I recently talked with folks who moderate the various Elm discussion forums about the challenges that come up and how we can do better.
The short version is: *we should start migrating more discussion to /r/elm <https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/>.* Now the long version! How Things Are Now Long-form discussion is split between elm-discuss and /r/elm <https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/>. There are a lot of regulars that spend more time on elm-discuss, but I think it's fair to say that /r/elm is much more easily accessible and "public facing" for newcomers. This creates some problems. Problems with elm-discuss: - Threads are linear, so it's hard for people to branch off into sub-discussions. - There's no voting mechanism in elm-discuss, so topics are sorted by "are people posting?" not by "do people care?" - Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are moderated by default to avoid those awful spam robots that Google Groups does not catch. - It goes to people's already full inboxes. If you change this, you use the online interface, which is not amazing. Problems from having two long-form forums: - Lots of valuable expertise *only* lives on elm-discuss. When new folks come to /r/elm, there are not as many folks with as much production experience. - Blog posts (frequently shared on /r/elm) miss out on a lot of valuable feedback. How Things Could Be Right now I'm just suggesting that folks who are regulars here get on /r/elm and see if you like it. I'd like to start by shifting the center of gravity for community discussion. Longer term though, things could look more like how Rust does it. It seems like /r/rust <https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/> is the center of gravity for community discussion. See their sidebar! They moderate content well and have some laughs <https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5l08o5/rust_is_literally_haskell/>. (I personally think it's very important for moderators to be active in guiding people towards *friendly* discussion! That's super hard on elm-discuss.) They also have an interesting approach to answering beginner questions <https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5ljizz/is_there_a_rust_equivalent_to_rlearnpython/> that I think it'd be good to try out! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
