Guys… please take what I say with a grain of salt… The issue is that the input is a stream of messages where they are addressed in a LIFO manner. This means that messages may be ignored. The stream of data (user@spark for example) is semi-structured in that the stream contains a lot of messages, some which could be noise or repeats not really organized by content.
So why not try to solve this as a Big Data problem… You’re streaming data in to the ‘lake’ and upon ingestion, you need to scan / index / and tag the message so that it could be easier to find. Now you can create user tools to search the messages. (e.g. SparkSQL … , ML, etc…) So you can find a target set of messages and see how many times they have been viewed, answered… even query who answered them… (e.g. Dean Wampler on Spark/Scala issues answered 30 questions this past month. or Owen was answering questions that focused on spark security… ) What features came up the most in the questions… etc … I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you should consider rolling your own tool set, or looking beyond just SO. Some have taken to glitter to set up online communities where discussions and questions can be answered… but looking at tools like glitter (github) , Atlassian, and SO… its a disjoint toolset. Why not choose one, or decide to roll your own and move on with it? (Either under Apache, or outside on your own.) I apologize for my mini rant. -Mike On Nov 7, 2016, at 4:24 PM, Maciej Szymkiewicz <mszymkiew...@gmail.com<mailto:mszymkiew...@gmail.com>> wrote: Just a couple of random thoughts regarding Stack Overflow... * If we are thinking about shifting focus towards SO all attempts of micromanaging should be discarded right in the beginning. Especially things like meta tags, which are discouraged and "burninated" (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/burninate-request/info) , or thread bumping. Depending on a context these won't be manageable, go against community guidelines or simply obsolete. * Lack of expertise is unlikely an issue. Even now there is a number of advanced Spark users on SO. Of course the more the merrier. Things that can be easily improved: * Identifying, improving and promoting canonical questions and answers. It means closing duplicate, suggesting edits to improve existing answers, providing alternative solutions. This can be also used to identify gaps in the documentation. * Providing a set of clear posting guidelines to reduce effort required to identify the problem (think abouthttp://stackoverflow.com/q/5963269 a.k.a How to make a great R reproducible example?) * Helping users decide if question is a good fit for SO (see below). API questions are great fit, debugging problems like "my cluster is slow" are not. * Actively cleaning (closing, deleting) off-topic and low quality questions. The less junk to sieve through the better chance of good questions being answered. * Repurposing and actively moderating SO docs (https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/apache-spark/topics). Right now most of the stuff that goes there is useless, duplicated or plagiarized, or border case SPAM. * Encouraging community to monitor featured (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/apache-spark?sort=featured) and active & upvoted & unanswered (https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/apache-spark) questions. * Implementing some procedure to identify questions which are likely to be bugs or a material for feature requests. Personally I am quite often tempted to simply send a link to dev list, but I don't think it is really acceptable. * Animating Spark related chat room. I tried this a couple of times but to no avail. Without a certain critical mass of users it just won't work. On 11/07/2016 07:32 AM, Reynold Xin wrote: This is an excellent point. If we do go ahead and feature SO as a way for users to ask questions more prominently, as someone who knows SO very well, would you be willing to help write a short guideline (ideally the shorter the better, which makes it hard) to direct what goes to user@ and what goes to SO? Sure, I'll be happy to help if I can. On Sun, Nov 6, 2016 at 9:54 PM, Maciej Szymkiewicz <mszymkiew...@gmail.com<mailto:mszymkiew...@gmail.com>> wrote: Damn, I always thought that mailing list is only for nice and welcoming people and there is nothing to do for me here >:) To be serious though, there are many questions on the users list which would fit just fine on SO but it is not true in general. There are dozens of questions which are to broad, opinion based, ask for external resources and so on. If you want to direct users to SO you have to help them to decide if it is the right channel. Otherwise it will just create a really bad experience for both seeking help and active answerers. Former ones will be downvoted and bashed, latter ones will have to deal with handling all the junk and the number of active Spark users with moderation privileges is really low (with only Massg and me being able to directly close duplicates). Believe me, I've seen this before. On 11/07/2016 05:08 AM, Reynold Xin wrote: You have substantially underestimated how opinionated people can be on mailing lists too :) On Sunday, November 6, 2016, Maciej Szymkiewicz <mszymkiew...@gmail.com<mailto:mszymkiew...@gmail.com>> wrote: You have to remember that Stack Overflow crowd (like me) is highly opinionated, so many questions, which could be just fine on the mailing list, will be quickly downvoted and / or closed as off-topic. Just saying... -- Best, Maciej On 11/07/2016 04:03 AM, Reynold Xin wrote: OK I've checked on the ASF member list (which is private so there is no public archive). It is not against any ASF rule to recommend StackOverflow as a place for users to ask questions. I don't think we can or should delete the existing user@spark list either, but we can certainly make SO more visible than it is. On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Reynold Xin <r...@databricks.com> wrote: Actually after talking with more ASF members, I believe the only policy is that development decisions have to be made and announced on ASF properties (dev list or jira), but user questions don't have to. I'm going to double check this. If it is true, I would actually recommend us moving entirely over the Q&A part of the user list to stackoverflow, or at least make that the recommended way rather than the existing user list which is not very scalable. On Wednesday, November 2, 2016, Nicholas Chammas <nicholas.cham...