Ryan C. Gordon
2017-03-28 01:52:41 UTC
tl;dr: We're going to try to move the mailing list and web forums to a
new piece of software. Please go to https://discourse.libsdl.org/ and
claim your account. You can still use it as a mailing list or a web
forum. This list will (probably) be going away soon.
So this is an experiment with Discourse (https://discourse.org/), to see
if we can solve our mailing list and forum woes:
Problems we currently have:
- The forum software is wildly out of date, and couldn't be upgraded
without losing the email bridge. Upgrading the software breaks a
fundamental feature we rely on, not upgrading it is a massive security
risk. We tried--and failed--to move the web server to PHP7; the forums
needed massive work to just run at all. Serious problems, like not being
able to register an account or post a reply, were failing silently, so
we could never be sure if we ever really had fixed it up completely. For
now we have dropped the web server back to PHP5, but being trapped on
old versions of basic software to support old versions of custom
software is doubly bad.
- The spammers on the forums were brutal; they couldn't actually post
because we had to approve the accounts, but they'd just flood our SMTP
server with backscatter trying to make thousands of accounts, all day long.
- We have to manually approve forum accounts in the first place. :/
- The mailing list was unreliable, and would lose mail, lose the
archives, etc. This was largely a problem with the list provider and not
mailing lists in general, but migrating somewhere more reliable was
non-trivial, so changing direction entirely was a reasonable option if
we had to do that.
- The glue that bridges between the mailing list and the forums was not
great in general.
As I see it, these are the primary benefits of Discourse for us:
- It runs on our server.
- Is well-maintained and constantly improving open source, concerned
with what modern Internet communication looks like (silly things like
Emoji and Gravatar, really important things like Unicode and REST APIs
and downloadable archives of your posts, etc).
- Is one central place where all communications happen.
- If you like the mailing list, you can use it exclusively through email.
- If you like the web forums, you can use it exclusively through a web
browser.
- If you want to use it through the web interface and occasionally shoot
off a quick reply by email, you can do that too.
- The web interface looks modern and responsive, with all that AJAX-y
goodness. It runs well and looks good on mobile devices, too.
- It has all our email archives imported! After a lot of manual cleanup
and one-off perl scripts, all the existing mailing list content, all the
way back to _1998_ has been turned into Discourse topics with threading
intact. More than 20,000 topics, more than 100,000 posts!
- It has all the old forum posts imported too, thanks to a lot of manual
cleanup and one-off perl (and PHP!) scripts.
- It has all the users (more than 2000!) imported. We took efforts to
try to merge people that posted from different email addresses over the
years into one account, using the latest email address we saw, and deal
with people that used both the forums and mailing list interchangeably
over the years.
- An actual search function that works.
- Lots of bells and whistles and control over everything...not just as
an administrator, but as a user, so you get the experience just how you
like it.
So we're going to give it a little time and see if we can turn off the
existing list and forums. So that we don't end up with two separate
communities, we're going to make this decision pretty quickly. As such,
if you have problems (including a generic "I hate this"), please speak
up loudly as soon as possible.
To get started: Go to https://discourse.libsdl.org/
If you sign up for an account and it thinks your email is already in
use, we probably generated a user for you when the list archives were
imported. Just tell it your forgot your password and it'll email you a
reset link so you can take control of the account. In this case, we
assigned you a best-guess username, but you can change it yourself once
you log in.
If you exclusively used the web forums, we have an account for you but
not your email: hit me up and I can hand the account over to you, or you
can just make a new one, if you like.
If you want to use Discourse as a mailing list and never see the website
again, you can; there is an option to turn on "Mailing List Mode" in
your user prefs. New topics can be started by writing to
***@discourse.libsdl.org, or you reply to the address on whatever email
you want to reply to, and it ends up in the right place.
If you have trouble, we can fix things (including getting you a username
from a legacy account, assigning ownership of old posts to a new
account, etc). Just let me know!
--ryan.
new piece of software. Please go to https://discourse.libsdl.org/ and
claim your account. You can still use it as a mailing list or a web
forum. This list will (probably) be going away soon.
So this is an experiment with Discourse (https://discourse.org/), to see
if we can solve our mailing list and forum woes:
Problems we currently have:
- The forum software is wildly out of date, and couldn't be upgraded
without losing the email bridge. Upgrading the software breaks a
fundamental feature we rely on, not upgrading it is a massive security
risk. We tried--and failed--to move the web server to PHP7; the forums
needed massive work to just run at all. Serious problems, like not being
able to register an account or post a reply, were failing silently, so
we could never be sure if we ever really had fixed it up completely. For
now we have dropped the web server back to PHP5, but being trapped on
old versions of basic software to support old versions of custom
software is doubly bad.
- The spammers on the forums were brutal; they couldn't actually post
because we had to approve the accounts, but they'd just flood our SMTP
server with backscatter trying to make thousands of accounts, all day long.
- We have to manually approve forum accounts in the first place. :/
- The mailing list was unreliable, and would lose mail, lose the
archives, etc. This was largely a problem with the list provider and not
mailing lists in general, but migrating somewhere more reliable was
non-trivial, so changing direction entirely was a reasonable option if
we had to do that.
- The glue that bridges between the mailing list and the forums was not
great in general.
As I see it, these are the primary benefits of Discourse for us:
- It runs on our server.
- Is well-maintained and constantly improving open source, concerned
with what modern Internet communication looks like (silly things like
Emoji and Gravatar, really important things like Unicode and REST APIs
and downloadable archives of your posts, etc).
- Is one central place where all communications happen.
- If you like the mailing list, you can use it exclusively through email.
- If you like the web forums, you can use it exclusively through a web
browser.
- If you want to use it through the web interface and occasionally shoot
off a quick reply by email, you can do that too.
- The web interface looks modern and responsive, with all that AJAX-y
goodness. It runs well and looks good on mobile devices, too.
- It has all our email archives imported! After a lot of manual cleanup
and one-off perl scripts, all the existing mailing list content, all the
way back to _1998_ has been turned into Discourse topics with threading
intact. More than 20,000 topics, more than 100,000 posts!
- It has all the old forum posts imported too, thanks to a lot of manual
cleanup and one-off perl (and PHP!) scripts.
- It has all the users (more than 2000!) imported. We took efforts to
try to merge people that posted from different email addresses over the
years into one account, using the latest email address we saw, and deal
with people that used both the forums and mailing list interchangeably
over the years.
- An actual search function that works.
- Lots of bells and whistles and control over everything...not just as
an administrator, but as a user, so you get the experience just how you
like it.
So we're going to give it a little time and see if we can turn off the
existing list and forums. So that we don't end up with two separate
communities, we're going to make this decision pretty quickly. As such,
if you have problems (including a generic "I hate this"), please speak
up loudly as soon as possible.
To get started: Go to https://discourse.libsdl.org/
If you sign up for an account and it thinks your email is already in
use, we probably generated a user for you when the list archives were
imported. Just tell it your forgot your password and it'll email you a
reset link so you can take control of the account. In this case, we
assigned you a best-guess username, but you can change it yourself once
you log in.
If you exclusively used the web forums, we have an account for you but
not your email: hit me up and I can hand the account over to you, or you
can just make a new one, if you like.
If you want to use Discourse as a mailing list and never see the website
again, you can; there is an option to turn on "Mailing List Mode" in
your user prefs. New topics can be started by writing to
***@discourse.libsdl.org, or you reply to the address on whatever email
you want to reply to, and it ends up in the right place.
If you have trouble, we can fix things (including getting you a username
from a legacy account, assigning ownership of old posts to a new
account, etc). Just let me know!
--ryan.