

Introducing Groups.io - jasondavies
http://wingedpig.com/2014/09/23/introducing-groups-io/

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walterbell
What exactly is "Github integration" with a group - user provisioning?

Glad to see the pay-for-privacy business model.

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NateDad
I find discourse (discourse.org) to be a much better groups replacement than
an email list. Email lists are so 1999.

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slgeorge
Why?

I primarily find that browser base stuff is inefficient as it doesn't tell me
what I've already read, and I have to remember to go a specific site to
remember to read new things. Whereas I can subscribe/sort email lists. But
then I am so 1999 :-)

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NateDad
Of course forums tell you what you've already read. What forums have you gone
to in the last decade that didn't?

Discourse is better because you have more fine grained control - you can have
all topics emailed to you, or only ones under a specific tag, or only replies
to topics you've posted on. Discourse lets you @tag people and have them
notified.

Discourse also makes it easy to link topics together, so there's a feature
"Reply as new topic" which will start a new topic, but link back to the
original so you can read the context.

And aside from that - forums are a lot more browseable and searchable. An
email list is a linear firehose of posts. A forum can have multiple
categories, and makes it easy to flip back and forth between topics. Also, a
forum by definition has all the posts online so that anyone can go back and
read them. Some mailing list sites record a history online, but because it's
not a main way that they are read, it's often only half a step above
plaintext, and not at all pleasant to peruse old messages that way.

Sure... a lot of this stuff _can_ be done with mailing lists, if you work hard
enough at it. But discourse wraps it all up in a nice package, and adds things
like automatic trust levels so that you can have community moderation of the
forums, without need dedicated people chosen to be moderators approving or
disapproving every post.

