On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 4:57 PM, Niharika Kohli nkohli@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd like to add that having Discourse will provide the one thing IRC channels and mailing lists fail to - search capabilities. If you hangout on the #mediawiki IRC channel, you have probably noticed that we get a lot of repeat questions all the time. This would save everyone time and effort.
No discussion system I've ever seen has managed to solve the problem of people asking the same question instead of searching for past replies. I'm skeptical that this new one will be any different.
Yes, the existing mailing lists have issues with searchability, although to a large extent that's due to a misguided robots.txt policy preventing the archives from being indexed in the first place.