Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Andrew Kofink]

I had the opportunity to more thoroughly explore Discourse over the
holiday, and I really love it! I think most users will already be used to
this forum style interface (quasi Stack Exchange). I really like the
features of voting and marking replies as The Answer. You've convinced me!
I encourage others to go play around with it as well. I think you'll find
it more familiar than you might think.

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 8:33 AM, Greg Sutcliffe 
wrote:

> On 08/11/17 17:01, Ivan Necas wrote:
> > And, if we meet in some time (let's say 6 months from the kick off)
> > and look at the numbers, I think it would be much easier discussion
> > if we should ditch the list or not. Additionally, we would have 6
> > months of hands on experience with Discourse.
>
> I'm going to assume we're talking about side-by-side for a single
> channel (i.e the users list). I'll focus on that, but I remain open to
> the option of running -dev on a list and -users on a forum, we can make
> that work. Still not my top choice, but doable.
>
> So, I'm all for following the data - in fact I'm actually studying Data
> Science at the moment in my spare time so I can be better at this for
> our community metrics in general (this course [1], good fun).
>
> What I think you're proposing is that we measure the amount of activity
> on both platforms after 6 months, and then use that as an indicator of
> how much people *like* each platform. The problem is that this
> experiment contains both systemic bais and a confounding variable.
>
> Firstly, the systemic bias: people will stay where the conversation is
> (i.e. the network effect). Unless everyone moves, no-one does. If we had
> zero users on both platforms at the start, this could probably be
> accounted for, but that's not the case.
>
> Secondly, the counfounding variable (nemesis of all data scientists).
> You're suggesting that "amount of activity" on a given platform (X) can
> be used to infer "willingness to use" that platform (Y). But this
> doesn't account for the procrastination problem (there are studies, I
> picked a couple [2,3]). People don't change if they don't *have* to,
> however much better the alternative is. So there's a variable affecting
> X but not Y that we can't account for, which means we can't use it for
> inference.
>
> > I'm not suggesting 100% agreement, on the other hand I'm serious
> > about listening carefully to the people that actually ARE active in
> > the community.
>
> 100% agree with that, that's exactly what this thread is for. I'll post
> that summary I mentioned shortly to try and loop some more voices in.
>
> Cheers,
> Greg
>
> [1] https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science
>
> [2] Opt-in vs opt-out organ donation - much higher donation rate with
> opt-out. People could *save lives* by filling out a form, and they don't.
>
> https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-014-0131-4
>
> [3] Electricity costs. 14 million houses in the UK could be saving £200
> per year (2016 data), but they don't switch. UK is actually
> considerating putting automatic tariff switching into law because people
> are so bad at this.
>
> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/household-energy-
> savings-through-switching-supporting-evidence/many-
> households-could-save-around-200-per-year-through-
> switching-energy-supplier-basis-for-claim
>
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-- 
Andrew Kofink
akof...@redhat.com
IRC: akofink
Software Engineer
Red Hat Satellite

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Another update on this, almost there :)

Threading now apears entirely functional. Ewoud and I ran a private test
using Mailgun last night (so as not to spam everyone in case it was
still broken). As you can see, in this Gist, it appears to be working in
Mutt:

https://gist.github.com/ekohl/60f3b5bdc6559800835b9f2ea0df13c1

Email support now feels pretty much the same to what we have today.
There's even a List-ID in the headers to filter on.

I've also reduced the email send delay to 5 mins, and I'm waiting for
Ohad to set up an MX record for me so we can handle inbound mail
directly. That will bring us from 15mins (5 min polling + 10 min delay)
down to just 5 min, which is acceptable I think.

I'll update again once I have the MX record. Only Ohad can do this, so
my hands are tied.

