Much of the features are listed on their site, but below are some that feel like an improvement to current platforms:
  1. Topic categorization, which allows filtering of posts based on things such as frameworks, general discussion, code questions.
    From a user's perspective they aren't posting into a separate channel, just attaching headers to their topic.
  2. Social-based login - users don't have to sign up to the application and can easily just use their own gmail, GitHub, or other social accounts.
  3. Modern UI. I feel this is a given but there is something to be said when it comes to first impressions of a platform. Being told that IRC or lispforum is where people communicate becomes a hard pass for those that are familiar with Modern Web UIs. With the revamp of https://common-lisp.net/ and creation of https://lisp-lang.org/, it's at least become apparent that to help grow the Common Lisp community there is some change that needs to be made on that front.
  4. Open Source - and not just that but an ability to gain these items and more by just talking to the Discourse team and seeing if they would provide a hosted solution for Common Lisp. There are more details on this free hosting here. We may be able to reserve https://common-lisp.discourse.group/. Should we need to scale up there are discounts for Open source projects, as well as a means to perform migrations to a self-hosted platform.
I assume when you refer to a plan to reach "critical mass", you're referring to how we're going to increase adoption of this forum. We would need to make modifications to the aforementioned https://common-lisp.net/ and https://lisp-lang.org/ community pages to include this discourse forum as the forum for general Common Lisp discussion, and advertise its creation in the lang Google Group/Reddit/IRC.

I do have concerns on community splitting, as we'd now have a subreddit, google group (wasn't aware of this one), and now a Discourse forum. Though with this requirement being posted in the contributions needed list I'd initially assumed the pros/cons had been evaluated.

Altogether though, if adoption fails, Discourse will shut down the forum after two-three months of no usage.

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 5:48 PM Daniel Herring <dherring@tentpost.com> wrote:
Hi Chris,

There have been many community forums over the years.  comp.lang.lisp,
irc.freenode (now #lisp on libera.chat), lispforum.com (locked after
conversations stopped), ...

Two questions:  1.  Why Discourse?  2.  How will you achieve "critical
mass"?

Thanks,
Daniel


On Sat, 11 Jun 2022, Chris Moore wrote:

> Hey folks -
>
> In CL's contribution list one of the open items is for establishing a community forum.
>
> Coming from Elixir, much of the community has fallen under Elixirforum, with Rust, Clojure, and even recently Racket opening their own Discourse forums.
>
> Altogether, I get a lot of use out of it w/ Elixir, and it seems to be a popular solution for establishing a community hub.
>
> They provide free hosted solutions for Open Source projects, which we can infer Racket received based on their URL. I can discuss with the Discourse team what our options are given there is no real Common Lisp open source project. If all else fails I can check out
> self-hosted solutions as $100/month is pretty hefty.
>
> If no one has already begun work on a community forum, I can take this up.
> --
> CHRISTOPHER MOOREmoore.christopher515@gmail.com
>
>


--
CHRISTOPHER MOORE