From my understanding, the point of Discourse was to be
simply a Q&A site. This forum has this as well, however it aims to also build a
community of MediaWiki users and admins beyond just a Q&A so that there's a place
to go to just talk about MediaWiki in general, share tips, spitball ideas to make life
easier for 3rd party wikis, and so on. A section of the site is also devoted to listing
professional services for hire, a bit of an analog to [[Professional development and
consulting]] on mediawiki.org[1], except with more of an ability for users to have a
back-and-forth and leave reviews.
I don't see this site as replacing any existing means of obtaining support.
There's still advantages to the existing methods out there that forums don't quite
meet (IRC is more realtime, mailing lists give flexibility in how to view the content, the
on-wiki support desk allows anonymous edits -- although I can enable anonymous/guest posts
as well on the forums if people think that would be beneficial). I felt that there was a
large hole in the existing offerings, and I had the technical means and ability to fill in
that hole.
It is using a software package called Invision Community. It is unfortunately not FOSS
software, however I felt that the feature-set and end user experience it offered surpassed
any of the FOSS alternatives.
Regards,
Skizzerz
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Professional_development_and_consulting
-----Original Message-----
From: MediaWiki-l [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sam
Wilson
Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 3:56 PM
To: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [MediaWiki-l] Announcing new MediaWiki forum
Isn't this rather a replication of the trial Discourse forum at
https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ ? (Which, unfortunately, is offline for an upgrade at the
moment!)
But anyway, sounds like an interesting idea. :-)
What software is it using?
On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, at 06:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
All,
Right now, all methods of getting support for and general discussion
about MediaWiki fall flat in many areas.
* This mailing list is good for long-form questions and answers,
but is difficult to search leading to multiple duplicate questions.
The nature of the list also makes things like embedding screenshots
difficult.
* [[Project:Support desk]] on
mediawiki.org is serviceable, but
long-form questions or answers require a large amount of scrolling due
to the narrow content width in Flow, and again attaching screenshots
to illustrate problems is difficult.
* The #mediawiki channel on IRC (and related channels) are not easy
for newbies to discover or use, and many organizations block IRC
meaning that we cut off this support method from those at such
organizations who have MediaWiki questions. Like the other support
methods, screenshots are also difficult.
As such, I have launched a new support forum for MediaWiki[1]. It aims
to make it easier to not only ask for and receive support compared to
the methods I outlined above, but also hopes to serve as a hub where
people who run their own MediaWiki installations can connect, share
tips, and network. To my knowledge, there is no such “MediaWiki Users Group”
outside of mailing lists at this time. The service is ad-free and
content posted is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 so that particularly
good answers can be used to bolster documentation on
mediawiki.org.
I encourage anyone that is interested to check it out, and please let
me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about it 😊.
Regards,
Skizzerz
[1]
https://mwusers.org
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