Hosting a FUDforum on lilypond.org

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi all,

In June (possibly earlier), the Nabble forums providing web
interfaces to the mailing lists have started seeing problems,
namely a majority of messages being shown as "CONTENTS DELETED",
of which the cause was finally identified as Nabble having,
without much notice, removed the gateway to the lists[1].
For reference, the respective threads on lilypond-user are [2]
and [3], and the one on lilypond-user-fr is at [4].

Now, the forum for lilypond-user-fr at [5] is down, apparently
simply removed [6], and the one for English-speaking lists
at [7] is no longer receiving posts from the mailing lists,
making it useless.

I haven't invested much effort into understanding the why and
how; Nabble is being discontinued in various ways (see [8]), and
we have to find something else if we want users to be able to
post through the Web. Several users have requested this strongly
[9, 10] and although I do not understand the problem with email
personally, it must be recognized that mailing lists are getting
somewhat outmoded and a forum could help broaden audience.
The number of questions on the Facebook group, in spite of
Facebook not being very practical for LilyPond questions
(mangling indentation) is some illustration of the need. (Of
course, Facebook is also a privacy sink which is why I do
not answer there.)

Naturally, moving the mailing lists altogether is sort of out
of question given the number of people who would have to update
their setup and get used to a new tool. Plus, I'm attached to
the addresses and the archives at gnu.org. They have proven
long-term reliability, which gives us some stability in contrast
to the pieces of infrastructure that are a bit falling apart due
to not enough people and not enough knowledge for too much to
maintain. So it would be hugely preferable to have a mere Web
interface allowing to read and post to the mailing lists, like
Nabble used to be.

I started searching for alternatives, and didn't find many.
In fact exactly one, called FUDforum -- Fast Uncompromising
Discussions, and not Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt! Its main
page is itself a FUDforum, [11], and the documentation is
at [12].

I was able to install it on a local Apache server. In my
experiments, I encountered some issues when trying to post to
the lists via it [13], but only with one SMTP server; another
was fine. The rest of the functionality worked correctly. Thus,
FUDforum appears to be a potential solution. And I do not see
other solutions currently. I therefore propose to try it out
for real.

The big question is: where to host it? There is lilynet.net,
administrated by Valentin, but he's been busy in the past
year, so he might not want to take that blame. Before I buy
a domain, how about lilypond.org? That would make it more
of an official community space and more discoverable for
newcomers.

Han-Wen (administrator of lilypond.org if I understand
correctly), and all, what do you think?

Best regards,
Jean

Links:

[1] 
https://support.nabble.com/Mailing-Lists-will-be-updated-to-regular-forums-next-week-td7609458.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2021-06/msg00225.html
[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2021-06/msg00232.html
[4] 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user-fr/2021-06/msg00133.html
[5] http://lilypond-french-users.1298960.n2.nabble.com/
[6] https://support.nabble.com/Downsizing-Nabble-td7609715.html
[7] http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/
[8] https://support.nabble.com/The-Future-of-Nabble-td7605923.html
[9] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2021-06/msg00102.html
[10] 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user-fr/2021-07/msg00064.html
[11] http://fudforum.org/forum/
[12] http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php
[13] http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=124157&start=0&;