[hackerspaces] Mailing List Software

[John Magolske]

Hi,

* Paul Brown <paul90brown at gmail.com> [140425 12:32]:
> I just noticed a hackerspace using some software called Discourse for
> their mailing list + forum: http://forum.tinkermill.org/latest/more
> It also looks like Discourse is free (and open source) as long as you
> host it yourself. The github page for Discourse is here:
> https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I've been looking around for mailing list + forum software for
a while, just came across this commentary in a new.ycombinator
thread [1] :

    codinghorror  
    We really want Discourse to get to a place where we have extremely
    robust 100% open source mailing list support -- we now have reply
    via email, notify via email, and community contributed submit
    topics via email. Working on attachments via email this week.

Also in that thread were comments about the DLang forums [2]. They
use forum software written in D [3], which in addition to providing
a web-based forum offers access via NNTP and mailing list [4] (the
mailing list being gateway'd from the news server).

> We switched from mailman because Google Groups has a better web
> interface and we liked the idea of not hosting/managing it ourselves.

While pipermail is a rather clunky interface to browse, one thing I
do like is the possibility of downloading the entire archives in mbox
format for off-line reading with a single wget command [5]. Really do
miss being able to do that in Google Groups, which AFAIK provides no
means for downloading archives.

Oh, and apparently Discourse is not threaded. Jeff Atwood's comments
on that are interesting & persuasive [6]...I see his point, though I'm
not sure I entirely agree.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7550585
[2] http://forum.dlang.org
[3] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
[4] http://lists.puremagic.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/digitalmars-d
[5] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2012-October/074210.html
[6] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html

Regards,

John

-- 
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact