PSC Vote: Let's move this list to discourse

Committees SAC mailing list
1

Right now we've just been mirroring this list on discourse as you can see
here:

To more efficiently test out the use of discourse, I feel the SAC mailing
list is a perfect guinea pig.

1) It's got enough people posting here that we can easily see issues people
are having and address
2) It's a relatively forgiving and patient community of users subscribed to
this list

And we have strk, who will serve as our official disgruntled user to tell us
all the ways this is not going to work for an email-only preferring user
and perhaps find solutions to make it work.

Thoughts, concerns.

Thanks,
Regina

2

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 5:10 AM Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us> wrote:

Right now we've just been mirroring this list on discourse as you can see
here:

SAC mailing list - OSGeo

To more efficiently test out the use of discourse, I feel the SAC mailing
list is a perfect guinea pig.

1) It's got enough people posting here that we can easily see issues people
are having and address
2) It's a relatively forgiving and patient community of users subscribed to
this list

And we have strk, who will serve as our official disgruntled user to tell us
all the ways this is not going to work for an email-only preferring user
and perhaps find solutions to make it work.

I am one of those email-only preferring users as well and wish to then
see clear instructions to keep the (former) list behavior (being often
on the road it is much more convenient to get messages into the inbox
rather than visiting discourse via browser). Will not be the only one
:slight_smile:

Markus

Thoughts, concerns.

Thanks,
Regina

1 Like
3

> And we have strk, who will serve as our official disgruntled user to
> tell us all the ways this is not going to work for an email-only
> preferring user and perhaps find solutions to make it work.

I am one of those email-only preferring users as well and wish to then see clear
instructions to keep the (former) list behavior (being often on the road it is much
more convenient to get messages into the inbox rather than visiting discourse via
browser). Will not be the only one
:slight_smile:

Markus

>
> Thoughts, concerns.
>
> Thanks,
> Regina
>

Yah I expect a lot of folks will want to correspond via email mostly. So sorry if it sounded like I thought you were a small group.
But I'm not sure the best terms to use to explain it to people how they can continue to use email.
I'm not even sure the best place in discourse to post these instructions that will be easy for everyone to find.

Sandro had brought up some concerns about the formatting of the email, and that is what he was most worried about
and also impostering (which mailman has the same issue too as I understand it).
He has been successful receiving and sending emails and replying to threads, so the general email functionality is there,
It just might not be formatted in a way that a pro-email user is happy with and so I wanted to tackle that issue, cause it is the number one
thing holding us back from using discourse. Can it sufficiently handle all the use cases we had in mailman and how close can we get to that.

Part of the reason I want to use this group as a guinea pig, is I figure we can work together to come up with instructions
that would be most understandable for everyone to follow regardless how they want to work via email only or web interface or even mastadon, and I'm not confident in my understanding
of how all the discourse stuff works and how people use mailing lists.

I'm also hoping with this group we can iron out any issues people may run into before more people get on board and come up with some instructions everyone can understand.

I'm still learning how all this discourse stuff works too, so not sure I'd be the best person to put together instructions.
Many people in this group are more skilled at the general workings of discourse than I am.

Thanks,
Regina

4

Markus Neteler wrote:

I am one of those email-only preferring users as well and wish to then
see clear instructions to keep the (former) list behavior

Same here,

  Martin
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

5

On Thu, Jan 04, 2024 at 11:10:20PM -0500, Regina Obe wrote:

To more efficiently test out the use of discourse, I feel the SAC mailing
list is a perfect guinea pig.

I think we already have enough guinea pigs for now:

  - OSGeo fr
  - SAC tickets
  - pgRouting
  - QGIS (is this used?)

By the way, I see some stats from about how many "topics" are posted
per month but it's not detailed enough to show it for sub-categories
so I cannot tell of those 72 topics per month we have in the SAC
category how many are tickets and how many are messages on the list,
is that something that could be found somewhere else ?

And we have strk, who will serve as our official disgruntled user to tell us
all the ways this is not going to work for an email-only preferring user
and perhaps find solutions to make it work.

Right, but I already found many problems and not all of them are fixed
so can we please set those guinea pigs in shape before inviting more ?

