[I drafted this when the announcement was made. Activity on Discourse has been growing slowly, so I thought I'd go ahead and post it now.] I think this is great. I've been part of a few of the mentioned communities that transitioned to Discourse, and a few others as well. The most positive change has been the increase in community participation. As someone initially more comfortable with Mailman mailing lists, I empathize with people who have strong email workflows. Moving to Discourse isn't painless. (There is a "mailing list mode", which helps some, but not entirely.) A web UI has some downsides compared to text, for those so inclined. But there are upsides as well. Threads are more isolated from each other, and are effectively dynamically-created mini-mailing lists. You can edit your posts, removing typos or clarifying points.[1] Worrying about top posting becomes obsolete. (I recognize the irony here, but I am on mobile, so....) But like I said, the biggest upside is improved community participation. As an anecdote, I know people who cared deeply about a particular project, but never felt comfortable enough with the mailing list interface to chime in. Forums, for whatever combination of reasons, are more approachable. (I even feel this myself, which is perhaps why the anecdote resonates with me.) Plus, Discourse provides richer means of communication through reactions, and it is better equipped to facilitate moderation and disputes.[2] I'm not sure what prompted me to write this fawning email, except that I wrote a very similar one when Nix started their trial, and now they've switched away from their mailing list completely and everything seems to be going quite well. I encourage people to give Discourse a go! P.s. Discourse would never replace all means of communication, but it could potentially replace all discussion-based mailing lists. [1]: The ability to edit posts can also be abused, but in practice this rarely happens. [2]: Moderation can also be abused, but its absence is more frequently the problem! On Fri, 22 Feb 2019, 15.27 Jasper Van der Jeugt, wrote:

Hello all,

We would like to announce a new discourse-based forum for the Haskell community, at:

https://discourse.haskell.org/

This is inspired by the Rust, Nix and Elm discourse instances, where these forums have had a strong positive effect on the community. We will run this as a "beta" for 6 months and then evaluate its usefulness. It is meant as an extra alternative to Haskell-cafe, reddit and Haskell IRC, but it does not replace any of those.

Discourse is completely open source and easily accessible using an email client. We would like to thank the Haskell.Org admin team for provisioning a server and Matthew Pickering for suggesting this and doing the hard work setting up the instance.

Warm regards, Jasper Van der Jeugt on behalf of the Haskell.Org Committee _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.