[Python-ideas] A bit meta

[Guido van Rossum]

Oooh, Discourse looks and sounds good. Hopefully we can opt out from
voting, everything else looks just right. I recommend requesting some
PSF money for a fully-hosted instance, so nobody has to suffer when
it's down, security upgrades will be taken care of, etc.

On Sat, Jan 30, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Nicholas Chammas
<nicholas.chammas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
> Discourse is built by some of the same people who built Stack Overflow,
> including Jeff Atwood. Among the many excellent features 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. Just earlier today a member of the Discourse
> team followed-up on that discussion with a detailed proposal to make the
> plugin real.
>
> 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, 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. 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 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)
>>
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>
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)