Eternal thanks to Scott W for maintaining the mailing lists all these years. These have been a continuously positive and helpful resource for me for ~15 years of using SuperCollider, in no small part to both Scott W and all the other core contributors answering messages, providing help, and setting a positive tone.
The scsynth forum has also grown into an incredible positive and helpful space over the years of its existence. To address a few things that have come up in this thread:
- Discourse, the backend software for
scsynth.org,
is a fully open-source and community-run project (https://github.com/discourse/discourse). A few years ago, when I looked into modern and well-maintained mailing list / community discussion platforms as an alternative to the current mailing list stack, Discourse stood out to me as a clear winner in terms of stability, features, easy-of-deployment, etc. It has been used by several other much larger OS music communities (in particular, the
lines forum) with great success.
- The current
scsynth.org list was started by Ismael, with setup help from a few other core SC community members (myself included). It's currently
moderated and maintained by James Harkins, Josh Parmenter, Julian Rohrhuber, Scott Wilson, James Surgener, Thomas Capogreco, Ismael, and myself. This list fell together naturally, based on people who were already core community members / who was paying attention to the day-to-day operations of the forum.
- The forum is hosted as a docker image run on a Digital Ocean cloud droplet. Backups are made regularly and are available to all administrators, so there's no danger of "losing" archived material, and anyone could spin up a new iteration of the forum if needed. In this sense, it's truly a community owned platform for us.
- The forum has historically been self-funded by Ismael, with a few others donating money - we're discussing starting a patreon / other funding source to share this burden (though it's not widlly expensive), or possibly moving to university-backed hosting, if we can figure out the details. The primary concern here is that the forum is easy to maintain, and remains as autonomous and community-operated / owned as possible.
- When I did an initial trial run of Discourse as a hosting platform, I tested mailing list mode extensively. In testing, it appeared to work as good or better than a traditional mailman/majordomo mailing lists - it is possible to use the scsynth forum PURELY via email, including both creating new topics and responding to topics. There was a short period in March where mailing list mode settings changed due to an update, and mail didn't get delivered for a few days - this should be resolved.
If you have mailing list mode turned on and are not receiving emails for all posts please post in Meta, because this definitely is a bug or configuration issue.
I'm going to do some more testing of mailing list mode in the coming week or so, to make sure everything is configured correctly for an email-only experience. I'll post a short guide about my experience, hopefully to address any remaining concerns about email-only usage.
I hope this clears up any confusion! If you have any issues or questions, please send a message to the
moderators group on
scsynth.org and we can address it. For anyone not already on the forum, welcome - we look forward to seeing you!
- Scott C