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Ivan Necas]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 2:42 PM, Greg Sutcliffe  wrote:
> Apparently my arguments aren't coming out coherently - I think we've
> misunderstood each other on a couple of points...
>
>> I'm afraid the amount of time waiting doesn't have any influence on
>> the feeling if something is big bang or not.
>
> Sure, that's not what I was trying to say, I was just trying to give
> some insight into my thinking.
>
> I knew the likely reaction to a big change would be negative (in some
> respects), and that partial solutions would be proposed. So I spent time
> looking at softer alternatives and indeed some of the partial solutions
> already proposed, and didn't really come up with any that I thought
> would work. So, faced with doing something hard, I instead kept waiting
> to bring this up, and pushing it back, and pushing it back. I knew I was
> in for a tough discussion, and so I didn't do it. That's a personal
> failure - I saw a need in the community, and I chose not to address it.
>
> However, I don't feel it can be pushed back any longer. So here we are.
>
>> Let's not try to harsh to a decision: keep in mind that there might
>> be folks not repsponding just because there are other things to do
>> as well.
>
> Agreed, we have a good debate going, and we need time to evaluate. I
> will also post a summary of the discussion so far for those who are
> super-busy. That will probably be tomorrow, since it'll be 1 week since
> I opened up the Discourse instance for testing. Please do make sure I
> represent things fairly (I know you will :P)
>
>> Sry, but I can't resist, as the fallacy I see here is the straw-man:
>> you can make an argument for every change based on the fact that
>> people in general hate change: it's irrelevant here. Please don't :)
>
> I've not made myself clear, I think, sorry for that. I'm not using this
> argument to justify the move to Discourse itself, that would indeed be a
> strawman. A change must be justified on its own merits, and hopefully my
> arguments for that are clear.
>
> Here I'm *specifically* arguing against running Discourse alongside an
> existing list, and for that I think it's not a strawman. The usual
> criteria for something like this is looking at how many users migrate to
> the new system, despite having the old one available.
>
> However, if you put a new system alongside an existing system, you are
> pretty much guaranteed to have very few people move to the new one after
> some time. That's human psychology at work, sadly, and not any comment
> on the quality of either solution. People will largely choose no-effort
> over doing-something even when there's clear benefits (look at how many
> people don't switch to lower tariffs on their utility bills, even though
> it will save them money).
>
> Therefore, I argue that a proposal to run Discourse alongside an
> existing list is set up to fail from the beginning, and I would be
> against that.
>
>>> Both of these will suffer the resistance-to-change problem above.
>>
>> Again, not a valid argument for me.
>
> Hopefully I've clarified that argument now.
>
>> There are other communities having both forum and mailling list
>> (didn't have to go too far, my first attempt just hit
>> https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help/#discussion)
>
> Interestingly they also use Discourse & Gougle Groups (nice styling on
> that instance, I need to copy...), and I see that the mailing list gets
> ~5 mails per month, and Discourse seems to have ~250 posts per month. I
> won't repeat the mistake of trying to draw conclusions about *our*
> community (see reply about S.O. below), but it certainly seems *their*
> community has a strong preference. Not making any arguments here, I just
> find the raw data interesting.

And, if we meet in some time (let's say 6 months from the kick off)
and look at the numbers,
I think it would be much easier discussion if we should ditch the list or not.
Additionally, we would have 6 months of hands on experience with Discourse.

>
>> and honestly, I'm not afraid of any community split. And if we find
>> ourselves using forum for everything, good for everyone. If we find
>> that the forum-like is not for us, we still have the backup plan.
>>
>> Anyway, having forum focused for users and mailing list on developer
>> discussion (for now at least) sounds like a natural split and
>> possible evolution.
>
> Oh absolutely, this is possible, and as I said I'm just about OK with
> this. It's not my preferred choice ofc, but so long as we agree to
> review it every so often, I can live with it.
>
> My main concern is that we still get a good interaction between the
> users and the devs. We can't actually ensure that today - the lists are
> entirely separate, so I see it as a positive that I can @mention someone
> to involve them in a thread (whereas today I have to ping them on IRC or
> forward the mail to them). That's an improvement in communication
> options if we move everything, especially 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Apparently my arguments aren't coming out coherently - I think we've
misunderstood each other on a couple of points...

