Future of Ubuntu Discourse?

Fri Feb 12 01:35:09 UTC 2016

I'm just going to throw in my very infrequent offered feedback and suggest
that unless Ubuntu Forums Council and Canonical can come to an agreement to
sunset vBulletin and keep it for archival purposes only and begin using
discourse then I don't see discourse taking off.

Discourse imho is a significantly more secure platform and much more modern
it even has functionality to where it can be used like a mailman mailing
list where people can subscribe and interact entirely via email.
Ultimately, if the community could come to some consensus around sunsetting
vBulletin and promoting Discourse I think overall you would see more web
based discussion participation on Discourse than is currently seen on
vBulletin.

Discourse was created partially because proprietary software like vBulletin
was no longer attractive as the web has become much more innovative and
IMHO Discourse encompasses all the features vBulletin has plus so much more
and that is why a very long list of open source projects use Discourse.

The only poor thing I have to say about Discourse is they really have a
hacky way of using Docker ;)

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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-- 
*Benjamin Kerensa*
*http://benjaminkerensa.com <http://benjaminkerensa.com>*
*"I am what I am because of who we all are" - Ubuntu*
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