This page is for technical information relating to the proposed software solutions, including features and limitations. The discussion page can then be used to debate the relative merits of each and to narrow down the field.
See the original google doc by Bryn.
Preamble
Wikipedia distinguishes between the following classes of discussion software:
Quoting loosely from Wikipedia: an internet forum (or message board) is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived.
Discourse
Discourse is a internet forum and mailing list management software application.
Gitter
Gitter is an instant messaging and chat room system for developers and users of GitHub repositories.
The billing page shows that private rooms are limited to 25 users per private room (that must be the total number of users registered to a single chat room?). Payment entails $5 per person per month which is non-trivial and certainly a barrier to entry. I suppose we would use public rooms exclusively in any case? So disabled services are not an issue.
Slack
Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool.
Its free version only keeps the most recent 10 000 chat messages.
