How soon do we switch from mailing list to Discourse? 
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Good questions 
A few steps that come to mind:
- We have to finalize the configuration of the instance so you can send an email to an address, and it will show up here.
- We should create a version of Using Discourse as a mailing list
- The community needs to get involved and adopt Discourse
- We have discourse.itk.org listed everywhere as a way to communicate with the community
- Send an invite email to all mailing list subscribers
- We find a manual or automatic way to direct traffic from the mailing list to Discourse
Other thoughts?
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It would be good to have a sticky post (or in the welcome note) that explains or gives examples about what kind of post goes in what category. For example, would “announcement” be limited to new releases or would that include announcements about new remote modules, blog posts,…?
I think announcements should have a bit more than just new releases. But only important and/or interesting content. @matt.mccormick Can anyone create a topic or move a topic to announcements?
@fbudin Description updated to give examples,
Low-traffic category for community news, events, and releases. Examples include library releases, new Insight Journal articles, hackathon announcements.
I do not know about blog posts – too much traffic? Put in Community instead?
@dzenanz Permission changed so you must have trust level 2 to post in Annourcements.
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I just had my first Discourse experience, trying to post a topic entitled “itk::HoughTransform2DCirclesImageFilter::GetCircles(n) patch”
Unfortunately the title were rejected, as Discourse prompted “Title seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?”
I pressed OK, which was the only option Discourse gave me. Still it refused to publish my topic. What could I have done, to make Discourse accept my topic? Eventually a colleague helped me out, as she broke up the ITK class name and added punctuation: “Hough Transform 2D Circles Image Filter GetCircles patch.” Which was eventually accepted by Discourse: Hough Transform 2D Circles Image Filter GetCircles patch.
Needless to say, I preferred the original title. Hope Discourse van become a bit more user friendly before replacing the good old mailing lists.
Thanks for the feedback @Niels_Dekker. Sorry to hear about the difficulty you encountered.
The max title word length setting was only 30, and it has been increased to help prevent similar frustrations.
Thanks for your reply, Matt! So may I ask, what is the current max title word length?
It appears that the annoying message that Discourse produced on my first attempt to start a new topic, “Title seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?”, might have been avoided by doing entropy = 0 in admin/site_settings.
As I understood from:
Thanks Niels for the pointer. If this is a problem that people encounter multiple times, we might change the entropy to 0. From my point of view, it is not a bad thing that Discourse gives pointers to the post writer on how to be clearer, so that tip can be useful in general. Since we have started to use Discourse recently, there are probably a lot a settings here and there that can be improve over time.
Thanks for your reply, Francois. For your information, Discourse did not really give me a pointer on how to make the title clearer. It just rejected the post, claiming that the title seemed unclear: itk::HoughTransform2DCirclesImageFilter::GetCircles(n) patch
It also rejected the following title: Analyzing HoughTransform2DCirclesImageFilter::GetCircles(n)
Basically it left me guessing how to write a title that is acceptable to Discourse.
Can you please still tell me the current max title word length? As a post writer, it’s helpful to know such criteria beforehand, rather than to keep guessing.
The new settings are:
max topic title length = 255
title max word length = 150
I tried to create a post with the titles you mentioned and it now works.
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It must have been related to the title length. The entropy settings were already at 0.