I hope I selected the right category for my discussion. Here it is: I want to introduce Discourse at work. I work in scientific research and I feel Discourse can help us organize things better. Before I do, I want to be prepared for inevitable questions about the “use case” for Discourse. Questi…

I think the answer is “It depends on how your organisation is using email”. One of the advantages of a platform like Discourse is that it provides what you might call “discretionary pull”, meaning that individual users can choose to pay attention to the full range of topics and categories on Discou…

Thanks, Andrew. I can think of a possible Pro for Discourse: by cleverly organizing categories into “fields op interest” you get a much better separation and overview of topics. Modern mail clients let you organize topics into folders and/or tag them. But I suspect that a well layed-out list of c…

I think the key point is the discretionary aspect: With an email system the user has to guess that there might be someone who has information that they might be interested in, then contact that person and ask to be included in the to: list. If it turns out that that information source isn’t what …

Excellent point! This goes especially for scientific research, where students and researchers need to follow several interdisciplinary fields related to their current research. This is a definite Pro for Discourse.

I went through a similar thing, trying to convince my fellow scouting leaders to use Discourse. We were (and still are mostly for now) using e-mail for group-wide communication, leader teams usually use a WhatsApp group or something like that for small talk. My strongest motivations were: Archiv…

Thanks, steef. This makes an interesting read. I particularly like the point you made in Contact management – new people can find discussions from before their time easily. That is important in scientific research. Once the budget has dried up, people are gone in an instant. Discourse will then pr…

I’ll write a more extensive reply to this in a bit, as this is a common question we ought to have a canonical answer for. In the meantime: [image] STiNGER: Doesn’t this introduce redundancy? Like people discussing things in Discourse that are really meant for email and vice versa? Not quite…

Sure, Erland. In our research facility, people are accustomed to inform each other by mail. We use a couple of mailinglists to sent the same message to multiple recipients. That’s our primary means of communication. People respond to email quickly, and are implicitely expected to do so. It is p…

[image] STiNGER: We use a couple of mailinglists to sent the same message to multiple recipients. You can simply have those lists post to Discourse categories and (depending on preferences and such) they’ll get an email. The ability to have access to old archives in a readable format seems p…

Absolutely, Jay. I have been impressed with Discourse’s search function from day one. [image] pfaffman: You can simply have those lists post to Discourse categories and (depending on preferences and such) they’ll get an email. I am not sure if I understand what you mean. Are you referring t…

Discourse vs. email -- Pros & Cons

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mcwumbly (Dave McClure) December 14, 2016, 8:28pm 16

I shared some thoughts on this subject here:

Topic		Replies	Views
Using Discourse instead of an email mailing list Site Management explanation	20	20025	June 15, 2023
Discourse and Email Lists (like Google Groups) Community Building	3	4084	December 15, 2016
Thanks for all of your help with Discourse! Praise	2	2010	October 17, 2018
Mailman to Discourse Migration Self-hosting	2	1694	March 13, 2019
Mailing list features Support	12	7670	November 28, 2022

Discourse vs. email -- Pros & Cons

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