> I'm afraid the amount of time waiting doesn't have any influence on 
> the feeling if something is big bang or not.

Sure, that's not what I was trying to say, I was just trying to give
some insight into my thinking.

I knew the likely reaction to a big change would be negative (in some
respects), and that partial solutions would be proposed. So I spent time
looking at softer alternatives and indeed some of the partial solutions
already proposed, and didn't really come up with any that I thought
would work. So, faced with doing something hard, I instead kept waiting
to bring this up, and pushing it back, and pushing it back. I knew I was
in for a tough discussion, and so I didn't do it. That's a personal
failure - I saw a need in the community, and I chose not to address it.

However, I don't feel it can be pushed back any longer. So here we are.

> Let's not try to harsh to a decision: keep in mind that there might 
> be folks not repsponding just because there are other things to do
> as well.

Agreed, we have a good debate going, and we need time to evaluate. I
will also post a summary of the discussion so far for those who are
super-busy. That will probably be tomorrow, since it'll be 1 week since
I opened up the Discourse instance for testing. Please do make sure I
represent things fairly (I know you will :P)

> Sry, but I can't resist, as the fallacy I see here is the straw-man: 
> you can make an argument for every change based on the fact that 
> people in general hate change: it's irrelevant here. Please don't :)

I've not made myself clear, I think, sorry for that. I'm not using this
argument to justify the move to Discourse itself, that would indeed be a
strawman. A change must be justified on its own merits, and hopefully my
arguments for that are clear.

Here I'm *specifically* arguing against running Discourse alongside an
existing list, and for that I think it's not a strawman. The usual
criteria for something like this is looking at how many users migrate to
the new system, despite having the old one available.

However, if you put a new system alongside an existing system, you are
pretty much guaranteed to have very few people move to the new one after
some time. That's human psychology at work, sadly, and not any comment
on the quality of either solution. People will largely choose no-effort
over doing-something even when there's clear benefits (look at how many
people don't switch to lower tariffs on their utility bills, even though
it will save them money).

Therefore, I argue that a proposal to run Discourse alongside an
existing list is set up to fail from the beginning, and I would be
against that.

>> Both of these will suffer the resistance-to-change problem above.
> 
> Again, not a valid argument for me.

Hopefully I've clarified that argument now.

> There are other communities having both forum and mailling list 
> (didn't have to go too far, my first attempt just hit 
> https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help/#discussion)

Interestingly they also use Discourse & Gougle Groups (nice styling on
that instance, I need to copy...), and I see that the mailing list gets
~5 mails per month, and Discourse seems to have ~250 posts per month. I
won't repeat the mistake of trying to draw conclusions about *our*
community (see reply about S.O. below), but it certainly seems *their*
community has a strong preference. Not making any arguments here, I just
find the raw data interesting.

> and honestly, I'm not afraid of any community split. And if we find 
> ourselves using forum for everything, good for everyone. If we find 
> that the forum-like is not for us, we still have the backup plan.
> 
> Anyway, having forum focused for users and mailing list on developer 
> discussion (for now at least) sounds like a natural split and 
> possible evolution.

Oh absolutely, this is possible, and as I said I'm just about OK with
this. It's not my preferred choice ofc, but so long as we agree to
review it every so often, I can live with it.

My main concern is that we still get a good interaction between the
users and the devs. We can't actually ensure that today - the lists are
entirely separate, so I see it as a positive that I can @mention someone
to involve them in a thread (whereas today I have to ping them on IRC or
forward the mail to them). That's an improvement in communication
options if we move everything, especially with @group support.

Basically, if we can agree some guidelines around the interaction
between -dev members and Discourse then I think it can work. But as
Ewoud said, I think having it all in one place is better if we can
handle the change.