  See
  Custom Query – OSGeo

  Which I also saved as a "Discourse defects" saved report:
  Discourse defects – OSGeo

--strk;

6

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 01:49:44AM -0500, Regina Obe wrote:

But I'm not sure the best terms to use to explain it to people how they can continue to use email.

The best would be not explaining anything because things just work.

Did we find out a way to get mailing list subscribers into the
discourse system automatically ? Mailman users each have some form of
"account" (they do have a password they can use to edit Mailman
settings) - could Mailman authentication be used to log into Discourse ?

I'm not even sure the best place in discourse to post these instructions that will be easy for everyone to find.

What about a Help category ?

Sandro had brought up some concerns about the formatting of the email, and that is what he was most worried about
and also impostering (which mailman has the same issue too as I understand it).

Confirmed: spoofing is general problem we also have with Mailman at
the moment.

He has been successful receiving and sending emails and replying to
threads, so the general email functionality is there,

Confirmed, BUT.

A problem I didn't raise formally yet (no ticket) is that moving
to Discourse seems to introduce a fundamental change: we stop talking
with "real email addresses" and start talking with "a bot" (discourse)
which eventually delivers our emails to the targets.

While this "bot-mediated" communication somewhat also happens with
Mailman, the messages we receive via Mailman still contain the email
address of whoever talks, which in turn can be used to bring the
communication somewhere that doesn't require the bot to remain in the
middle.

This is an important paradigma shift that we should carefully consider
as it can kill communities (I do feel this problem very heavily with
the modern issue trackers - I never know how to contact people without
having to take a million steps which turn me into a detective).

I'm also hoping with this group we can iron out any issues people
may run into before more people get on board and come up with some
instructions everyone can understand.

Can't we use the Help category as a guinea pig, just "subscribing"
(or "watching", I guess?) to that one and run on those wheels ?

Many people in this group are more skilled at the general workings of
discourse than I am.

I'm not sure about this. I know a couple of people who screamed for
having Discourse but I don't see them talking on this list at all.

Please if any of you reads this: speak up, we need you in the Help
category !

--strk;

  Libre GIS consultant/developer
  strk's services

7

Hi Martin,

On Fri, 05. Jan 2024 at 12:01:38 -0000, Martin Spott wrote:

Markus Neteler wrote:

> I am one of those email-only preferring users as well and wish to then
> see clear instructions to keep the (former) list behavior

Same here,

and here.

Jürgen

--
Jürgen E. Fischer norBIT GmbH Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Rheinstraße 13 Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
Software Engineer D-26506 Norden https://www.norbit.de
QGIS release manager (PSC) Germany IRC: jef on Libera|OFTC

8

Sandro Santilli <strk@kbt.io> writes:

While this "bot-mediated" communication somewhat also happens with
Mailman, the messages we receive via Mailman still contain the email
address of whoever talks, which in turn can be used to bring the
communication somewhere that doesn't require the bot to remain in the
middle.

This is an important paradigma shift that we should carefully consider
as it can kill communities (I do feel this problem very heavily with
the modern issue trackers - I never know how to contact people without
having to take a million steps which turn me into a detective).

I am only a lurker not a contributor here on sac@ but this is a good
point. I occasionally find it useful to be able to send offlist private
replies occasionally, even though I am a "keep it on list" type
normally. Maintaining unison on github, there's no way that I know to
do that.

I also agree with strk@'s point that there are already guinea pigs and
it would be good to straighten them out fully first. It seems there is
a belief that discourse is great and sufficient but it isn't yet clear
that this is really true.

9

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 8:15 AM Jürgen E. Fischer <jef@norbit.de> wrote:

Hi Martin,

On Fri, 05. Jan 2024 at 12:01:38 -0000, Martin Spott wrote:
> Markus Neteler wrote:
>
> > I am one of those email-only preferring users as well and wish to then
> > see clear instructions to keep the (former) list behavior
>
> Same here,

and here.

and here.

..Tom

10

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 08:11:08AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:

I occasionally find it useful to be able to send offlist private
replies occasionally, even though I am a "keep it on list" type
normally. Maintaining unison on github, there's no way that I know to
do that.

