Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Libreplanet using Discourse for mailing lists and web-based forums?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Please respect the format of replies being used on this list. Your quoting 
style (including top-posting) is not in keeping with how email or mailing 
list replies elsewhere on this list are done.

Connor Doherty wrote:
> No doubt it's hard to manually inspect, again. And that may be the
> reality, for now, for today's internet sites that do anything more than
> display static info. That said, in this case we don't have those
> problems - Discourse is a piece of software you can go and inspect right
> now, and it'll be the same code running on any other instance you find
> (including the JS) unless they tweaked it a bit (but the FSF's instance
> would publish that too).

There are two problems with that bold claim: software freedom means you 
can't predict what any instance of Discourse uploads to the client, and 
users can't be sure the sites they get software from aren't uploading 
malware to them.

> While there are certainly many bulky, poorly-optimized sites out there
> that slow down old hardware, this is not the case with Discourse. It's
> snappy, and the JavaScript features are what really make it a joy to
> use.

Some of the Discourse features strike me as undesirable: an editor that 
looks up websites as one puts in the URL, the "Narrative Welcome Bot" 
chatbot, user themes, badges, and more (see 
https://blog.discourse.org/2017/05/discourse-1-8-released/ ). I wouldn't 
choose to have any of that stuff. This also makes me think that Discourse 
hackers don't share my values in judiciously using JS.

I wrote:
> "I see "Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled" on
> https://community.cartalk.com/login even though there's nothing about
> logging into anything that genuinely requires JS to do that job."

Connor Doherty replied:
> Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't realize Discourse works with JS
> disabled. Cool! (Not that it matters if you're only interacting via
> email)

You've misread what I wrote. I didn't say Discourse worked without JS. The 
community.cartalk.com Discourse instance did not offer to let me login 
because I'm not running the site's JS. This is another example of the 
needless use of JS I referred to earlier.

> Actually, the Trisquel forum, where I also spend a bit of time, is
> exactly the kind of forum I had in mind when describing the traditional,
> clunky forum software that's been around for over a decade.

What you disparage as "clunky" sounds like time-honored and working to me. 
Perhaps it's not doing everything the web side can (even for features a 
mailing list could implement) but I appreciate the effort. Their 
implementation preserves threads too.

> I'm not really looking for a "works well enough" solution so much as a
> completely improved experience all around, which hopefully Trisquel can
> adopt as well.

As Mike Gerwitz said earlier in this thread, "Many of us don't want to see 
it reimagined.  That's the opposite of what many want.". I concur with him. 
I'll need good reasons to justify such 'reimagining' and so far I'm seeing 
unbacked claims of forgoing supporters and risky software execution toward 
ends I don't want or need.

> And yes, this isn't either/or, my point was exactly that we keep both
> sides of it.

If Discourse is to be the choice (which, as far as I can tell from reading 
this thread, is not a foregone conclusion) I believe Discourse will require 
some work to become a viable replacement for the current mailing list 
hosting. I see multiple problems that I believe ought to be addressed 
before further consideration. Here's some of the problems I've identified:

The Discourse instance at https://community.cartalk.com/ (which I'm 
guessing is typical since it's being pointed to on Discourse's main website 
as a reason to adopt Discourse) has the same multiple source JS problem I 
referred to earlier in this thread -- pages on this site try to load over 
half a dozen JS files hosted on another site 
(cdn-enterprise.discourse.org). This increases the user's risk because if 
either site serves up malware in these files the user's browser will 
blindly download it and run it. This should strike proponents as a problem 
too: if any of the hosts is inaccessible the JS-based functionality that 
script provides isn't there.

Posts on web forums sometimes include pointers to other materials to be 
rendered inline (images, sounds, movies, 3D objects, executables, etc.). 
The user's browser will blindly download these files and do something with 
them (execute the code, run the Flash object, etc.). This is a 
vulnerability unique to using a web browser to read posts or using a 
poorly-written email program that mishandles untrusted input. And the 
material can be hosted anywhere (another instance of the above). Forum 
posts should not include inline references to any kind of data. I'd expect 
Discourse to help with this by restricting what posts are allowed to 
contain inline.

The aforementioned Discourse code pointed to by the cartalk.org site is 
license-unknown minified JS which is effectively non-free object code 
because minified code requires considerable effort to turn it back into the 
source code a programmer would edit (and even then has no comments). Code 
licenses should be labeled and complete corresponding source code should be 
available and pointed to.

Some Discourse features mean nothing in a mailing list and it's not clear 
to me what is really going on therefore I can't say I understand what 
tradeoff is being made:
- splitting/merging threads
- what's been referred to on Discourse forums as "collaborative editing" of 
something; I take it multiple people are editing something, but what are 
they editing?

In https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-mailing-lists/54298 
xiasummer wrote "I believe the mail should be from the sender, not from 
noreply.discourse.org or other public mail box.". In Discourse do all 
mailing list posts appear to come from some user @noreply.discourse.org?

Rob Nicholson (no relation) said on the same page "For me the /biggest/ 
plus of a forum is that I can edit my reply after posting. I'm crap at 
proof-reading before hand so often spot a typo.". Are users allowed to edit 
their posts even after a followup post?

> I do this too, and every time I subscribe to a new mailing list I have
> to modify the filters so I can save my inbox. I see this as a hack, not
> really a solution, but I understand again that older folks are used to
> what they're used to.

I'm sure users young and old are capable of examining the situation on its 
merits.

> I'm interested in the implication you're giving off her. Are you saying
> you have to really work to learn any new interface you come across, even
> a website? That most sites aren't quickly intuitive or otherwise trivial
> to "learn"? If you feel this way, it would explain the aversion to "new"
> interfaces. It'd be interesting to study the demographics of this
> question.

I'm not implying anything, I'm outright stating that every website carries 
a different set of features and requirements to do roughly the same thing: 
discuss things with others. Some sites even carry browser-specific code to 
implement their functionality (for example, I'm told there is a task 
management website for tracking tasks that only works fully in Google's 
Chrome browser; this belies the entire point of the web).

> It's even easier to sign up for an account on a forum, but see above.

Signing up for a mailing list on Mailman requires supplying an email 
address and clicking a link to confirm (or pressing reply on a confirmation 
email). Ease of signing up was never an issue before and I wouldn't expect 
it to become any more complex in the future. Besides, I'm already on this 
mailing list now and using it effectively; there's no need for me to sign 
up for any forum to keep doing what I've been doing.

> You can't turn it off - to reply to a particular post, you hit reply.
> Can't say as to whether the gear-heads care for proper threading though.
> 😝

My guess is that more technical users will expect a threaded message 
display because they either already use a client that does this or they 
come to understand the value in identifying the natural tree of followups 
and using that tree to handle what to do with the posts.

> What I meant is that you can use email to communicate through the forum.
> Or, you can use the web interface. It sounds like you want to use a web
> interface (at least a little bit) anyway [...]

No, I'll download a file from a web server if I'm given a URL to the mbox 
archive for a Discourse group (which I take to be the equivalent of a 
mailing list).

> I'd love to know what magical Mail client you must be using if it's
> libre software for GNU/Linux that somehow manages to be nicer than
> Discourse, however.

GNU Emacs is also my regular program for a lot of activity (like Mike 
Gerwitz explained). It's not magical it's very capable. I'm experimenting 
with some other mail programs including Evolution and Thunderbird which 
also offer the ability to run user-written add-ons to better integrate them 
into my daily work.