> Do you think having discourse would actually stop people asking on 
> stack overflow? Why? That might be just a sign that people are used 
> to ask about just anything on stack overflow.

A fair argument, I am making 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Just a quick update on threading, since that's causing the most pain...

On 05/11/17 18:51, Martin Bačovský wrote:
>  - 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

In short, it appears Mailjet (the SMTP service I'm using) are mangling
outgoing Message-ID headers :/

Discourse has some fairly sane code around re-using the incoming
message-id if a post comes in by email, or generating a sensible one if
it was written in the UI. That means you'd get a header like:

Message-ID: 

Sadly what's arriving in my inbox has a header like:

Message-ID 

*That's* what's breaking the threading, not Discourse itself ( I think,
it's hard to separate currently). Interesting the Redmine email does not
do this, I see this:

Message-ID: 
References: 

So Mailgun is leaving it intact. I'll see about switching over to
Mailgun shortly (sadly that means I have to sort out new DKIM and SPF
records, sigh), and hopefully this threading mess will go away.

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Ivan Necas]

Not reacting to everything here, but I would like to keep the
discussion focused on facts.

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 5:17 PM, Greg Sutcliffe  wrote:
> Thanks for returning to excellent debating form :)
>
> On 07/11/17 08:50, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
>> HyperKitty is not just a nice archive, you can easily just use mailing
>> list as a forum. There are other options like Gmane and others, but I
>> find HyperKitty as the nicest and smoothest experience.
>
> It's a lovely interface, but it's still a mailing list, and as I've
> said, I don't think a mailing list is a one-to-one equivalent to a
> forum. The features are fundamentally different, and I don't think it's
> possible to make both things first-class citizens (or we'd all be using
> that project already).
>
>> It is *the* right interface into mailing list, which some of us want
>> to continue using.
> Absolutely, it's a fantastic interface for a mailing list - but it's
> still a mailing list. It's time to move to a forum, in my opinion.
>
> Your opinion is valid too though, of course, I don't want to say it
> isn't. As Ewoud said, we can't make everyone happy, it's about figuring
> out what the majority of opinions are, and acting on that.
>
>> It's not just in hating Discourse, I particularly do not like big bang
>> migration.
>
> 100% agree, that's why I've waited over a year to propose this. I've
> been over and over it, and there's no other option (see below). Again, I
> don't do this lightly, for fun, or because I like upsetting people. It's
> because it's needed (in my view). I will set out the "how" of the actual
> migration later this week, so we can discuss how to minimize that
> big-bang (if we go ahead).

I'm afraid the amount of time waiting doesn't have any influence on the
feeling if something is big bang or not. So far, it seems there are issues
raised, and discussion going (regardless of the fact, that it's just a
mailing list:).
Let's not try to harsh to a decision: keep in mind that there might be folks
not repsponding just because there are other things to do as well.

>
>> I would not write a single word if you'd propose installing
>> Discourse next to our existing communication channels.
>
> This is a classic fallacy I'm afraid - putting two services side by side
> and seeing if users move does not account for resistance-to-change.
> There are  *so* many examples of people resisting a change, only to
> accept the change was good afterwards. Here's just *one* [1] (and then
> read the posts above it, some more good takes on the benefits of a forum).

Sry, but I can't resist, as the fallacy I see here is the straw-man: you can
make an argument for every change based on the fact that people in general
hate change: it's irrelevant here. Please don't :)

