On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 13:15:23 -0700 Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote:
> Ihor Antonov <ihor@antonovs.family> writes: > > On Sunday, April 12, 2020 11:51:27 AM PDT Russ Allbery wrote: > > [...] > So, I should be clear that I personally have only a small amount of > experience with Discourse and haven't looked into the details of its > features. But there are a lot of reasons for investigating that sort of > forum software, more generically. Here are a few. > [...] +1 Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1782/ [I really wanted to just leave it at that, but...] I think being able to easily indicate a +/-1 would be a huge benefit for debian-style conversations. There are four distinct long-winded discussions that I can immediately recall over the last year where people have reached out to me or others over IRC to express frustration/agreement with a topic/email, but they never mentioned it on the mailing list. These same people (myself included) would likely have added a simple indication of approval/disagreement, especially knowing it is not an entirely new email to be read by every reader. I haven't used discourse yet, but if it's able to send me an email for new conversations and updates for conversations/categories I'm subscribed to, that means an infinitely smaller inbox, less noise, and more time/attention on the things I care about. ... I'm sure it can, those seem like standard features. Speaking of more recent events, I can see where certain longer-lived topic categories would be helpful, such as a help-needed (or team-needs-help) category. Rather than the FTP-Masters team firing off periodic emails hoping that someone this round reads it and bites, they could create the topic in that help-needed category and leave it for people interested in seeing how they can help Debian. I'm sure that same logic applies to many teams, where burn-out and and serious demotivation happens long before anyone external to the team is aware of the problem, which exasperates simpler problems. Continuing to pick on my favorite team... this is applies ftp-masters, where the training process itself is extremely demotivating simply because of the lack of manpower available for reviewing our reviews. A lot of these supposed benefits are speculation, since I haven't used the service yet, but it's probably time to check out this new-fangled forum stuff. At a glance, it looks like these features (and other subscription refinements) are available. They sound like they could (possibly) drastically improve how we communicate, raise concerns, gather consensus, etc. Cheers, -- Michael Lustfield