Discourse all the things!

Hello folks :slight_smile:,

You might have noticed that Hoa mailing lists (ML) no longer work. Why? The mail server got some troubles and shuts down.

Before ML, you may remember the forum. Well, it was not suitable for everyone, hence the ML. But ML, despites the server issues, were not suitable for some people too.

Consequently we gently asked Discourse to help us by providing a free hosted instance on their server. And if you are reading this, this is because they are generous and they agreed to help us!

A common place for everything

Discourse will replace the mailing lists. All the internal or support related discussions will now happen here. To feel comfortable, you will find the same categories: internal and support.

A new category appears: announcements. Almost everyday, we have a daily meeting on IRC. During this meeting, we present and discuss what we have done the previous days (“achievements”) and what to do the next days (“goals”). A summary of these meetings is a good candidate for this new category.

About the Hoa Virtual Meetings, you will find the summary in the internal category (e.g. Hoa Virtual Meeting 2016-08).

What about comments?

We also have some troubles with the comments on the website. They land since several months now and we are using isso. This is a great tool but there is no administration pannel. It was fine with few comments but now it becomes impossible. We tried to implement a panel on our side but it was not very useful.

So we are going to remove isso and to use Discourse instead. We will embed it and it will create a new reply to an existing topic each time someone has a question. We don’t know how to implement it yet but this is the idea. If you have some experiences with it, please, contact us!

Thanks Discourse!

You rock :thumbsup:.

Hello :slight_smile:,

Comments from Discourse are now landing on the blog. A first blog post has been automatically created, see http://blog.hoa-project.net/2016/07-WebSocket-safety-stability-and-performance.html for instance.

Hello :slight_smile:,

And finally, isso has been replaced by Discourse into the hack book chapters! Automatic topic/thread creation is done by the @Jekxyl bot.

Example of a topic: http://discourse.hoa-project.net/t/hoa-websocket-hack-book-hoa/44. We can see the abstract as the first post of the topic, and then the comments as regular posts. An automatic backup has been applied (cc @pierozi, @iraphael) to not lose the existing comments. If you go on http://hoa-project.net/En/Literature/Hack/Websocket.html#Comments, you will see all the posts related to the topic. They are correctly embedded.

That’s exciting. People will be able to help each other in a better way now :clap:!

1 Like

More work has been done for TLS support (see TSL for all Hoa's domain). However, automatic topic creation —with comments on the website or on the blog— is restarting, because URLs have changed from http:// to https://. Most of the existing comments have been moved from one topic to another and the “http:// topics” have been deleted.

There was another issue with the blog. When someone visits an old blog post, then an automatic topic will be created. This is “wrong” since it will pollute the announcements category. So administrators must close old blog post topics themselves. I hope that comments will not re-create a topic if it has been closed. Let’s see.