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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
本主题阐述了在群体对话和社区管理中，使用 Discourse 相较于传统电子邮件邮件列表的优势。
所需用户等级：所有用户
The difference is, of course, that on discourse you have a chance of avoiding it, provided you know the right search terms.