Originally published at: http://southlondonmakerspace.org/2015/06/18/introducing-discourse/
We’ve moved our main discussion and documentation over to the Discourse platform. While our Google Group and Wiki are still open, they will be deprecated soon. Why did we do this?
Control
Discourse is open-source software, which we run on our own hosting. Google could turn off or modify Groups at any time and there’s nothing we could do about it, so we considered it very important to have direct control. Discourse also has good extensibility and customisation support, which will let us do all sorts of nice things in the future, like integration with the membership system.
User-friendliness
Both Groups and Mediawiki have archaic interfaces and tend to drown the useful content in an ocean of fiddly UI and poor design. Discourse is clean, modern and friendly. It also allows us to have the same editing/commenting system for both general-purpose discussion and documentation. A regular post can become a wiki with one click!
Privacy
Some documentation and some discussion shouldn’t be seen by the general public, for example detailed financial information or instructions for accessing the space. Discourse allows us to restrict that information to paying members only.
Wordpress Integration
Comments for this blog are now handled by Discourse. We hope that this will help drive new users to the main discussion area, where they will be warmly welcomed, and prevent article comments from being a wasteland.
In fact, this post is a test of that integration. Fingers crossed it’s all set up right!
