Moving from Google Groups

Do you think we should turn off the Akratics Anonymous Google Group? What about importing the archives?

As I commented in the Google group, I find the Google Groups web interface a more convenient way to access several forums I follow/participate in, than visiting separate sites. I would prefer if there is any way to use Google Groups’ ability* to function as a read-only archive of a mailing list, assuming that Discourse does provide that interface on its end.

* I am actually not sure this functionality is still in place in that exact form, but I believe that by forwarding all posts from discourse, Google Groups’ threading mechanism might allow it to continue functioning normally; in which case it’s only the posting permissions that need to be removed for a read-only functionality to be achieved.

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I like discourse, or at least I like the concept, and I think that it is better than Google Groups. Discourse is an attempt to rethink how forums/discussion boards should work. A lot of thought have gone into making discourse natural and intuitive to use, and I think it works really well if you just look for a feature where it would make sense to find it instead of where it usually is on other forums. I think it would be a mistake to try to fit it too much to old use cases.

It has been slightly annoying that I wasn’t able to insert images or include more than two links when posting as a new user.

Maybe just let the Google Group stay open, but make sure that people can’t read or write anything there without at least knowing that it has been replaced.

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I’m a bit sad about the move, as I used to read Akratics Anonymous every morning on my mobile as I procrastinated getting out of bed. I can’t do this any more because my phone is too old to read the discourse forum :frowning:

I remember someone asking whether discourse could act as a mailing list as well. If I could read all the new posts as an email I would be happy again.

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You can change your discourse settings to send you email for every message. This is what I've done. You can respond to a message just by replying to the email (like I am doing now).

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Does anyone else find Discourse’s visual presentation of threaded discussions intuitive? That’s the part that irks me the most. Everything else seems to have been done really well.

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We’ve successfully gotten critical mass here to the forum! (Thanks everyone!) We haven’t imported the Akratics Anonymous archives yet; I still think that would be nice. I’ve been using the daily beemails occasionally to point to interesting forum posts. I think I’ll try doing that on the old google group, turning it into a curated best-of sampler for the forum.

(I probably won’t keep doing that unless you all love it though. Just an experiment so far.)

AFAIK Discourse provides a digest feature. I receive one for several forums I participate in, and I believe it’s on by default because I don’t recall setting it up myself. It’s quite a nice summary; I wouldn’t keep up with those forums otherwise. Having it forwarded to the Google Groups posting address would be a great way to automate this out of your back. Computers don’t care if people love what they do :wink:

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