The various RT and RTIR mailing lists have been a great resource for help and discussion since March 2000 (wow!). Today we're excited to announce that we're taking a big step forward and migrating our community discussions to a web-based forum hosted using Discourse.
Why the change? Discourse offers tons of great features that will help RT users including a built-in search (which should also help as people do web searches) and a really nice web interface for reading and commenting on posts. You'll also have a user account allowing you to set various preferences to manage how you interact with the community.
Worry not if you prefer email over a web site. Discourse has a mailing list mode that will allow you to continue to receive and reply to posts via email.
Forum Features
The BPS mailing lists are a great resource for sharing information about RT and RTIR, but some of that great information can be lost over time. In addition to a native search, the forum will allow us to organize discussions by category and topic, making information easier to find. We're also going to provide several social login options so it will also be easier for new users to become involved.
For more technical posts, Discourse offers formatting for code, including Perl, to make things easier to read. Users can like and bookmark useful posts. At BPS we'll be able to see which posts are popular, indicating a common feature request, bug, or gap in the documentation.
There's way more and the best way to see the new features is to try it out for yourself. Discourse hosts a site at try.discourse.org where you can experiment to get ready for the change.
Schedule
We are currently targeting early March for the cut-over. To seed the new system with helpful discussions from the list, we are importing the last 5 years of posts from the lists into Discourse. After a few hours of downtime, we'll send a notification when the forum is up and running. We'll also pull in current subscribers by email and you'll be able to use the "Forgot password" link to set a new password.
We're looking forward to the next 17 years of great community discussion!