Much of the features are listed on their site https://www.discourse.org/features, 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 http://lispforum.com/ 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 https://free.discourse.group/. We may be able to reserve *https://common-lisp.discourse.group/ 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 https://common-lisp.net/contribute 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

Just my two bits, but I think 'forum.common-lisp.net' is fine.

-- Scott

On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 10:27 PM Mark Evenson evenson@panix.com wrote:

Chris,

My name is Mark Evenson, and I serve as secretary of the Common Lisp Foundation, which is a non-profit (“Stichtung” in Dutch) based in the Netherlands. We very much indeed would to host and support a Discourse instance for Common Lisp that would serve as a long-term, archived record of discussions and hopefully provide a place to perform some “lightweight" standardization of various topics.

I’d like to invite you to attend the next monthly CLF meeting which will occur this Wednesday, June 15th online at 2000 UTC. If you are able to attend, please send me private email for a more formal invitation.

Given our mission to not only create content around CL but also ensure that it is accessible for decades to come, we would like to have a Common Lisp Discourse under a DNS name that we have administrative “control" over but we are undecided as to what would be best

forum.common-lisp.net

is pretty descriptive but perhaps too long.

Whereas if we went with

forum.lisp.org

we would have to “share” the space with Scheme, Clojure, and whatever CONS-de-jure is popular. Not a huge problem, but it would take ongoing explanation that “Lisp means Common Lisp”, which while perhaps true for a majority of CL users, is certainly not the sole defensible position.

In any event, the CLF would love to give ya a host, a mandate, and some coordination to set up a Discourse instance. There are several other CL users who would like to contribute and/or use such a Discourse instance that would be good to canvas for additional requirements/goals, but initially a Discourse instance, hooked up to some Oauth2 providers, and with tested daily automatic backups would be a great first step.

If a meeting on Wednesday is inconvenient to get going, then please let’s continue this discussion in some other way.

Yours, Mark Evenson

-- "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare to it now."