On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 4:57 PM, Niharika Kohli <nkohli(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
I'd like to add that having Discourse will provide
the one thing IRC
channels and mailing lists fail to - search capabilities. If you hangout on
the #mediawiki IRC channel, you have probably noticed that we get a lot of
repeat questions all the time. This would save everyone time and effort.
No discussion system I've ever seen has managed to solve the problem of
people asking the same question instead of searching for past replies. I'm
skeptical that this new one will be any different.
Yes, the existing mailing lists have issues with searchability, although to
a large extent that's due to a misguided robots.txt policy preventing the
archives from being indexed in the first place.
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation