Expand the use of Discourse to include existing mailing lists

It would be helpful to integrate Discourse with the existing Fedora mailing lists. Right now it appears there are certain topics that are discussed only here, and others to which you must subscribe to a mailing list, i.e. Packaging, Development, KDE etc. I find Discourse much easier to use than trying to sort through email, reading top posts, truncated posts, etc.
I also recognize there are those who prefer mailing lists - mainly due to unfamiliarity with Discourse. If there was an option to use both platforms, people could discover which platform meets their needs the best. Right now, seems like we’re just treading water.

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It would be interesting to raise this as a Fedora Council ticket. It’s not clear to me who is directly responsible for managing the Discourse forums, so I think bringing it to the Council is the best way to get this idea considered.

Its isn’t so much about unfamiliarity as it is that Discourse is very limited,
and we’ve had a number of issues with mailing list mode, which is the most
efficient way to use Discourse even now, in its limited state.

I’ll dig up the old thread when I can, that lists the issues I was aware of,
when CommOps was considering switching to Discourse, before it actually
occurred.

Actually, Discourse has quite a few features for mailing lists. I’m going to look into it more to verify we have them all activated. That said, the web interface does offer conveniences not available via the mailing list interface - and I can’t imagine anyone in this day and age not having access and knowledge of how to use a web browser.

I’m sure Discourse does have some features for mailing lists. It’d be nice to get some in there to fix the current functionality, if possible.

Mail clients offer conveniences not available via the Discourse web interface - and I can’t imagine anyone in this day and age not having access and knowledge of how to use email.

Here is a link that shows mailing list improvements:

The discussion was started in 2015 and closed in 2017 so I’m thinking most if not all have been implemented. If you know of any additional functionality that hasn’t been addressed, it would be helpful if you could open a ticket on https://meta.discourse.org so it could be considered.

I can certainly do that, and will with the most glaring issues, such as
threading, but I don’t use Discourse as a mailing list anyway. Because we
already have working mailing lists, I’m not going to waste my time trying to
help Discourse figure out what was implemented properly in the 90s. For the
most part, I’m just going to use the mailing lists instead of this instance.
I will, however, respond to “threads” here.

John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity

If you read the link above it specifically mentions “threading” as being completed - so if it’s not, we should report it. If it is, we should discover why it isn’t working. It also could be that their definition of threading features and capabilities are different than yours. I’m not at all an expert in mailing lists or email for that matter. So, if you’re knowledgeable, it would be helpful if you could assist. My interest is simply to improve discussion.fedoraproject.org for all users.

Threading is pretty basic: You should be able to see a tree of messages, with
each reply below the message the user replied to, recursively, until you reach
the first message in the thread.

John M. Harris, Jr.
Splentity