Usare Discourse invece di una mailing list via email

[Discourse]

Questo argomento spiega i vantaggi dell’utilizzo di Discourse rispetto alle tradizionali liste di distribuzione email per le conversazioni di gruppo e la gestione della comunità.

Livello utente richiesto: Tutti gli utenti

Discourse è una piattaforma moderna progettata per le conversazioni di gruppo che offre vantaggi significativi rispetto alle tradizionali liste di distribuzione email. Sebbene l’email rimanga efficace per le comunicazioni uno-a-uno o per piccoli gruppi, Discourse eccelle nella gestione di discussioni più ampie e in corso. Ecco perché dovresti considerare l’uso di Discourse per la tua comunità:

Navigazione e organizzazione migliorate

Collegamenti e riferimenti incrociati

Discourse rende facile collegare diversi argomenti, creando una rete di discussioni interconnesse. Questa funzionalità permette:

• Una navigazione semplice tra conversazioni correlate
• Notifiche automatiche quando un argomento viene citato altrove
• Un elenco chiaro dei collegamenti in entrata per ogni argomento

Categorizzazione e monitoraggio

A differenza della sfida di gestire più liste di distribuzione, Discourse offre:

• Categorie con controlli di monitoraggio granulari
• Una pagina dedicata “Non letti” per gli argomenti che segui
• Una pagina “Nuovi” per gli argomenti appena creati
• Una pagina “Top” per evidenziare le discussioni più popolari

Esperienza utente potenziata

Barriera all’ingresso ridotta

Discourse offre opzioni di onboarding flessibili:

• Accesso tramite social (Google, Facebook, GitHub, Discord, LinkedIn, ecc.)
• Single Sign-On con provider di accesso personalizzati
• Link di invito
• Whitelist di domini email aziendali

Controlli di moderazione

Prevenisci lo spam e gestisci il comportamento degli utenti con:

• Segnalazioni di moderazione basate sulla comunità moderation flags
• Livelli di fiducia personalizzabili
• Rilevamento automatico dello spam

Riduzione del rumore

Discourse incoraggia interazioni significative:

• Utilizzando i “Mi piace” per riconoscere l’accordo senza commenti non necessari
• Consentendo agli utenti di modificare i propri post, riducendo le correzioni successive

Ricerca e archiviazione migliorate

Ricerca sul sito

Discourse offre potenti capacità di ricerca:

• Ricerca full-text su tutto il contenuto
• Opzioni di ricerca avanzate per filtrare per utente, data, categoria e altro
• Suggerimenti di argomenti simili per prevenire discussioni duplicate

Contenuti ottimizzati per la SEO

Per i forum pubblici, Discourse migliora la reperibilità:

• Formato amichevole per i motori di ricerca
• I collegamenti interni ed esterni migliorano la SEO

Flessibilità e integrazione

Integrazione email

Discourse può comunque soddisfare gli utenti focalizzati sull’email:

• Configura l’email in entrata per consentire interazioni basate sull’email
• Modalità “Lista di distribuzione” opzionale per gli utenti che preferiscono un coinvolgimento solo via email

Supporto mobile e PWA

Accedi ai tuoi forum Discourse in movimento:

• Discourse può essere installato come Progressive Web App (PWA) su dispositivi mobili
• Ricevi notifiche push su tutte le istanze, incluse quelle ospitate autonomamente
• Usa l’app DiscourseHub per visualizzare i conteggi di nuovi e non letti su più istanze di Discourse

Feed RSS

Discourse fornisce feed RSS per varie pagine:

• Aggiungi “.rss” agli URL degli argomenti per i feed degli argomenti singoli
• Feed RSS specifici per categoria disponibili
• Consulta questa guida per una panoramica completa dei feed RSS disponibili

Considerazioni quando si passa dalle liste di distribuzione

Sebbene Discourse offra numerosi vantaggi, considera quanto segue durante la transizione:

• Discourse richiede risorse di hosting più sostanziali rispetto alle semplici liste di distribuzione
• Alcuni utenti potrebbero aver bisogno di tempo per adattarsi alla nuova interfaccia e al nuovo flusso di lavoro
• Per progetti molto piccoli o nelle fasi iniziali, un’istanza completa di Discourse potrebbe essere eccessiva

Importazione dei contenuti delle liste di distribuzione

Se decidi di passare a Discourse, puoi importare i contenuti esistenti della tua lista di distribuzione. Per indicazioni sull’importazione delle liste di distribuzione, visita la nostra guida all’importazione delle liste di distribuzione.

Risorse aggiuntive

• 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]

Ho scritto una breve guida all’uso di Discourse via email su LibreHosters. Mi sono perso qualcosa?

How to Use Discourse for Mailing-List Dwellers

[Jonathan5]

Questa non è una vera differenza tra una mailing list funzionante e un forum funzionante, ma in pratica ho scoperto che garantire la recapitalità delle email dalle mailing list su un server condiviso è un lavoro arduo. La recapitalità delle notifiche via email sembra più facile con Discourse, utilizzando Mailgun, e non è comunque un problema potenziale dato che le persone visitano il forum online piuttosto che fare affidamento esclusivamente sulla ricezione dell’email. Questa è solo la mia esperienza personale.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Jonathan5

in practice I have found that ensuring deliverability of emails from mailing lists on a shared server is hard work

Sì, non scherziamo cc @tshenry @simon la deliverability delle email è un problema estremamente difficile.

[MikeNolan]

Se richiedi agli utenti di accedere per accedere a determinati contenuti, pubblicare o utilizzare determinate funzionalità, Discourse non elimina realmente i problemi di recapito delle e-mail, li rende solo meno frequenti, poiché devi comunque essere in grado di recapitare ALCUNE e-mail agli utenti per configurarli o per aggiornare le password.

E la mia esperienza (oltre 30 anni come amministratore di posta elettronica) è che se devi affrontare problemi di recapito delle e-mail solo occasionalmente, potresti nemmeno notare quando le cose cambiano. (E cambieranno frequentemente, ad esempio quando gli ISP modificano le loro regole di base.)

Le liste ad alto volume creano altre categorie di problemi, così come consentire risposte o la creazione di argomenti via e-mail.