Usando o Discourse em vez de uma lista de e-mail

[Discourse]

Este tópico explica as vantagens de usar o Discourse em vez de listas de e-mail tradicionais para conversas em grupo e gestão de comunidades.

Nível de usuário necessário: Todos os usuários

O Discourse é uma plataforma moderna projetada para conversas em grupo que oferece vantagens significativas em relação às listas de e-mail tradicionais. Embora o e-mail continue eficaz para comunicações individuais ou em pequenos grupos, o Discourse se destaca no gerenciamento de discussões maiores e contínuas. Veja por que você deve considerar usar o Discourse para sua comunidade:

Navegação e organização aprimoradas

Vinculação e referência cruzada

O Discourse facilita a criação de links entre diferentes tópicos, formando uma rede de discussões interconectadas. Essa funcionalidade permite:

• Navegação fácil entre conversas relacionadas
• Notificações automáticas quando um tópico é referenciado em outro lugar
• Uma lista clara de links de entrada para cada tópico

Categorização e acompanhamento

Diferentemente do desafio de gerenciar múltiplas listas de e-mail, o Discourse oferece:

• Categorias com controles de acompanhamento granulares
• Uma página dedicada “Não lidos” para tópicos que você está acompanhando
• Uma página “Novos” para tópicos recém-criados
• Uma página “Topo” para destacar discussões populares

Experiência do usuário aprimorada

Barreira de entrada reduzida

O Discourse oferece opções de integração flexíveis:

• Login social (Google, Facebook, GitHub, Discord, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Single Sign-On (SSO) com provedores de login personalizados
• Links de convite
• Lista de permissões para domínios de e-mail corporativos

Controles de moderação

Previna spam e gerencie o comportamento dos usuários com:

• Sinalizações de moderação apoiadas pela comunidade moderation flags
• Níveis de confiança personalizáveis
• Detecção automatizada de spam

Redução de ruído

O Discourse incentiva interações significativas ao:

• Usar “Curtidas” para reconhecer concordância sem comentários desnecessários
• Permitir que os usuários editem suas mensagens, reduzindo correções posteriores

Melhor indexação e arquivamento

Busca no próprio site

O Discourse oferece recursos de busca poderosos:

• Busca de texto completo em todo o conteúdo
• Opções de busca avançada para filtrar por usuário, data, categoria e muito mais
• Sugestões de tópicos semelhantes para evitar discussões duplicadas

Conteúdo amigável para SEO

Para fóruns públicos, o Discourse melhora a descoberta:

• Formato amigável para motores de busca
• Links internos e externos melhoram o SEO

Flexibilidade e integração

Integração com e-mail

O Discourse ainda pode atender a usuários focados em e-mail:

• Configure e-mails de entrada para permitir interações baseadas em e-mail
• Modo de “Lista de e-mail” opcional para usuários que preferem engajamento apenas por e-mail

Suporte a dispositivos móveis e PWA

Acesse seus fóruns Discourse em movimento:

• O Discourse pode ser instalado como um Progressive Web App (PWA) em dispositivos móveis
• Receba notificações push em todas as instâncias, incluindo as auto-hospedadas
• Use o aplicativo DiscourseHub para visualizar contagens de novos e não lidos em múltiplas instâncias do Discourse

Feeds RSS

O Discourse fornece feeds RSS para várias páginas:

• Adicione “.rss” às URLs de tópicos para feeds de tópicos individuais
• Feeds RSS específicos por categoria disponíveis
• Consulte este guia para uma visão completa dos feeds RSS disponíveis

Considerações ao migrar de listas de e-mail

Embora o Discourse ofereça diversas vantagens, considere o seguinte durante a transição:

• O Discourse exige recursos de hospedagem mais robustos em comparação com listas de e-mail simples
• Alguns usuários podem precisar de tempo para se adaptar à nova interface e fluxo de trabalho
• Para projetos muito pequenos ou em estágio inicial, uma instância completa do Discourse pode ser excessiva

Importando conteúdo de listas de e-mail

Se decidir migrar para o Discourse, você pode importar seu conteúdo existente de listas de e-mail. Para orientações sobre a importação de listas de e-mail, visite nosso guia de importação de listas de e-mail.

Recursos adicionais

• 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]

Escrevi um pequeno guia sobre como usar o Discourse por e-mail na LibreHosters. Perdi alguma coisa?

How to Use Discourse for Mailing-List Dwellers

[Jonathan5]

Isso não é realmente uma diferença entre uma lista de e-mails funcional e um fórum funcional, mas na prática descobri que garantir a entregabilidade de e-mails de listas de e-mails em um servidor compartilhado é um trabalho árduo. A entregabilidade de notificações por e-mail parece mais fácil com o Discourse, usando o Mailgun, e não é um problema tão potencial, pois as pessoas visitam o fórum online em vez de depender inteiramente de receber o e-mail. Esta é apenas a minha experiência pessoal.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Jonathan5

na prática, descobri que garantir a entregabilidade de e-mails de listas de mala direta em um servidor compartilhado é um trabalho árduo

Sim, sem brincadeira, cc @tshenry @simon a entregabilidade de e-mails é um problema extremamente difícil.

[MikeNolan]

Se você exigir que os usuários façam login para acessar algum conteúdo, postar ou usar determinados recursos, o Discourse não elimina realmente os problemas de entregabilidade de e-mail, apenas os torna menos frequentes, pois você ainda precisa conseguir entregar ALGUM e-mail aos usuários para configurá-los ou para atualizar senhas.

E minha experiência (mais de 30 anos como administrador de e-mail) é que, se você só precisa lidar com problemas de entrega de e-mail com pouca frequência, pode nem notar quando as coisas mudam. (E elas mudarão com frequência, por exemplo, quando os provedores de internet modificarem suas regras.)

Listas de alto volume criam outras categorias de problemas, assim como permitir respostas ou criação de tópicos por e-mail.