing to have.
I’m not familiar with Discourse but it looks pretty simple to spin up a digital ocean vps.
<https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/discourse?utm_campaign=marketplace&utm_source=marketplace#api-creation>
“Mail-in-a-box <https://mailinabox.email/>” makes it pretty easy to set up an email
server. DigitalOcean probably isn’t the best platform for that. I have one I setup there but it
took some time to get the larger mail providers to unblock it. That’s probably the case no
matter how you approach that though. Using a 3rd party service like MailChimp might be easier
but would probably cost more.
Unfortunately I’m not in a position to donate any cash to this but I could
spend some time on getting Discourse up and running on a DO vps if that’s a
viable option.
Please don't take this step. Apache Infra needs to be aware of what's
going on, and fully support whatever approach is taken. Our community
cannot be seen to be "going around them" without some severe backlash.
As I mentioned in my other email, let's work together with them to make
this happen.
-Joan
Kindest Regards,
Bill Stephenson
On Mar 12, 2020, at 9:32 AM, Garren Smith <gar...@apache.org> wrote:
Hi All,
The CouchDB slack channel has been a real success with lots of people
asking for help and getting involved. The main issue is that it is not
searchable so we often get people asking the same questions over and over.
The user mailing list is great in that sense that if you have subscribed to
it you have a searchable list of questions and answers. However, it's
really not user-friendly and judging by the fact that it has very low user
participation I'm guessing most people prefer to use slack to ask questions.
I've been really impressed with how the FoundationDB forum[1] and the rust
internal forum work [2]. I find them easy to use and really encourage
participation. I would like to propose that we move our user and dev
discussion to Discourse or a forum that works as well as Discourse. I think
that would make it really easy for users of CouchDB to look up answers to
questions and get involved in the development discussion.
I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure we could get all discourse threads to
automatically email back to the user and dev mailing list so that we still
fulfill our Apache requirements.
I know its a big step away from what we're used to with our mailing lists,
but I think it would definitely open up our community.
Cheers
Garren
[1] https://forums.foundationdb.org/
[2] https://internals.rust-lang.org/