I'm poking another guinea pig about the possibility of Discourse
to include poster email addresses in the email notifications:

  Sandro Santilli: "Can #Discourse be configured to show the email ad…" - FLOSS.social

--strk;

11

Sandro Santilli wrote:

Did we find out a way to get mailing list subscribers into the
discourse system automatically ? Mailman users each have some form of
"account" (they do have a password they can use to edit Mailman
settings) - could Mailman authentication be used to log into Discourse ?

I suspect it would be preferred to take the opposite direction and not to
introduce yet another authentication service. The Postorious frontend to
Mailman3 has sort of veritable user-accounts:

  ~$ echo ".dump auth_user" | sqlite3 /var/lib/mailman3/web/mailman3web.db

and you can even plug in an LDAP backend:

  Document the ability to authenticate users via AD/LDAP (#132) · Issues · GNU Mailman / Postorius · GitLab

Don't get me wrong, this is not a vote in favour of retiring this list for
Discourse. I would just like to remind you how long it took to free the Wiki
from its standalone authentication.

Best regards,

  Martin
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Like
12

I don’t think we should move it, then. If the SAC members prefer email, let’s keep using email.

Let’s not make Discourse worse for everybody, e.g. by turning off HTML email support, or by insisting they implement some feature that only makes sense for a relatively small amount of people (like forced monospaced, fixed width rendering of posts for some categories).

I think the QGIS community will be very happy with Discourse, so why not leave it to that?

13

Sandro Santilli wrote:

I'm poking another guinea pig about the possibility of Discourse
to include poster email addresses in the email notifications:

Would you still leave the pages open for reading without authorization when
the members' email addresses stand next to their postings - thus inviting
everybody to harvest EMail addresses?

This probably opens yet another discussion ....

  Martin
--
Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 Like
14

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 03:23:45PM -0000, Martin Spott wrote:

Sandro Santilli wrote:

> I'm poking another guinea pig about the possibility of Discourse
> to include poster email addresses in the email notifications:

Would you still leave the pages open for reading without authorization when
the members' email addresses stand next to their postings - thus inviting
everybody to harvest EMail addresses?

This probably opens yet another discussion ....

The way Mailman does this is obfuscate emails somehow (lightly) in archives
while keeping it readable to subscribers. Now being a "subscriber" is pretty
easy, both with Mailman and with Discourse, but the point is that I value
the ability there must be a way for me and you to bring this conversation into
a private one, and I don't see any other way to do that w/out exchanging our
emails in the same way this email is being exchanged.

--strk;

15

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 03:10:48PM -0000, Martin Spott wrote:

  Document the ability to authenticate users via AD/LDAP (#132) · Issues · GNU Mailman / Postorius · GitLab

Don't get me wrong, this is not a vote in favour of retiring this list for
Discourse. I would just like to remind you how long it took to free the Wiki
from its standalone authentication.

This is an important concern of mine too, enough that I've asked a few
times already (but only in chat) to disable the "github login" that's
currently enabled in Discourse. The reason why people want to keep that is to
reduce friction of entry and it's usually mentioned as the reason that
"you didn't need a LDAP account to subscribe to mailing lists" which
is why I asked here about using Mailman auth for Discourse.

At this stage of things I'm perfectly happy with:

  1. Disable non-LDAP login in Discourse (it's experimental, supposedly)
  2. Enable LDAP login in Mailman3, if we install it

The way I think we should deal with "easy of access" is reducing the
friction required to get a LDAP account, and make a LDAP account not
enough to grant too many permissions over too many services.

--strk;

16

Now being a "subscriber" is pretty
easy, both with Mailman and with Discourse, but the point is that I value
the ability there must be a way for me and you to bring this conversation into
a private one, and I don't see any other way to do that w/out exchanging our
emails in the same way this email is being exchanged.

You could log into Discourse and send a direct message with your email address.

Anyway, I don't think we should move this list to Discourse. If some SAC members want it to behave exactly like mailman, that's really unlikely to happen in the near future. And I'm worried that trying to make it do that, e.g. by disabling HTML email support, would "poison the well" for everyone else.

