[LEDE-DEV] A Forum for LEDE Project

[Rich Brown]

> On Aug 23, 2016, at 6:50 AM, Jo-Philipp Wich <jo at mein.io> wrote:
>
> We now have enough resources to spare to spin up new web instances, for
> example we could start providing a forum, provided that we find enough
> volunteers to moderate it.

> Any thoughts on that? Shall I look into setting up a dedicated forum?
> I need to review the previous list discussions to see if there was a
> preferred software candidate already...

Yes. To increase participation in the LEDE project, we should support
a forum. (The LEDE-dev list is essential for developers. But it's no
good for newbies, since it's hard to figure out how to subscribe, and
then you're connected to a firehose of e-mails...)

Setting up a forum will have a huge number of benefits:

- It makes it easy for people to ask questions
- It makes it easy for people to provide answers
- It makes it easy to search the messages
- But most importantly, activity on the forum makes us look like a
real place for people to hang out

I remain partial to the Discourse forum system (discourse.org) A
number of projects (big and small) with similar needs to ours use it
successfully. It is attractive. It supports Markdown, which (thanks to
github) has become the standard text markup language for technical
sites. Discourse is actively maintained. I followed the (trivial)
setup instructions for a Docker container, and a couple clicks every
month or so bring it up to date.

Although there were other alternatives named in the original "forum
thread" in the list starting at:
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-dev/2016-July/001996.html
most of those listed seem to have a feel of "we've always done it this
way". None seems to offer all the good attributes that Discourse does.

Thanks for listening.

Rich Brown