Hello readers of wikimedia-l,
One of the outcomes of the 'better thankspam' thread was to experiment with a pilot installationg of Discourse. This has been set up at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ by Erik Bernhardson. In the past weeks a couple of dozen of people have signed in and have been taking a look around. In a recent thread on wikimedia-l Fæ posted results of SQL queries of number of users thanked and number of users thanking on different wikis. On Discourse users can like (by clicking a heart) for individual posts. Number of hearts received and number of hearts given are by default and automatically counted by Discourse, and these numbers are public, see https://discourse.wmflabs.org/users?period=yearly.
For the Wikimedia Discourse installation to be a succesful pilot it has to be a real alternative for the wikimedia-l mailing list. Users want to read posts in their mail, and want to be able to reply to posts by mail, without having to visit the site. Users who have signed up at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ will receive new posts by default in their mailbox. Mail preferences can be individually set. Wikimedia Discourse users can reply by mail to posts received by mail. Members of Wikimedia Discourse can mail new posts. Please let me know if anything is missing at Wikimedia Discourse that the current wikimedia-l mailing list does have. Sign up for an account at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ to discover the extras Discourse offers. Wikimedia Discourse users can earn barnstars for example, isn't that nice?
Please note that by subscribing to the wikimedia-l mailing list your mailing list subscription isn't linked to any account at any Wikimedia wiki, neither is your mail address. For the wikimedia-l mailing list you will have to provide a mail address and after confirmation mailman will mail you a password. If you want to sign up at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ you will have to provide a mail address and pick a password yourself. Currently their is no link between https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ accounts and any account at any Wikimedia wiki, nor is their link with mail addresses, just like it as with the wikimedia-l mailing list. A phabricator ticket requesting SSO or Oauth 1.0 or Oauth 2.0 can be found at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124691. Currently there are no resources available for writing an Oauth 1.0 plugin for Wikimedia Discourse, neither are there resources available for moving MediaWiki authentification from Oauth 1.0 to Oauth 2.0. As said, SSO or Oauth is a 'nice to have' and doesn't have to block a succesful pilot.
Secure communication is a must. The Discourse installation is now configured to default to use SSL, so you will always see https://.
Here is a short list of places where the Discourse installation can be discussed: * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Discourse * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discourse * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124690 and of course at the wikimedia-l mailing list and at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/.
Best regards,
Ad Huikeshoven