@gmail.com> wrote: We’ve discussed several times upgrading our communication tools, as far back as 2014 and maybe even before that too. The bottom line is that we can’t due to ASF rules requiring the use of ASF-managed mailing lists. For some history, see this discussion: * https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/spark-user/201412.mbox/%3CCAOhmDzfL2COdysV8r5hZN8f=NqXM=f=oy5no2dhwj_kveop...@mail.gmail.com%3E * https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/spark-user/201501.mbox/%3CCAOhmDzec1JdsXQq3dDwAv7eLnzRidSkrsKKG0xKw=tktxy_...@mail.gmail.com%3E (It’s ironic that it’s difficult to follow the past discussion on why we can’t change our official communication tools due to those very tools…) Nick On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 12:24 PM Ricardo Almeida <ricardo.alme...@actnowib.com> wrote: I fell Assaf point is quite relevant if we want to move this project forward from the Spark user perspective (as I do). In fact, we're still using 20th century tools (mailing lists) with some add-ons (like Stack Overflow). As usually, Sean and Cody's contributions are very to the point. I fell it is indeed a matter of of culture (hard to enforce) and tools (much easier). Isn't it? On 2 November 2016 at 16:36, Cody Koeninger <c...@koeninger.org> wrote: So concrete things people could do - users could tag subject lines appropriately to the component they're asking about - contributors could monitor user@ for tags relating to components they've worked on. I'd be surprised if my miss rate for any mailing list questions well-labeled as Kafka was higher than 5% - committers could be more aggressive about soliciting and merging PRs to improve documentation. It's a lot easier to answer even poorly-asked questions with a link to relevant docs. On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 7:39 AM, Sean Owen <so...@cloudera.com> wrote: > There's already reviews@ and issues@. dev@ is for project development itself > and I think is OK. You're suggesting splitting up user@ and I sympathize > with the motivation. Experience tells me that we'll have a beginner@ that's > then totally ignored, and people will quickly learn to post to advanced@ to > get attention, and we'll be back where we started. Putting it in JIRA > doesn't help. I don't think this a problem that is merely down to lack of > process. It actually requires cultivating a culture change on the community > list. > > On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 12:11 PM Mendelson, Assaf <assaf.mendel...@rsa.com> > wrote: >> >> What I am suggesting is basically to fix that. >> >> For example, we might say that mailing list A is only for voting, mailing >> list B is only for PR and have something like stack overflow for developer >> questions (I would even go as far as to have beginner, intermediate and >> advanced mailing list for users and beginner/advanced for dev). >> >> >> >> This can easily be done using stack overflow tags, however, that would >> probably be harder to manage. >> >> Maybe using special jira tags and manage it in jira? >> >> >> >> Anyway as I said, the main issue is not user questions (except maybe >> advanced ones) but more for dev questions. It is so easy to get lost in the >> chatter that it makes it very hard for people to learn spark internals… >> >> Assaf. >> >> >> >> From: Sean Owen [mailto:so...@cloudera.com] >> Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2016 2:07 PM >> To: Mendelson, Assaf; dev@spark.apache.org >> Subject: Re: Handling questions in the mailing lists >> >> >> >> I think that unfortunately mailing lists don't scale well. This one has >> thousands of subscribers with different interests and levels of experience. >> For any given person, most messages will be irrelevant. I also find that a >> lot of questions on user@ are not well-asked, aren't an SSCCE >> (http://sscce.org/), not something most people are going to bother replying >> to even if they could answer. I almost entirely ignore user@ because there >> are higher-priority channels like PRs to deal with, that already have >> hundreds of messages per day. This is why little of it gets an answer -- too >> noisy. >> >> >> >> We have to have official mailing lists, in any event, to have some >> official channel for things like votes and announcements. It's not wrong to >> ask questions on user@ of course, but a lot of the questions I see could >> have been answered with research of existing docs or looking at the code. I >> think that given the scale of the list, it's not wrong to assert that this >> is sort of a prerequisite for asking thousands of people to answer one's >> question. But we can't enforce that. >> >> >> >> The situation will get better to the extent people ask better questions, >> help other people ask better questions, and answer good questions. I'd >> encourage anyone feeling this way to try to help along those dimensions. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Wed, Nov 2, 2016 at 11:32 AM assaf.mendelson <assaf.mendel...@rsa.com> >> wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> I know this is a little off topic but I wanted to raise an issue about >> handling questions in the mailing list (this is true both for the user >> mailing list and the dev but since there are other options such as stack >> overflow for user questions, this is more problematic in dev). >> >> Let’s say I ask a question (as I recently did). Unfortunately this was >> during spark summit in Europe so probably people were busy. In any case no >> one answered. >> >> The problem is, that if no one answers very soon, the question will almost >> certainly remain unanswered because new messages will simply drown it. >> >> >> >> This is a common issue not just for questions but for any comment or idea >> which is not immediately picked up. >> >> >> >> I believe we should have a method of handling this. >> >> Generally, I would say these types of things belong in stack overflow, >> after all, the way it is built is perfect for this. More seasoned spark >> contributors and committers can periodically check out unanswered questions >> and answer them. >> >> The problem is that stack overflow (as well as other targets such as the >> databricks forums) tend to have a more user based orientation. This means >> that any spark internal question will almost certainly remain unanswered. >> >> >> >> I was wondering if we could come up with a solution for this. >> >> >> >> Assaf. >> >> >> >> >> >> ________________________________ >> >> View this message in context: Handling questions in the mailing lists >> Sent from the Apache Spark Developers List mailing list archive at >> Nabble.com<http://nabble.com>. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@spark.apache.org -- Maciej Szymkiewicz
