[Koha-bugs] [Bug 34315] Provide an alternative to the mailing lists - Discourse

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.koha-community.org]

https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=34315

--- Comment #9 from Thomas Dukleth <td-koha-bugs at agogme.com> ---
I have made a much more detailed investigation of many aspects of Mailman 3
with Postorius and HyperKitty, Discourse, and Flarum.  I will post details as I
consolidate text for the various aspects.

We need to remain inclusive and retain email compatibility for the portion of
mailing list subscribers is who rightly understand that forum software is often
designed to make staying informed about about several threads an inefficient
game.  Community development may be aided by having some gamification available
even if it is accompanied by anti-usability features.


Flarum Misses Email Compatibility.

Flarum should be excluded from consideration at least on the grounds of
breaking inclusiveness for having the feature for users to send email only as a
recently under development probably only proprietary and depending upon a
proprietary service.


HyperKitty Misses Some Additional Forum Development.

HyperKitty may be a weak choice for the forum aspect because it lacks
development effort past an early point.  It has only the most basic features
and might not need much more other than hooking into some additional Django
features and plugins along with a more engaging CSS but the absence of that
work leaves HyperKitty less likely to assist as much as Discourse with
community engagement for which the anti-usability features of Discourse may be
a virtue.  I will detail what is committed but not released and the problem of
Fedora development of HyperKitty which is divergent and for which changes are
not committed upstream.  [The Fedora development does not have much more of
what is needed but does have some commits which could be adopted upstream.] 

[Search by date in HyperKitty, unlike browse by date which obviously works,
seems to be inaccurate for lack of good date indexing but may work properly
with appropriate undocumented syntax.  Sorting search results by date is easy
and the web browser back function always works to return to the place in the
search result set in my more recent testing of HyperKitty with no need for
multiple browser tabs.  HyperKitty is still much less efficient than very old
email clients.] 


Discourse Manageable with Configuration and Modification Contrary to Design. 

Discourse seems the best choice for forum engagement despite some terrible
inefficient anti-usability features merely by the absence of a competing level
FOSS development work for some other forum.  Effective configuration for a
friendly cooperative and inclusive FOSS community requires much configuration
counter to the intentions of Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, the company
controlling Discourse with the use of a contributors license agreement and much
else.  Good FOSS options should also be chosen contrary to the official
recommendation of proprietary services which may be easier for most users to
implement.  I will detail all those which I discovered after consolidating my
text for various aspects.

In the case of receiving email. what is officially described as the worst
choice should be considered the best.  Living up to the promise of email
compatibility will require either modifying a hard coded design, creating some
plugin to do so, or constantly running a script to elevate everyone to trust
level 2 merely to allow known users to use email for posting with their own
topic as opposed to merely answering about topics raised by others without
being forced to use the forum software for an extended period.  Email
compatibility for those who rightly find forum software especially problematic
should mean not forcing users to use the forum software.

[A search result set can be forced to a state where the web browser back
function at least partially works by following the more link with less need for
multiple browser tabs to preserve context.  It is still much less efficient
than very old email clients.]

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