Future of Ubuntu Discourse?

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 8:42 AM, Jorge O. Castro <jorge at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've gotten poked at by the Discourse guys that the site is pretty much
> dead. The CSS is unmaintained, groups that committed to using the site never
> materialized, and in general the original vibe we were looking for is seems
> to be centered around /r/ubuntu anyway.
>
> I'd like to propose a shutdown/tail-off this cycle unless someone steps up
> to fix the issues and/or drive the project forward.

I don't like web forums so I wouldn't be the one to drive anything
here, but as a data point:

While at the UbuCon Summit unconference we were talking about a new
initiative to share Ubuntu user stories and photos in a casual spot
where we could chat about them. Cool, right? Since many folks won't
use Reddit due to abuse and harassment concerns (myself included), it
was suggested that the project use Discourse for this instead. Half
the people in the session had never heard of it, and they all
considered themselves pretty well informed in the world of Ubuntu.

I suspect that there was that initial push for trying it out, but over
the years there was not much work put into telling people about it
more and making it more visible. Quickly looking around it's unclear
to me how people would ever find it. It's mentioned once on
community.ubuntu.com, at the bottom of the Support page:
http://community.ubuntu.com/help-information/finding-help/support/ and
the only other mentions of it I can find are a discussion a while back
to see if any LoCo teams wanted to try it. Also don't report popular
posts or statistics for it in UWN like we do for AskUbuntu. This isn't
to say making it more visible is a panacea, maybe people just don't
have an interest in using it, but we could do a much better job with
this if someone does want to continue to lead.

I'll also note that the promise of Discourse as it was sold to me was
a modern web forum that would also integrate with email. Unfortunately
the email integration part seemed to not be much of a priority to
developers, there are very few controls to tune what you receive, it's
kind of all or nothing. So for me it was just another web forum that I
don't have time to manually check all the time to be an effective
participant.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2