On 04/04/18 17:26, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
Hi everyone!
We have a very robust and vibrant community at ask.openstack.org
<https://ask.openstack.org/>. There are literally dozens of posts a
day. However, many of them don't receive knowledgeable answers. I'm
really worried about this becoming a vacuum where potential community
members get frustrated and don't realize how to get more involved with
the community.
I'm looking for thoughts/ideas/feelings about this tool as well as
potential admin volunteers to help us manage the constant influx of
technical and not-so-technical questions around OpenStack.
Here's the thing: email alerts. They're broken.
I have had my email alert preferences set to 'only subscribed tags' with
a daily 'Entire forum (tag filtered)' email for several (like 4) years
now. I am subscribed to exactly 3 tags.[1]
For the first 3 years, I didn't receive any email alerts at all despite
repeated fiddling with the settings. At the beginning of 2017 there was
a software update and I started getting daily emails that are *not* tag
filtered. (I know it was due to a software update, because the first
emails started coming from the staging server.) Within a couple of days
those emails started to go directly to spam, because GMail. I trained it
not to do that any more for me, but it's unlikely most people did, and
in any event all I get is a daily email that generally doesn't contain
any of the questions I am interested in - even on days where there _are_
in fact new questions with tags that I am subscribed to.
I've been able to make a reasonably significant contribution to
answering questions because I've made it a habit to check the site
itself regularly (and the tag filtering on the home page works really
quite well). But anyone wanting to use technical means to give them
notice about only the stuff they're interested in only when needed would
be unable to do so. (And even if you fixed it at this point it'd all be
sucked into spam filters.)
There's other problems too - for example if somebody posts a question
with not enough information and I post a comment asking for more, I
won't get a notification when they reply unless they specifically @ me,
which most people won't. (Sometimes I've discovered the replies only
years later.) In fact in general the learning curve is way too high for
people who just want to ask a casual question - for example, I'd say
users are considerably more likely to respond to a correct answer by
posting their own 'answer' that says 'It worked!' (or, worse, contains a
totally unrelated question) than they are to click the 'Accepted answer'
button - and there's no point trying to educate them because you almost
never see the same user twice. Those are all broader problems with the
design of StackExchange though; the alert thing is a feature that's
supposedly present but doesn't work as advertised.
It's also worth noting that the voting in general is fairly pointless
because ~nobody has an account registered. So if people find a useful
question and/or answer on ask.openstack from a search engine, they still
won't bother to upvote because they'd have to create an account.
Communities with critical mass like StackOverflow can use voting as a
quality signal to surface the best content; we don't get enough data for
that. (For reference, I've answered 237 questions and less than a dozen
have ever gotten a second upvote - which is likely a good proxy for 'has
ever been voted on by someone other than the original questioner'.)
So, suggestions:
* Fix the email subscription thing.
* Ensure all devs have an account - perhaps by creating one for them
using their IRC nickname & Foundation email? - and encourage people to @
each other when they see a question where they don't know the answer but
they know who would (like you might add people to a Gerrit review).
(Although realistically most of this will end up in the Spam folder...
some might say deservedly ;)
* Encourage teams to figure out a set of tags they want to watch, and
encourage at least all core reviewers to log in once and set up their
tag subscriptions so they'll see something useful when they visit the
homepage.
* Ask each team to come up with 1 or 2 volunteers to subscribe to
(filtered!) email alerts and try to answer or triage incoming questions.
For those of you already contributing there, Thank You! For those that
are interested in becoming a moderator (instant AUC status!) or have
some additional ideas around fostering this community, please respond.
I'm not sure what else there is that I can't already do at my current
karma level, but you're welcome to add me to the list and I'll try to do
some of it in my travels.
cheers,
Zane.
[1] Feel free to use your admin powers to poke around in my settings to
try to figure out what is going on:
https://ask.openstack.org/en/users/2133/zaneb/?sort=email_subscriptions
Looking forward to your thoughts :)
Thanks!
Jimmy
irc: jamesmcarthur
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