My views do align with Martin here: email does feel like a second class
citizen. Sending email does work properly (likely because they could
just use the github parser gem) but what it sends out is ... barely
enough.
On the other hand (and this has been pointed out by other people), it
might be much better for users. Given that foreman-dev is not a very
high activity mailing list (which I like, good signal/noise ratio) I
think it can be a good trade-off for better user interaction. While we
could consider splitting into a discourse for -users and a mailing list
for -dev, IMHO the downsides of that a much bigger than the upsides.
Right now we have done an experiment and with these initial findings I
think we can approach the Discourse community to ask them what their
views are. Perhaps we can work together to improve it (yay open source).
To state what's perhaps obvious: we're never going to find a perfect
solution that makes everybody happy. We should strive to find a local
maximum that makes most people happy / the least people unhappy. For
-dev we can ask the devs since that's a pretty consistent group and we
know most. That's not true for -users since they might be unhappy now
but not tell us. I'm willing to trust others that it's the better
choice even if I see some downsides for me personally.
On Sun, Nov 05, 2017 at 07:51:45PM +0100, Martin Bačovský wrote:
For monitoring of what is going on on the foreman-dev/users I prefer to
consume it as a mailing list. It is lightweight and efficient and fits well
to my mail-centric workflow. I understand the benefits of the forum so I
gave Discourse a try to see how it works and if its mailing-list mode
promises smooth transition.
Things I like:
- searching during new post compose
- existence of "groups"
- likes (even work when sent via mail)
- rich-text messages, syntax highlighting, markdown
- easy to share links to individual posts
Things I didn't like (I guess some are likely interference with the Gmail
client and some can be tuned up):
- for some reason the threads are not kept together in my Gmail and the
messages from one thread are split into multiple threads even if they seem
to have same subject. I'm not sure why, it may be because I tuned the
account settings. I'll keep testing this
- it took about 15 min since I sent mail to the time I received it from
the list (not sure what are the reaction times on the list today but this
won't improve it)
- mails from Discourse take too much visual space - the footer saying how
to unsubscribe, reply or visit the topic is included in each message.
First post should be enough. There is also extra username with avatar and
forum role next to User name in the From field. Is this configurable?
- "likes" are only indicated in forum notifications but not in emails. If
you send '+1' to the list the like is added but no message is sent to the
users (just the notification)
So far for me it is difficult to follow the Discourse discussion using just
Gmail. For further testing I'd like to see more traffic in the Testing
area. I'd also appreciate experience with mailing-list mode testing form
others.
M.
On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 7:29 PM, Lukas Zapletal <l...@redhat.com> wrote:
Greg, I absolutely understand the motivation, every two years amount
of programmers doubles. That is a crazy amount of newcomers. But these
new people are not idiots and some technical level is required even
for soft roles in our community. And we can make lists approachable
very much like forums.
Do not put me into position of blind and angry dev who can't accept
something different or new. I understand all contexts and I say
Discourse is an overkill that will bother me and possibly others. God
I wish Google Groups are gone, but not for this.
> * do nothing
Honestly, yeah.
> * switch mailing list for minimal improvement
s/minimal/reasonable/
> * switch to a forum, big upheaval but potential big payoff
Sure, because there are no downsides.
It's not about a list standard e-mail headers. The forum has different
workflow and features and there will be new features as well while
mailing list will stay the same. This will screw my inbox. This will
but a wall between e-mail users and web forum users. This is what's
this all about. And I think we don't need to go that direction.
LZ
On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Greg Sutcliffe <g...@emeraldreverie.org>
wrote:
> One more thought occurred to me while I was out on the nursery pickup,
so I'll drop here before I bow out for the weekend.
>
> Lukas, I think part of our disagreement is our different goals. As I
highlighted in the last mail, users behave differently to devs. These days
I consider myself more user than dev (when did I last contribute code), so
I have a different world view.
>
> You want to protect a tried and trusted workflow, likely used by many
here - that's fine. My job is to promote and develop the user community, so
I see room for improvement.
>
> Here's the catch though... Our future devs, as a community, *come from*
the user community. If we don't focus there, then we risk stagnating the
dev community too.
>
> I won't deny this change is a larger net benefit for the user group. The
case for the dev community is harder to argue. But there *is* benefit, and
compared to running a list (for dev) and a forum (for users) I think the
better argument is to use a forum for both.
>
> I don't expect to convince everyone, so this is going to come down to a
group decision - but not for a while yet. We need to do more tests.
>
> Have a great weekend all,
> Greg
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"foreman-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to foreman-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
