Hello! 2015-10-16 15:42 GMT+03:00 Tom Worster <fsb@thefsb.org>:
There is now a decent open-source system that can function as email list replacement and provide web and mobile Q&A, as well as other stuff: https://www.discourse.org I've used it at New Relic and it seems pretty good. It's got a lot of good stuff and I want to highlight just two.
1. "Mailing List Support - Opt into a special mode where all messages are sent to you via email, exactly like a mailing list. Start new topics via email."
2. You can host it yourself or pay someone you trust to do so. It's not a "free" cloud service where you pay by feeding the internet advertising/surveillance economy.
I don't know if Discourse is right for Maria but I wouldn't mention it if I didn't think it might help build a bigger and more active support community, which I long for.
I looked into the options and also stumbled across Discourse, which indeed seems good and used for example by New Relic. The hosted version is a bit pricey (100 USD per month)[1]. Discourse can also be self-hosted. Mailman is the most common option among open source projects, and the version 3.0 released in April includes new user interfaces for archives and administration, so it finally even looks decent[2]. It took however 7 years to build Mailman 3.0 and is not yet feature complete compared to 2.1, and the components it uses mixes both Python 2.x and Python 3 code. For experience I know Mailman is not easy to maintain and I haven't noticed that anybody would offer it as a hosted version. Other option (ezmlm, Sympa, Majordomo) seem even less attractive. Managing a mailing list or a mail server in general is quite a lot of work due to incoming and possibly even outgoing spam issues, so I'd prefer a hosted version where maintenance is done by somebody who anyway already does at a scale. [1] https://payments.discourse.org/buy/ [2] http://lwn.net/Articles/638090/