>
>> We have a lot of people who subscribed for something and you are
>> forcing them onto something they haven't subscribed for.
>
> You're right that we haven't asked them ... yet. I plan to open up the
> instance to the users-list at some point soon and get their feedback
> too. Community buy-in is the right way to make change, I've merely
> started with foreman-dev because it's the more active group (and usually
> decisions are taken here).
>
>> And we won't read their opinion here until you do the migration and
>> they will see (the terrible - I think) experience. I'd prefer
>> slower-paced rollout with old services fading out (might not happen),
>
> We're also not reading the opinions of the people who haven't joined our
> community because the mailing list is a problem for them. Which group is
> larger? We have no way to know, so all we can do is hope they cancel
> out, until we can get better data (probably never).
>
>> therefore I'd like to propose other options:
>>
>> 1) Ditch Discourse and move to Fedora Hosted mailinglists with
>> HyperKitty interface (*)
>
> As you already know, that's -1 from me.
>
>> 2) Phased rollout: Install Discourse and keep our -user and -dev lists
>> on Google Groups
>> 3) (2) + integrating Discourse with -user list in some way (daily
>> summary mail to -user list)
>
> Both of these will suffer the resistance-to-change problem above.

Again, not a valid argument for me.

>
> In addition this causes a split in the community, and will lead to
> repeat questions asked in both places, and potentially higher workload
> in answering questions - I'm not in favour of that when we're all
> already busy enough. The split in the knowledge archives is bad too.

Watch out for slipper slope (but let's stop before somebody brings up
fallacy fallacy:)

There are other communities
having both forum and mailling list (didn't have to go too far,
my first attempt just hit https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help/#discussion)
and honestly, I'm not afraid of any community split. And if we find ourselves
using forum for everything, good for everyone. If we find that the forum-like
is not for us, we still have the backup plan.

Anyway, having forum focused 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

I will just reply to phased rollout.

> Also, this may be wishful, but the fact that
> people choose to post on StackOverflow rather than our mailing list
> again shows a desire for more modern forms of interaction.

Why are we creating a duplicate of StackOverflow then? There is a
community already, let's just embrace it, advertise on dev channels,
create links from site, blog post and integrate more tightly with
-user list. (*)

I don't really see much value in building another StackOverflow. You
are not sure that these people which are comfortable with discussing
there will move to Discourse.

(*) https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/20/subscribe-to-tags-via-emai/

-- 
Later,
  Lukas @lzap Zapletal

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Thanks for returning to excellent debating form :)

On 07/11/17 08:50, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> HyperKitty is not just a nice archive, you can easily just use mailing
> list as a forum. There are other options like Gmane and others, but I
> find HyperKitty as the nicest and smoothest experience.

It's a lovely interface, but it's still a mailing list, and as I've
said, I don't think a mailing list is a one-to-one equivalent to a
forum. The features are fundamentally different, and I don't think it's
possible to make both things first-class citizens (or we'd all be using
that project already).

> It is *the* right interface into mailing list, which some of us want 
> to continue using.
Absolutely, it's a fantastic interface for a mailing list - but it's
still a mailing list. It's time to move to a forum, in my opinion.

Your opinion is valid too though, of course, I don't want to say it
isn't. As Ewoud said, we can't make everyone happy, it's about figuring
out what the majority of opinions are, and acting on that.

> It's not just in hating Discourse, I particularly do not like big bang
> migration.

100% agree, that's why I've waited over a year to propose this. I've
been over and over it, and there's no other option (see below). Again, I
don't do this lightly, for fun, or because I like upsetting people. It's
because it's needed (in my view). I will set out the "how" of the actual
migration later this week, so we can discuss how to minimize that
big-bang (if we go ahead).

> I would not write a single word if you'd propose installing
> Discourse next to our existing communication channels. 

This is a classic fallacy I'm afraid - putting two services side by side
and seeing if users move does not account for resistance-to-change.
There are  *so* many examples of people resisting a change, only to
accept the change was good afterwards. Here's just *one* [1] (and then
read the posts above it, some more good takes on the benefits of a forum).

> We have a lot of people who subscribed for something and you are
> forcing them onto something they haven't subscribed for.

You're right that we haven't asked them ... yet. I plan to open up the
instance to the users-list at some point soon and get their feedback
too. Community buy-in is the right way to make change, I've merely
started with foreman-dev because it's the more active group (and usually
decisions are taken here).

