Hive13 has used Google Groups for its mailing lists since 2009 - however, on May 17, 2022, these will all be turned to archive-only, and everything migrated to a self-hosted Discourse instance You read that right. Hive13 is making the long await switch from Google Groups (or as we lovingly refer to it as: the mailing list) to Discourse.

What?

Discourse is message forum software. It behaves like most "traditional" forums: people post messages in topics, and replies to a topic form message threads. Users can also configure it to behave like a mailing list.

Why?

The ecosystem of products and companies changed considerably since we chose Google Groups in 2009. Google has had Google Groups merely on life-support for many years now. We'd rather move everything now while we have the time to do it at our own pace. Some nice integrations that we had in the past - such as integrating the mailing list with Slack - are now gone because Google removed the support. Here are some of the other reasons: - We've received a regular stream of complaints about Google Groups being very annoying to interact with on phones. - Moving to a self-hosted Discourse instance means that we have full control of our own data. - Because Discourse is quite a nice piece of software, and we have plans of using its integrations with our Wiki, our Slack instance, and possibly our GitHub.

What next?

If you are a Hive13 member and would like to participate, we have great migration documentation written in the wiki on how to sign up, as well as Google Groups, and Discourse.

Note:

You do not need a discourse account to read the forums. Only to post/reply. More information is also in that wiki page, as well. We think this is a much needed migration, and one that will be better for us as an organization in the long run. If you have any questions, please post them in Slack or on Discourse.