On 10/15/15, 5:03 AM, "Maria-discuss on behalf of Colin Charles" <maria-discuss-bounces+fsb=thefsb.org@lists.launchpad.net on behalf of colin@mariadb.org> wrote:

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On 15 Oct 2015, at 05:35, Jean Weisbuch jean@phpnet.org wrote:

To be able to give the best answer we must first know what is motivating the move from LP.

So the reason we were thinking of ditching launchpad for mailing lists: 1. When there was a MariaDB-Manager google group, that group got a lot of user posts about MariaDB Server. That group now no longer exists, but it gave us a hint that people are interested in a Google group

2. We moved everything from Launchpad (bugs to Jira, code to Github) and the only thing remaining is mailing lists

3. The MariaDB Knowledgebase: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/ used to have an OpenID login that would be useful if you had a LP account, but OpenID is apparently going away (or gone), so there’s less use for LP

4. LaunchPad itself seems to be “hard” for people to signup (see #1).

Good points. Making it easy for people to get involved is important, but if that's the idea then moving to Google Groups isn't a great solution. Apart from it being old and clunky owing to Google's neglect, the insurmountable problem is that it's still an email list at core. Personally, I like email lists best but I'm very old and have been in computing since the 70s, and I accept that most of the rest of the world has moved on.

Another problem the Maria community might consider together with the discuss email list is the low quality and participation in the web Q&A of the Knowledge Base. That sometimes makes me sad.

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.

Tom