> And we won't read their opinion here until you do the migration and
> they will see (the terrible - I think) experience. I'd prefer
> slower-paced rollout with old services fading out (might not happen),

We're also not reading the opinions of the people who haven't joined our
community because the mailing list is a problem for them. Which group is
larger? We have no way to know, so all we can do is hope they cancel
out, until we can get better data (probably never).

> therefore I'd like to propose other options:
> 
> 1) Ditch Discourse and move to Fedora Hosted mailinglists with
> HyperKitty interface (*)

As you already know, that's -1 from me.

> 2) Phased rollout: Install Discourse and keep our -user and -dev lists
> on Google Groups
> 3) (2) + integrating Discourse with -user list in some way (daily
> summary mail to -user list)

Both of these will suffer the resistance-to-change problem above.

In addition this causes a split in the community, and will lead to
repeat questions asked in both places, and potentially higher workload
in answering questions - I'm not in favour of that when we're all
already busy enough. The split in the knowledge archives is bad too.

As an example of this, consider that there is a Foreman StackOverflow
board [2] (this may be news to some people here). These questions look
*remarkably* similar to ones asked in other places, and no-one is
answering them. Splitting channels splits users, devs, knowledge and
ultimately the community. Also, this may be wishful, but the fact that
people choose to post on StackOverflow rather than our mailing list
again shows a desire for more modern forms of interaction.

> 4) Migrate only user list and keep -dev list on Google Groups

Ewoud mentioned this, and I agree with him - the downsides are more than
the upsides. It's splitting the community (devs not in communication
with users) but is at least possible. I'm not sold that the barrier
between the users and devs is worthwhile, but I'm definitely less
against this than the other options. So I guess that's -0.5 compared to
the other choices :)

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/opendatakit/gG6D4Gfwh44/YUhGedXaCAAJ
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/foreman

Greg

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Re: Draft v2 - Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

> No, I don't think we can. We've been over this in the preceeding emails.
> We can give an archive a shiny GUI, but fundamentally they have a
> different feature set, and a different target user group. Your position
> on Discourse is clear, and recorded here for all to see. If enough
> people agree with you, it won't happen.

HyperKitty is not just a nice archive, you can easily just use mailing
list as a forum. There are other options like Gmane and others, but I
find HyperKitty as the nicest and smoothest experience. It is *the*
right interface into mailing list, which some of us want to continue
using. I just want to repeat it here in the new thread for others.

It's not just in hating Discourse, I particularly do not like big bang
migration. I would not write a single word if you'd propose installing
Discourse next to our existing communication channels. We have a lot
of people who subscribed for something and you are forcing them onto
something they haven't subscribed for. And we won't read their opinion
here until you do the migration and they will see (the terrible - I
think) experience. I'd prefer slower-paced rollout with old services
fading out (might not happen), therefore I'd like to propose other
options:

1) Ditch Discourse and move to Fedora Hosted mailinglists with
HyperKitty interface (*)
2) Phased rollout: Install Discourse and keep our -user and -dev lists
on Google Groups
3) (2) + integrating Discourse with -user list in some way (daily
summary mail to -user list)
4) Migrate only user list and keep -dev list on Google Groups

(*) Yeah still my preferred way, you can easily do new posts *without
subscribing* or doing *any* e-mail:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-mailm...@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/new

--
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Re: Draft v2 - Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

And this is what happens when you edit drafts as new messages. You don't need 
fancy software to break threading, just a silly mistake will do :)
-- 
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Draft v2 - Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 03/11/17 18:29, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> Greg, I absolutely understand the motivation,

Good. However, we're not the only two people on this list, and
over-communication is key to reducing misunderstanding in remote
relationships. You know me pretty well, but others do not, so I lay my
position out clearly to benefit them.

> Do not put me into position of blind and angry dev who can't accept
> something different or new.

I have not said that. I praised your first email as a model of rational
debate, proposing a alternative route with clear arguments. Following a
deeper dive into the pros & cons of each solution, you now appear to be
getting defensive. Let's not derail a productive discussion.

