[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Nicholas Chammas]

To follow up on one of the suggestions Brett and Donald made, I think the
best solution today for a modern discussion forum is Discourse
<http://www.discourse.org/>.

Discourse is built by some of the same people who built Stack Overflow,
including Jeff Atwood
<http://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/>. Among
the many excellent features <http://www.discourse.org/about/> it has is
full support for a “mailing list mode”, where you can reply to and start
new conversations entirely via email. That may be important for people who
are not interested in using the web for their conversations.

Discourse doesn’t currently have a voting plugin, but here is an
interesting discussion about adding one
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/feature-to-allow-uservoice-getsatisfaction-suggestions-and-voting/19812>.
Just earlier today a member of the Discourse team followed-up on that
discussion with a detailed proposal to make the plugin real
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-feature-voting-separated-from-likes/38772>
.

As an example of the polish Discourse already has, consider this remark by
Random832:

It would be interesting to make a forum with a “spin-off thread” feature,
which would automate the placement of the reply in a new thread and a note
in the old thread with a link to the new one.

If you look at the post I linked to about adding a voting plugin
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-feature-voting-separated-from-likes/38772>,
you can see just this kind of link offered by Discourse since the poster
spun that new thread from an existing one.

A large open source community using Discourse today is Docker
<https://forums.docker.com/>. If Donald sets up a Discourse instance for
Packaging, that should serve as a good trial for us to deploy it elsewhere.
I suspect it will be a success.

As for hosting, there are many options
<https://meta.discourse.org/t/becoming-the-new-standard-discussion-tool-for-open-source-projects/26305/9?u=nicholaschammas>
that range from free but self-managed, to fully managed for a monthly fee.

Nick
​

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 10:50 AM Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
> > How do you change the subject line to indicate that the topic has
> > drifted (or is a spin-off), while still appropriately quoting the
> > previous post?
>
> You're free to quote any post anywhere, even if you make a new
> thread. In general to do this you have to start your reply in the
> original thread, then copy/paste the quote markup (which includes a
> magic link to the post you are quoting) into the post new thread form.
>
> It would be interesting to make a forum with a "spin-off thread"
> feature, which would automate the placement of the reply in a new thread
> and a note in the old thread with a link to the new one.
>
> But in most cases this can't be automated because on better-managed
> forums once a digression has grown large enough to need a separate
> thread, the forum's moderators will move earlier posts about it
> (originally made in the first thread) to the new thread. (it might be
> interesting to make a forum that provides a way to have a post live in
> two different threads at the same time)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Python-ideas mailing list
> Python-ideas at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas
> Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/attachments/20160130/593f20cb/attachment.html>