These users can sign up with their normal email addresses just like Google Groups. And they can receive posts to their inboxes and also filter posts by tag. As soon as Fabien is back in the office, we’ll also have fixed our Discourse installation so that one can reply via email rather than having to come to contributors.scala-lang.org.
This it would be a drop-in replacement to Google Groups.
Thus I really don’t understand the handful of folks that are opposed Discourse. I see Discourse as a strictly superior replacement for Google Groups. Let’s just give it a chance (it already is more active than scala-internals and several other Google Groups mailing lists, btw)
True, but (a) it’s new, and (b) it’s topically contentious, both of which usually give an initial burst of activity to any conversation system. I’m still in wait-and-see mode on this instance, to see whether it has legs, but I expect that the SC can keep it reasonably active simply by continuing to propose ideas to discuss on it.
More importantly, though, keep in mind that I wasn’t commenting on this instance (which, as I said, I’m okay with); it’s the “users” instance that I’m more skeptical about. My argument isn’t that Discourse is bad, it’s that it isn’t the be-all and end-all solution – it has some strengths, but also some serious weaknesses, and I expect those to bite harder when you try to use it with more-casual users. Frankly, I think it’s a bad fit to the needs of a general “users” group. So I may be wrong, but I’ll be surprised if the users instance still has a lot of activity after six months…
@nafg@heathermiller I have just enabled the “reply via email” feature. Hope you enjoy. Note that replies have to be longer than 1000 bytes. So very small replies (one sentence long) won’t pass the Discourse filter.
(it already is more active than scala-internals and several other Google Groups mailing lists, btw)