The email alert definitely should be the first one to get fixed :) On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 8:23 AM, Zane Bitter <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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/u > sers/2133/zaneb/?sort=email_subscriptions > > Looking forward to your thoughts :) >> >> Thanks! >> Jimmy >> irc: jamesmcarthur >> >> >> ____________________________________________________________ >> ______________ >> OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) >> Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscrib >> e >> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev >> >> > > __________________________________________________________________________ > OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions) > Unsubscribe: [email protected]?subject:unsubscribe > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev > -- Zhipeng (Howard) Huang Standard Engineer IT Standard & Patent/IT Product Line Huawei Technologies Co,. 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