I believe Tingting's point — if not, it is my point — is that the post one is replying to moves well out of sight. Often, I want to reread something to make sure I've got it right. On a long thread, it's hard to manage scrolling up and down.

I'm in Harvard's CS50 and University of Helsinki's Discord servers, setting up the server is no problem, just need official users for leadership, service and arbitration. If the employees are on the clock, they need to be paid for such contributions. Otherwise, volunteers can act as liaisons I guess.

Do you know what will be cool? Having an input option with free handwriting and drawing, like a blackboard. Do you know what would be even cooler? Having the machine learning ability to interpret and print them in the notebook in Wolfram language.

Since you're participating in a discussion in a MOOC, you can provide data that others (including me) don't know:

How large is the Harvard CS50 MOOC? About how many people are participating in the Discourse discussion?

Approximately how many messages are posted in a day?

How do you manage your participation? Do you get notifications via e-mail? How do you control how many notifications you get?

Do you read all the discussion, or only a subset of it? If you read a subset, what navigation hints do you use to help you find the parts you want to read?

Is the discussion overwhelming, or is it manageable? As an aside, I find that the Wolfram Community discussions become quite cumbersome at >250 messages in the discussion -- there's a limit that can be displayed on one webpage.

If someone has said something that warrants a personal reply (e.g., "Thanks!"), is it easy to send that personal reply? Conversely, is it easy to block receiving personal replies from someone who is too vocal?

Is it possible to block messages matching some keywords/user so that you never see matching messages in the future? Do you use those mechanisms?

Any other questions/comments in using Discourse vs. a Wolfram Community discussion for a course?

Thanks!

Interesting. I don't think that trolling would be an inherent problem in a private Discord group for a Wolfram U course. I don't think trolling would be a problem if the entirety of the Wolfram Community's discussions were ported over to a Discord server. OTOH, I do think trying Discord with a few Wolfram U courses as an experiment would be a good way to start.

There is zero chance that our intro to Calc course would move to Discord. That would make no sense; it would be planned in advance -- probably >6 months in advance. We really don't get a vote in this. Maybe the first overture would be for Wolfram U to do a survey of its students and see what they think about the idea. I fondly hope that this is something @Jamie Peterson (Director of Wolfram U) would consider in the future. You're the only participant in these forums that I've ever conversed about their community software with. I happened out of random chance to stumble on the discussion you created.

I just don't know how much friction there is to staying with the Wolfram Community forums. Is that an important product for WR -- a selling point to companies to use their software? I don't know. I don't think so, but I could be mistaken.

The fact that you can't use emojis here is not a serious problem. The fact that emoji-postings fail with a "The message system is temporarily unavailable" error is a concern. Vague error messages that don't point to the [simple] solution are problematic. There no way to measure, but I'm certain more than a handful of newbies have punted when they got that :( message.

Tingting, you're currently participating in a Wolfram U course. All things equal, I think that Wolfram U courses would be far better off if Discourse were being used for their messaging. They're easier to use, easier to navigate, they scale pretty well, and -- most important -- emojis are available. ;) Newbies are grappling with brand-new concepts in a Wolfram U course. The way they converse with instructors and each other should be as easy as possible. Many of them are already familiar with Discourse and similar systems. Are all things equal? I cannot tell. I have asked Stephen about that in one of his live q&a sessions; he ignored my question. Perhaps he had more important questions to deal with.

Yes Mike, that's what I meant! :D