Thanks Campbell. I think this is a really great idea. While I don't have any suggestions as to what specific tool (Discord or Phabricator/Ponder, etc.) is best for the job, I think it's really important for this forum to be a "searchable" Q&A format and not simply a persistent "chat" or "ongoing discussion" format.
Having something where people can search through previously asked questions *before* asking their own question saves them time (if it's already been asked and answered) and also the time of experienced blender devs who are generously taking time away from their own work to help others. Moreover, being able to tag questions and answers with relevant blender versions also saves ppl time, so people aren't looking for code in 2.7 that only exists in 2.8, for example. In the end, I completely agree that the goal should be to help people use time as efficiently as possible when doing blender dev (considering the limited time of experienced blender coders too). That's why i think a persistent IRC-like "clone" would not be helpful in the longer term. Thanks again for all you guys are doing to help get the community more involved! You guys are awesome :) Cheers, Danrae On Nov 21, 2017 1:21 AM, "Campbell Barton" <[email protected]> wrote: Recently the possibility of using a forum was suggested as a way we can help on-board new developers. A quick summary of the issues with current communication channels: - Realtime chat is too timezone sensitive *. - Bf-committers mailing lists aren't setup for Q&A. while responding to some questions from interested dev's is OK, noisy discussions are discouraged. I suspect some people might be too shy to ask questions on our official mailing list too. My impression is IRC is getting a reputation as having a higher barrier of entry with alternatives like Slack, Mattermost, RocketChat .. etc. gaining popularity. In a discussion with the other admins we considered doing a trial run of a blender-developer forum. Unlike the old blender.org forums, which had too much overlap with blenderartists.org this would focus on people working with Blender's code, developer tools and anything related to becoming a committer. User questions, feature requests - would be off topic, there are better places that handle this. It's hard to know if this is really needed or how much it would be used, there have been a handful of times new developers have asked questions in bug reports, but further I cant say for sure. When talking with Bastien Dalai & Sergey, our main concern is the time needed to respond to posts, that we end up in a similar situation to what we already have with patch review. Proposal -------- - Create a forum using discourse: https://www.discourse.org see rust-lang's forum as an example: https://users.rust-lang.org - Appoint someone to be responsible for triage, they can contact maintainers if it's needed. The intent here is to take some pressure off maintainers for handling day to day posts. It's possible it ends up being an unnecessary role, it's just to avoid diffusion of responsibility - Maintainers who already spend time helping others should not need to spend more time doing this. As a rule of thumb - time helping others on the forum can replace some time helping out in IRC. - This is to help people who are serious about getting into Blender development anything else can be redirected to the appropriate site or closed if it's really off topic. - Trial run for a fixed time-frame (3-6 months for eg). if it's not working well after we've made a reasonable effort, close it. Thoughts and suggestions welcome. ---- * Newer online chat systems support stored scroll-back, making real-time chat work better across time-zones, even so, switching away from IRC is a different topic and not part of this proposal. -- - Campbell _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
