Migration from mailman to discourse

Clearing the Path
1

At the time when I originally talked about making this thread, we were still considering whether we should deprecate mailman (https://lists.snowdrift.coop/) in favor of discourse. At this point, that seems like a foregone conclusion. However, we still need to figure out how best to set it up. Here’s my initial proposal, as a starting point:

  • Create one email address per forum category: design@…, development@…, legal@…, etc
  • Sending an email to one of these will create a new topic in that category.
  • Allow users to configure email notifications as they see fit.
  • Allow replies by email.

I think this will come close enough to fully replicating email functionality that it’s OK to drop mailman and iterate from there.

1 Appreciation
2

Implementation detail re: email addresses. When I was reading up on setting this up, someone suggested the following:

  • Make the mailing addresses on our own domain. Eg, design@community.snowdrift.coop
  • Make them just forwarding addresses, eg -> snowdrift-design-community@example.com
  • Set up posts by email with snowdrift-design-community@example.com

The advantage being that we can use our own domain, but delegate spam filtering to example.com.

8

Are there any blockers for actually enabling these options? I am a little annoyed at the web interface personally :wink:

1 Appreciation
9

In practice, there are blockers. We’re currently waiting for the final steps for our regular email to be operated through OSU OSL. After that, we have several steps for them to take over our services including the main site and the forum. Once this whole massive migration is complete, it will be a huge relief. Sysadmin hassles have cost us years of delays and headaches.

When OSU OSL is fully managing things, we could look into these forum options. I think even then it’s not trivial, but probably doable if we’re sure there’s no real downsides.

1 Appreciation