Trial Announcement
We’re happy to announce that for Suricata we’re going to trial a Discourse setup. Discourse is a “place for civilized discussion”. It is used by others in the open source community, such as Mozilla and the Rust Language project.
Reasons for choosing Discourse
Easy to get started for users: the default forum style interface makes it easy to start interacting with the community. It also directly gives access to (participating in) discussions that predate the registration, something that is much harder in the current mailing lists. By enabling a number of ‘social logins’, signing up is also easy.
Trial goals
Goals of the trial are finding out how the community would use this platform, how we can manage it against various forms of unwanted activity and if we can see an uptick of users. Next to this we want to use the trial period to adjust settings, experiment with plugins and themes.
Trial steps
During the trial we will use the hosted version of Discourse, which is hosted by the developers of the platform. During the trial or at the end of the trial we’ll evaluate how well this worked for us. Discourse can also be self-hosted.
The trial will run until June 1st. Assuming the trial is successful, we will then start a transition phase where we will discourage the use of the old mailinglists. End of summer / early fall we’ll then disable them completely. We will keep the archives online of course.
Mailinglist
For people who dislike forums or in general dislike web based interfaces, Discourse offers a special ‘mailing list mode’. In this mode you can receive posts as emails, reply to them and start new topics as well. The mailinglist mode can be activated in the ‘preferences’ page of your account.
Feedback
In the ‘Site Feedback’ category you can give feedback on the setup, predefined categories, moderation, etc. Please use this if you feel there are things that can be done to improve the usefulness of the platform.