KDE is the original and best Linux on the desktop project and we are meeting this week in Milan. There is plenty of support for moving our forums and mailing lists to Discourse and I’ve set up a testing site to give it a go. We have a few questions.
Our current forums use phpBB with some customisations. They cover many topics and sub categories ranging from applications and various features therein to entirely localised sub forums for different languages.
- Deployment with Docker means we are putting lots of trust in the Discourse Docker creation process. How responsive is the team behind the Docker images to updating for security issues in the underlying libraries? (libpng was given as a relevant example which has had issues in the past.)
- We have a custom addition to phpbb for our artwork app Krita which shows an image along with the topics list, is somthing similar possible for Discourse? Work in Progress Artworks • KDE Community Forums
- We’d like to move developer mailing lists over to Discourse but currently the separation between forums and mailman lists prevents many loud and unhelpful users annoying the developers, is there a way to separate different lists so there is some barrier to moving to the other type?
- For mailing lists it’s common to already have a list of e-mails of people to add in. Can we add in e-mails into a Category in Discourse or does each user need to faff around adding themselves? Maybe there is a way of inviting people to a category?
- Can it support multiple domains for incoming e-mails?
- For a forum with an incoming e-mail address how does a user find out what that address is? I could not work out a way to do this.
- What are the tools to remove identifying info for users who request it?
- Is there a command line tool to review the moderation queue to approve or discard posts? We currently use this a lot with Mailman.
- We have a guided posting page which directs users towards the right forum in a fairly user friendly way, is there any equivalent https://forum.kde.org/guided.php?stage=1
- We have sub-forums where app categories (see graphics and Krita forums) contain app forums which then contains some sub-forums within that. Is a stepped categorisation method possible?
- Is it possible to not deploy on Docker? Our sysadmin has expressed a preference for being able to use our own deployment tooling.
Sorry to ask so many questions, pointers to docs are good answers too of course