Discourse Trial evaluation

We’ve been running Discourse at https://forum.suricata.io/ as a trial since the middle of March. The team is very pleased with it.

Engagement has been quite a bit higher than expected. We estimate that we’ve seen 3 to 4 times more traffic than was usual on our user and devel mailing lists. This confirms our thoughts about better usability and accessibility Discourse provides over mailing lists.

We’ve seen no technical issues, spam or other unwanted behavior. We’ve also not received any negative feedback.

In conclusion, we’re very happy with how the trial went.

Next steps

Our goal is to replace the mailing lists. This summer will be a transition phase. Early September we’re going to set the lists to ‘read only’. Archives will continue to be accessible, but new posts will no longer be accepted.

During the summer we’ll actively encourage people to move over to our forum.

As a reminder: Discourse can be used as a mailing list, see: Mailinglist mode

Why we choose 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.

Original trial announcement: Discourse Trial Announcement

Feedback

In our forums we have a dedicated category for feedback: https://forum.suricata.io/c/site-feedback/

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