Usar Discourse en lugar de una lista de correo por email

[Discourse]

Este tema explica las ventajas de utilizar Discourse en lugar de listas de correo tradicionales para conversaciones grupales y la gestión de comunidades.

Nivel de usuario requerido: Todos los usuarios

Discourse es una plataforma moderna diseñada para conversaciones grupales que ofrece ventajas significativas sobre las listas de correo tradicionales. Aunque el correo electrónico sigue siendo eficaz para comunicaciones uno a uno o en pequeños grupos, Discourse destaca en el manejo de discusiones más grandes y continuas. Aquí te explicamos por qué deberías considerar usar Discourse para tu comunidad:

Mejora en la navegación y organización

Enlazado y referencias cruzadas

Discourse facilita el enlace entre diferentes temas, creando una red de discusiones interconectadas. Esta característica permite:

• Una navegación sencilla entre conversaciones relacionadas
• Notificaciones automáticas cuando un tema es referenciado en otro lugar
• Una lista clara de enlaces entrantes para cada tema

Categorización y seguimiento

A diferencia del desafío de gestionar múltiples listas de correo, Discourse ofrece:

• Categorías con controles de seguimiento granulares
• Una página dedicada de “No leídos” para los temas que sigues
• Una página de “Nuevos” para temas recién creados
• Una página de “Destacados” para resaltar discusiones populares

Experiencia de usuario mejorada

Menor barrera de entrada

Discourse ofrece opciones de incorporación flexibles:

• Inicio de sesión con redes sociales (Google, Facebook, GitHub, Discord, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Inicio de sesión único (SSO) con proveedores de acceso personalizados
• Enlaces de invitación
• Lista blanca de dominios de correo electrónico corporativos

Controles de moderación

Previene el spam y gestiona el comportamiento de los usuarios con:

• Banderas de moderación impulsadas por la comunidad moderación flags
• Niveles de confianza personalizables
• Detección automatizada de spam

Reducción del ruido

Discourse fomenta interacciones significativas mediante:

• El uso de “Me gusta” para reconocer acuerdos sin comentarios innecesarios
• Permitir que los usuarios editen sus publicaciones, reduciendo correcciones posteriores

Mejora en la búsqueda y archivado

Búsqueda en el sitio

Discourse ofrece potentes capacidades de búsqueda:

• Búsqueda de texto completo en todo el contenido
• Opciones de búsqueda avanzada para filtrar por usuario, fecha, categoría y más
• Sugerencias de temas similares para evitar discusiones duplicadas

Contenido optimizado para SEO

Para foros públicos, Discourse mejora la discoverabilidad:

• Formato amigable para los motores de búsqueda
• El enlazado interno y externo mejora el SEO

Flexibilidad e integración

Integración con correo electrónico

Discourse aún puede atender a usuarios centrados en el correo electrónico:

• Configura el correo entrante para permitir interacciones basadas en correo
• Modo “Lista de correo” opcional para usuarios que prefieren la participación exclusiva por correo

Soporte móvil y PWA

Accede a tus foros de Discourse sobre la marcha:

• Discourse puede instalarse como una Aplicación Web Progresiva (PWA) en dispositivos móviles
• Recibe notificaciones push en todas las instancias, incluidas las autoalojadas
• Usa la aplicación DiscourseHub para ver conteos de nuevos y no leídos en múltiples instancias de Discourse

Fuentes RSS

Discourse proporciona fuentes RSS para varias páginas:

• Añade “.rss” a las URLs de los temas para obtener fuentes de temas individuales
• Fuentes RSS específicas por categoría disponibles
• Consulta esta guía para una descripción completa de las fuentes RSS disponibles

Consideraciones al cambiar de listas de correo

Aunque Discourse ofrece numerosas ventajas, considera lo siguiente al realizar la transición:

• Discourse requiere recursos de alojamiento más sustanciales en comparación con las listas de correo simples
• Algunos usuarios pueden necesitar tiempo para adaptarse a la nueva interfaz y flujo de trabajo
• Para proyectos muy pequeños o en etapas tempranas, una instancia completa de Discourse podría ser excesiva

Importación de contenido de listas de correo

Si decides cambiar a Discourse, puedes importar tu contenido existente de listas de correo. Para obtener orientación sobre cómo importar listas de correo, visita nuestra guía de importación de listas de correo.

