Why Discourse?
I’m not sure people understand maintenance burden.
Google groups has been a maintenance headache. Probably one of the smaller maintenance headaches, but still a problem.
With most of the system’s that PS:One has developed over the last several years, new member handling, auto admining of the 40 or so systems group member’s, etc has been automatic.
PS:One cycles through motivated individuals pretty quickly. If we ever come across a gap between an old productive member and a new ones, we lose something. There are a few ways to handle this: One is to stop burning people out, and to make sure that gap doesn’t exist. The other is to reduce the amount of information that can fall in that gap.
Per application user management is a great way to burn out technologically creative individuals. I’ve seen it happen a few times.
Our current systems approach is to reduce maintenance burden to deal with the first problem. The other is to make most of the tasks a systems person needs to carry out be automatic. Google Groups has not presented us with much as far as solutions to deal with these 2 problems. They offer no api to add or remove subscribers, and are notoriously difficult to write scraping tools for, and offer no guarantee of long term stability for scraping tools.
We have investigated a few potential solutions for mass communication in the membership. Most of these focus on web forum technology, as we are hitting the magic threshold where mailing lists are no longer the right solution due to message volume. So far discourse is the most promising.
Jeff Atwood Is one of the main developers and founders of discourse. Previously he started stack overflow with Joel Spolsky (the Joel on Software guy), and has been running a blog called coding horror since about 2004. He’s got some experience with online communities and a lot of opinions and practical experience on what makes them work well and what doesn’t, including a few very well known implementations of online discussion platforms. I don’t always agree with his technical and social decision minutia, but I have to understand that he’s coming from a wealth of experience, and has left the discourse discussion platform open to plugins and extension.
