[HLUG] New forum

[Julian Robbins]

Hi everyone

As part of the Survey recently held I asked if LUG members would be happy
to try a new communication system for our group. I've noticed that many
open source communities I'm part of now use discourse.org as their many
focal point of group communications. Ie

https://discuss.erpnext.com and
https://forum.restic.net

My reasons are many.

Our existing mailing list does not allow attachments, in line images,
videos, emojis, nothing apart from text. Nowadays people are used to more
expansive forms of communication and community ie like Facebook, Twitter
etc where communications are so much richer.

My plan is that we move to an Open Source ' Discourse' forum which allows
us to have all this and more. The forum is searchable too where you can
watch several separate threads at once. This forum also allows the use of
emails as notifications to new messages in the forum which means that it
can function in a similar but more featureful way than usual.

There is even new add-ons that allow inline chat on the website and
notifications to conversations using slack , telegram , Riot etc etc

I've installed a forum for our use which we can have total control over.
It's installed on a small vps which I'm  happy to pay for if it's a
success. I still need to go through the config a bit further as yet but
this won't take too long.

The site is currently at as a temp address

https://discuss.joolsr.life

When everyone has had chance to have a play I will change the URL so it
will be

Http://discuss.hlug.org.uk

Here's a few notes about the forum. I suggest that you have a quick look at

https://www.discourse.org to find out more what it can do

Escape email silos

Engage in searchable discussions with your most avid customers, superfans,
and fellow team members – every day. Let everyone discover what you do, how
you do it, and join in on the conversation.


Private conversation areas and whispers are supported too, along with email
notifications and email replies. We’ve got you covered.


I hope this can be a positive contribution to getting the group to be more
active again. I've spent quite some time putting this together so hope that
others can make good use of it to help learn and work together using Linux
and Open Source in the county


Julian