I have used the email support on other Discourse instances and can say that it is *really* bad. The messages are not sent in the right order, edited posts don't work, the formatting doesn't work well, headers related to mailing lists aren't sent properly and I have many other complaints. I don't think the Discourse developers care much about the email support, and there are many features of Discourse that it does not work with or that were clearly not given much thought. If the point is just to get a nicer looking web interface, upgrading to Mailman 3 would be a better option.

On Mon, 2016-02-08 at 22:09 +0100, Ad Huikeshoven wrote:

Hi,

Aubrey and Sam would like to try Discourse as an alternative for the wikisource-l mailing list. A pilot installation is up and running at https://discourse.wmflabs.org/. There is a separate category for wikisource-l related discussions on the Discourse site. Members can create new posts by mailing to wmflabsdiscourse+wikisource-l@gmail.com.

The pilot installation is to test things out. Users of Discourse can download their posts in a .csv file. Admins can download backups - which are Postgress database tables. I'm trying to figure out to export/download all posts of all users. Discourse uses javascript, as does Facebook, Twitter and many other sites.

For the Wikimedia Discourse installation to be a succesful pilot it has to be a real alternative for a mailing list like wikisource-l. 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 wikisource-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 wikisource-l mailing list your mailing list subscription isn't linked to any account at any Wikimedia wiki, neither is your mail address. For the wikisource-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 wikisource-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 wikisource-l mailing list and at https://discour se .wmflabs.org/.

Best regards,

Ad Huikeshoven _______________________________________________ Wikisource-l mailing list Wikisource-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikisource-l