Webhook to forward posts to a mailinglist: best practice?

If you’re not moving people to the new platform, you’re not migrating, you’re creating another community, and hoping that people come across. Pretty much, that doesn’t work. Never has, never will, and webhooks won’t save you.

The idea that you “can’t” move users between platforms is utter bollocks. Migrations happen all the time between platforms, and as long as the platforms are fairly feature-compatible, rarely does it cause more than a bit of temporary butt-hurt amongst a few people whose cheese has been moved. Now, if you completely change the way the system works (e-mail to web-based forum), yes, that will rightfully piss people off, which is why I’m wondering what features your userbase actually cares about, so we can fix it.

ToS, etc are red herrings; you don’t have to have the default ones if you want, and you can have none at all if you really want to go wild. So is “segmented audiences”; Discourse isn’t mail-a-kimp, and I hope like hell it stays that way. Discourse has categories, which map nicely to individual mailing lists, and that’s that. If you migrate a mailing list properly, people aren’t going to be getting “summary” e-mails, because they’re getting mailing list mode instead, so it makes no sense that you bring that up, either.

You’re not trying to transition “across the seam”, you’re trying to make life hard for yourself by building a second, separate community and then trying to lure people across who don’t like the taste of your bait. I’m yet to see an example of that working, and I’ve seen plenty of examples of it failing miserably. You’re not going to find easy “best practices” to do something that is, itself, a really, really bad idea.

5 Likes