Sunsetting Discourse

Hey folks!

In the last ~9 years, this Discourse instance has been a great place for folks to chat about web standards, make requests for things they think are missing, and propose API modifications and additions, some of which then turned into flourishing incubations and web platform features. Thank you all for making this a vibrant community.

About 2.5 years ago, we decided to move the proposals to the WICG proposals repo, in order to have better handle over them, and better integrate them with the WICG repo creation flow.

We recently started thinking about the current role of Discourse, and found that it has a lot of overlap with another project: https://webwewant.fyi/

As such, we’re planning to sunset this Discourse instance and make it read-only, starting from <2 weeks in the future>. New open-ended discussions can be directed to https://webwewant.fyi/ to attract conversation, while new WICG proposals should go to the proposals repo, as we have encouraged for some time.

Regarding existing content here, we’re planning to archive the instance and keep it online (in read-only mode) for the foreseeable future.

Cheers

Yoav, on behalf of the WICG chairs

Hi yoavweiss, Can you help me?

I would like to make my profile anonymous. It’s possible? What does it take to do this?

I spoke here about leaving the profile anonymous, because how the Discourse will be closed, and made publicly available. I thought about deactivating my profile so that I can remain anonymous.

Also, I would like to have the right to be forgotten.

Hey yoavweiss.

Are we to understand you talking about killing off the whole WICG discourse forum here?

I’m talking about making this forum read-only.

To give this a more concrete date, the plan is to turn this forum into read-only on June 1st, 2023.

You haven’t given any justification for this proposed merger of discussion (convenience over access?), nor described the difference in experience a user of this forum should expect.

To participate, a user would need a github account. I would argue that as a discussion forum, github is not as user-friendly as this one. Would one be able to jump into a conversation as readily as here, where we just click once from an e-mail notification to get right into a thread?

Perhaps you could give us some more information about the reasons why the overlap you speak of is so intolerable. A cynic might suggest that this ‘sunsetting’ amounts to an exercise in reducing outreach, excluding the public and confining power and control to a smaller group.

My first objection is to the taste of the webwewant web-site, where visitors can register a ‘want’. These ‘wants’ necessarily become phrased with the prefix ‘I want…’, which is an ugly, brattish phrase. I think its a really bad idea to only accept such entries from brattish people or make people sound brattish to register an entry. I would certainly like to see the demise of that particular situation.

You need help making all pages just plain silly HTML files? I’ve done this quite a number of times, including for WebAt25, and WebPlatform.org. I have published code to do just that, including ways to tell which part of pages to omit in the staticificated (sic) output

Just say the word, @yoavweiss