Exciting news! As we discussed at the annual meeting in Manchester, we are ready to move to our modern web-based discussion forum using Discourse.
Here’s a guy on Youtube saying why he’s enthusiastic about Discourse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2DYhaL3xpU
To get started, go to http://discourse.iapct.org/ and create an account.
When you’re logged in, Mak has posted some info on the left side under ‘Discourse Resources’. If you want more, you can look at
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-new-user-guide/96331
You will see that we have already established a number of categories and have initialized or ‘seeded’ them with topics and posts, many them by copying posts by Bill Powers and others from the archive as a sound well-grounded starting point for further discussion.
You can tailor the connection of Discourse to your email. Click your user icon in the upper right-hand corner, and select the gear icon for preferences. Under Emails, for example, you can change the default to ‘always’ under “Send me an email when someone quotes me, replies to my post, mentions my @username, or invites me to a topic”, if that’s what you want. This will send you a notification. (You might find it easier just to glance at the front page when you log in, and see what’s new.) When you don’t visit, the default is to send you a daily summary of posts and replies, which you can change to weekly, etc. If you want each post to come in to your email just like the mailing list we have now, you can do that.
You create a post, you should select a category and you can can tag it. You are alerted when there is a reply, and you can can follow (or ignore) tags, posts, topics, categories, or users, so that you see a alert on the interface and optionally in email when there is a reply or a new post.
To get back to the home page, click the IAPCT logo in the upper left-hand corner.
CSGnet will still exist. However, if you post email to CSGnet, it will not be posted on Discourse. That would jumble many of the advantages of Discourse, because the Sympa listserv (at the University of Illinois) has no way of telling Discourse what category and topic to put it in, or how to tag it.
Mak has taken the lead in setting it up and administering it, but we all can help as we learn.
Welcome to our brave new world!
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/Bruce