[vtkusers] Transition to Discourse - thoughts from lurker

[Andras Lasso]

A soft transition worked quite nicely for both Slicer and ITK. For a while, questions sent to the mailing list were still answered there but a users were reminded that further questions should be posted to the forum. Then we stopped responding on the mailing list but asked people to post messages to discourse. Finally, we disabled posting to the list and set an auto-response message that explained that questions should be now posted on the forum. This transition was completed in a few months.

It took a couple of months for google to start indexing the forum with high frequency and about a year to reach the same number of registered members as on the old mailing list.

Andras

From: vtkusers <vtkusers-bounces at vtk.org> On Behalf Of Jan Hardenbergh
Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2019 12:48 PM
To: vtkusers at vtk.org
Subject: [vtkusers] Transition to Discourse - thoughts from lurker

There is a question here that has not really been addressed in the Welcome To Discourse page:
 https://discourse.vtk.org/t/welcome-to-discourse/8<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiscourse.vtk.org%2Ft%2Fwelcome-to-discourse%2F8&data=02%7C01%7Classo%40queensu.ca%7C10e27eeeeaf240c32b6308d68091cf78%7Cd61ecb3b38b142d582c4efb2838b925c%7C1%7C1%7C636837761146193378&sdata=xJ2juHjIsPMCTlk33CXe3MvtVLeTgmTpPiy%2FzkBWyCQ%3D&reserved=0>


  *   Why should they come here?

What is the motivation for the switch?

If this will make it easier to provide support, that's a good reason. A good transition strategy might be to reply to questions that are asked on the mailing list in Discourse, and then reply to the mailing list with the link.

Another transition strategy would be to post the Topics Titles active for the past week to get people to go to Discourse if they are interested in that topic.

Back to lurking...
YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh, VolumePro SW Eng. Mgr. Terarecon, Inc.

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