Recursos adicionales

• Foreman :: Discourse, 6 months on: Impact Assessment
• Discourse vs. email -- Pros & Cons
• Finding Discourse RSS feeds

[pne (Philip Newton)]

Another mailing list pro is: all mailing lists end up in one mailbox.

Depending on the user’s workflow, they may read them all in one place or filter them out to various labels or folders.

Discourse may have several related mailing-list equivalents in one place, but that’s generally just from one company.

If I’m interested in horse-riding and leap seconds and 13th-century Dutch art history, I’d probably rather fire up one email client in the morning (which I do anyway) than have to visit umpteen separate Discourse instances hosted on various websites.

I think what might be useful would be something like Usenet: a decentralised one-stop shop for all sorts of content, so the horse riders, leap-second buffs, and art history lovers could all be at the same place – they would then simply choose which categories to watch and which ones to ignore.

[Rob_Nicholson]

The new app for mobile does something similar to this in that all it really does is show the new/unread counts for each of your Discourse forums. Not sure if there is a web portal that does something similar? The stack exchange group of sites ended up having one notification box didn’t they which helped me picking up on posts across multiple system but I don’t think it had a shared front end portal.

Does Discourse have an RSS feed? I use Inoreader these days and it would be handy to have my various Discourse feeds in there as well.

[pne (Philip Newton)]

@Rob_Nicholson

all it really does is shown the new/unread counts for each of your Discourse forums

This just works for hosted forums, right? So that would only partially help if one is also interested in Discourse forums that are self-hosted by other users/companies/groups/etc.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Counts and basic functionality is fine, push notifications are omitted

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Indeed, but discourse will email you posts if you want it to.

[Mittineague]

@Rob_Nicholson

Does Discourse have an RSS feed?

Many pages do. Try appending “.rss” to a URL eg.

Why use Discourse instead of a email mailing list?

Discourse Meta - Latest topics

[pne (Philip Newton)]

Also things such as categories, e.g. https://meta.discourse.org/c/faq.rss

[xiasummer]

A mailing list like google group has many good propertities.

If you want to make discourse compete the Mail list. You need at least these propertities:

For open groups:

• The group can be managed by many people. Like anyone can add or delete themselves all by themselves.

• So The group names must be presented somewhere.

• The discussion should be emailed to the email box, at least optional. And, I believe the mail should be from the sender, not from noreply.discourse.org or other public mail box.

• People can choose to post to someone in the list, or post to the group.

• Some of the good topics should be presented to Discourse, while some should just be a notification or other short messages that should NOT be presented to the discourse.

###For private Groups, there should be one or a few managers.

• How should we present there private groups? How should the Manager manage the groups? All big problems.

Discourse is not so mature to replace mail-lists.

I think we should devote great effort to solves all these problems first. Now is not the time for marketing.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@xiasummer

The group can be managed by many people. Like anyone can add or delete themselves all by themselves.

Doesn’t Discourse allow that too, but with even greater granularity?

@xiasummer

So The group names must be presented somewhere.

I don’t understand what you mean by this.

@xiasummer

The discussion should be emailed to the email box, at least optional.

Like we do?

@xiasummer

And, I believe the mail should be from the sender, not from noreply.discourse.org or other public mail box.

I can’t say I agree with that one. This is how broken, messy email chains happen.

@xiasummer

People can choose to post to someone in the list, or post to the group.

Could you explain further? What is “the group” in this case?

@xiasummer

Some of the good topics should be presented to Discourse, while some should just be a notification or other short messages that should NOT be presented to the discourse.

Also don’t understand this one.

@xiasummer

How should we present there private groups? How should the Manager manage the groups? All big problems.

Just require logins? What’s the big problem?

[pacharanero (Marcus Baw)]

@erlend_sh this is a really good article and covers some of the points I often have to make to people when I’m explaining why they need a forum as opposed to several mailing lists. I work primarily in the National Health Service in the UK, where email is used for everything (unless a fax machine can be used), and therefore people are literally drowning in emails, when there are so much better ways of handling and sharing information such as (but not limited to) Discourse forums. Most of the user-land resistance comes from a primal fear that you will increase that email volume. My contention is that if you know everything is archived on the forum you can simply delete the notifications or switch them off.