The Discourse is mainly for the user communities, and I think they'll be really happy to use it.

Laurentiu

17

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 06:49:00PM +0200, Laurențiu Nicola wrote:

> Now being a "subscriber" is pretty
> easy, both with Mailman and with Discourse, but the point is that I value
> the ability there must be a way for me and you to bring this conversation into
> a private one, and I don't see any other way to do that w/out exchanging our
> emails in the same way this email is being exchanged.

You could log into Discourse and send a direct message with your email address.

I tried this, can any non-admin user see this message ?
https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/re-psc-vote-lets-move-this-list-to-discourse/6539

Anyway, I don't think we should move this list to Discourse. If some SAC
members want it to behave exactly like mailman, that's really unlikely
to happen in the near future. And I'm worried that trying to make it
do that, e.g. by disabling HTML email support, would "poison the well"
for everyone else.

I agree, let's keep the two things separated. Who's unhappy with a
mailing list can request using Discourse. I'd even disable the mirror,
unless it can be made very very clear that it is a read-only thing
(right now admin users can reply and that creates a discrepancy
between mailing list and Disurse view of the discussion).

--strk;

  Libre GIS consultant/developer
  strk's services

18

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 6:17 PM Sandro Santilli <strk@kbt.io> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 06:49:00PM +0200, Laurențiu Nicola wrote:
> > Now being a "subscriber" is pretty
> > easy, both with Mailman and with Discourse, but the point is that I value
> > the ability there must be a way for me and you to bring this conversation into
> > a private one, and I don't see any other way to do that w/out exchanging our
> > emails in the same way this email is being exchanged.
>
> You could log into Discourse and send a direct message with your email address.

I tried this, can any non-admin user see this message ?
https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/re-psc-vote-lets-move-this-list-to-discourse/6539

Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

Markus

1 Like
19

For lists focused on public interaction like marketing it is an advantage
to have GitHub login (and others). We are a public service outreach
organization after all :slight_smile:

--
Jody Garnett

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 8:42 AM Sandro Santilli <strk@kbt.io> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 03:10:48PM -0000, Martin Spott wrote:

> Document the ability to authenticate users via AD/LDAP (#132) · Issues · GNU Mailman / Postorius · GitLab
>
> Don't get me wrong, this is not a vote in favour of retiring this list
for
> Discourse. I would just like to remind you how long it took to free the
Wiki
> from its standalone authentication.

This is an important concern of mine too, enough that I've asked a few
times already (but only in chat) to disable the "github login" that's
currently enabled in Discourse. The reason why people want to keep that is
to
reduce friction of entry and it's usually mentioned as the reason that
"you didn't need a LDAP account to subscribe to mailing lists" which
is why I asked here about using Mailman auth for Discourse.

At this stage of things I'm perfectly happy with:

  1. Disable non-LDAP login in Discourse (it's experimental, supposedly)
  2. Enable LDAP login in Mailman3, if we install it

The way I think we should deal with "easy of access" is reducing the
friction required to get a LDAP account, and make a LDAP account not
enough to grant too many permissions over too many services.

--strk;

20

On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 06:26:56PM +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:

On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 6:17 PM Sandro Santilli <strk@kbt.io> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 05, 2024 at 06:49:00PM +0200, Laurențiu Nicola wrote:
> > > Now being a "subscriber" is pretty
> > > easy, both with Mailman and with Discourse, but the point is that I value
> > > the ability there must be a way for me and you to bring this conversation into
> > > a private one, and I don't see any other way to do that w/out exchanging our
> > > emails in the same way this email is being exchanged.
> >
> > You could log into Discourse and send a direct message with your email address.
>
> I tried this, can any non-admin user see this message ?
> https://discourse.osgeo.org/t/re-psc-vote-lets-move-this-list-to-discourse/6539

Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

Ok, admin users were able to read it so it's still really not the same
as a private conversation starting right away from my MUA, but I'm
glad such possibility still exists. Only if the Discourse service is
down I'll still be able to find those emails.

Of course I do have a lot of your emails already but I hope you can
see what the concern I have is: take $CentralServer down and all your
community is killed... I'd like to avoid that.

--strk;