[vtkusers] Transition to Discourse - thoughts from lurker

[Cory Quammen]

Thanks for your feedback, Jan.

On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 1:28 PM Andras Lasso <lasso at queensu.ca> wrote:
>
> 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.

We basically took the same approach for the ParaView mailing list
transition to discourse.paraview.org and it worked nicely.

> 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.

Thanks for the feedback. The welcome message is something I have
overlooked. I have updated the welcome message to provide information
about the forum's purpose.

> 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.

This seems reasonable at first glance, but I think the process is too
complex in the sense that most responders won't opt to do it.
Responding to the question and including a reminder of the transition
to Discourse is something some of the more active members will be more
likely to do as the transition process goes on. By the way, there is a
place on the new forum for just this kind of feedback :-)

https://discourse.vtk.org/c/site-feedback

> 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.

That's a good idea. I'll plan to do that the next couple Fridays at least.

- Cory

>
>
> Back to lurking…
>
> YON – Jan C. Hardenbergh, VolumePro SW Eng. Mgr. Terarecon, Inc.
>
>
>
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-- 
Cory Quammen
Staff R&D Engineer
Kitware, Inc.