One killer feature of fora over mailing lists that you missed out is the access to ALL of the messaging history that you get when you join a forum. With older style ‘listserver’ mailing lists you only have whatever history you’ve saved in your email client.

This messaging history may well contain the answer to your question, so you can search, find your answer, and you don’t even need to post your n00b question. (If you had posted that n00b question on the mailing list, people would bark back at you ‘THAT question again? Wasn’t that answered just a few weeks ago?’ anyway, so if you can find the existing post it’s an advantage)

Admittedly, with some ‘mailing lists’ such as Google Groups you can search the messaging history to a degree, but this isn’t they way most people normally interact with the forum, so I think fewer people than you think would know/bother to do this.

Marcus

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Thanks for pointing that out. I added a paragraph under “Search friendly archive that prevents repetition” including a showcase of our “Similar topic” JIT notification. Let me know if you have something to add to that.

[tophee (Christoph)]

@pacharanero

If you had posted that n00b question on the mailing list, people would bark back at you ‘THAT question again? Wasn’t that answered just a few weeks ago?’

Though on certain discourse forums this will still happen to you The difference is, of course, that on discourse you have a chance of avoiding it, provided you know the right search terms.

[Rob_Nicholson]

Over on the CAMRA Discourse forums, an attempt has been made to placate those very familiar and happy with mailing lists by saying you can make Discourse work like a mailing list.

Personally I feel this is a mistake as said members will never learn about the advantages of working in the much richer web interface.

For me the biggest plus of a forum is that I can edit my reply after posting. I’m crap at proof-reading before hand so often spot a typo.

And isn’t the story from Colin in the (UK) national health service a common one?

[downey (Michael Downey)]

@Rob_Nicholson

you can make Discourse work like a mailing list

Sure, but there’s always the “extra features” of the web interface that will always be there, drawing people back and tempting them to check out the web UI. I’ve seen many people, originally “stubborn” and refusing to use the web, eventually switch over because the overall UX was so much better. Maybe not everyone, but it definitely happens. (Plus, I’m a big believer in the “meet people where they are” philosophy of building community.)

[fedorov (Andrey Fedorov)]

I would also add few more advantages of Discourse that I don’t think were mentioned:

• very comprehensive usage statistics reporting interface
• intuitive and engaging user feedback system with “likes” and “solutions” that attracts more participation
• plugins for integrations with external products (YouTube, GitHub) that help connect communities and further engage users
• effective moderation/spam filtering engine

[hellekin]

Escribí una guía breve sobre cómo usar Discourse por correo electrónico en LibreHosters. ¿Me faltó algo?

How to Use Discourse for Mailing-List Dwellers

[Jonathan5]

Esto no es realmente una diferencia entre una lista de correo que funciona y un foro que funciona, pero en la práctica he descubierto que garantizar la entregabilidad de los correos electrónicos de las listas de correo en un servidor compartido es un trabajo arduo. La entregabilidad de las notificaciones por correo electrónico parece más fácil con Discourse, utilizando Mailgun, y de todos modos no es un problema potencial, ya que la gente visita el foro en línea en lugar de depender por completo de recibir el correo electrónico. Esta es solo mi experiencia personal.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

[quote=“Jonathan5, post:18, topic:54298”]
en la práctica, he descubierto que garantizar la entregabilidad de los correos electrónicos de las listas de correo en un servidor compartido es un trabajo arduo
[/quote]Sí, no me digas, cc @tshenry @simon, la entregabilidad de los correos electrónicos es un problema extremadamente difícil.

[MikeNolan]

Si requiere que los usuarios inicien sesión para acceder a cierto contenido, publiquen o utilicen ciertas funciones, entonces Discourse no elimina realmente los problemas de entregabilidad del correo electrónico, solo los hace menos frecuentes, porque aún debe poder entregar ALGUN correo electrónico a los usuarios para configurarlos o para actualizar contraseñas.

Y mi experiencia (más de 30 años como administrador de correo electrónico) es que si solo tiene que lidiar con problemas de entrega de correo electrónico con poca frecuencia, es posible que ni siquiera note cuándo cambian las cosas. (Y cambiarán con frecuencia, por ejemplo, cuando los ISP modifiquen sus reglas).

Las listas de gran volumen crean otras categorías de problemas, al igual que permitir respuestas o la creación de temas por correo electrónico.