> 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. 

Sure, they need some technical knowledge. They need to know Git & have a
GitHub account, probably a Redmine account, maybe they contributed on
Transifex, maybe they even set up a development environment (non-trivial
for sure). There's probably more, and thats before we consider plugins.
Even adding to our calendar needs you to use GitHub.

I don't think a requirement to join a mailing list proves any *further*
knowledge on their part. In other words, some barriers to entry serve a
purpose, but where we can remove them, we should. To do otherwise means
we lose potential contributors.

We should also be open to ways to help educate people with the knowledge
needed to participate - I get the feeling you expect people to
self-educate *before* they come to us, but my *own* history in this
community started with a completely innocent email to Ohad about how to
test something. We should be open to tooling that makes such teaching
easier.

> And we can make lists approachable very much like forums.

No, I don't think we can. We've been over this in the preceeding emails.
We can give an archive a shiny GUI, but fundamentally they have a
different feature set, and a different target user group. Your position
on Discourse is clear, and recorded here for all to see. If enough
people agree with you, it won't happen.

Greg


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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Update on threading...

On 06/11/17 11:43, Greg Sutcliffe wrote:
> Thanks for the testing help, Martin.
> 
> * 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

>From the testing Martin did, and Ewoud supplying the headers he got
without participating, we were able to track down what we think is
happening [1].

We're trying out a hacky patch to fix it, and in a 2-email test I just
tried, it looks like it's working (at least, they were threaded when the
same test yesterday was not). More testing required please :)

I've also opened this upstream to discuss, we'll see what they say.
Discussion and patch at [2] if you want to follow along.

Greg

[1] https://pastebin.com/u0cDzWbW
[2]
https://meta.discourse.org/t/threading-for-email-only-topics-seems-broken/73523

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Thanks for the testing help, Martin.

* 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

I'm seeing this too, and it appears to be specific to the very first
email that starts a thread - the rest are threaded underneath. I suspect
some interaction with the Sent folder and also BCC-to-myself which I use
quite liberally at the moment. I don't see this in my GitHub folder (see
my other email for the relevance) but that's probably because we don't
start PRs by email...

>  - 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)

There's a 10 minute poll time on the incoming mail inbox, so that's
likely the source of the delay.

>  - mails from Discourse take too much visual space - the footer saying
how to unsubscribe, reply or visit the topic  is included in each message.

Agreed, these are all templates that can be altered. I'll leave it for
now so others can see the defaults, and if we go ahead we can alter to
suit our tastes. All such styling will need sorting before any migration
can happen.

>  - "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)

That's true - since Likes are intended to specifically to *not* clutter
the topic with just agreements, the post isn't recorded. I'll open a
discussion upstream about it (maybe we can get a setting for that) but
for now, it's one extra character to send "+ 1" as a workaround (I just
tried that).

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Some updates from the weekend testing:

* Inbound email should work properly now (community-t...@theforeman.org
to start a topic)

* A few people have brought up threading - I'll take this upstream once
we've isolated the issue (see reply to Martin). It's actually using a
fork of the GitHub email parser, hence why it looks very similar to
those threads.

* I've enabled tags and (for now) everyone can create tags for posts.
I'm not sure we'll use these long term, but lets try it out. Tags can be
made into something you're notified on in your personal settings.

* I've added a bunch of groups:
  * katello
  * core
  * ui
  * packaging
  * infra

These are self-select (you can join them from the Groups link in the
hamburger menu) with the exception of infra (which is request-to-join,
just for testing that function) and notify them with @group in posts.
Feel fee to try it out.

Neil, Eric, thanks for the positive vibes. There are indeed costs to
this transition but I hope we can conclude that it's worth it. In case
anyone is interested, I found some notes from another group who did
exactly this, and were pleased with the result:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/opendatakit/gG6D4Gfwh44/discussion

Several people have now said we need more traffic. I'd like to ask if
there's a subgroup that would be prepared to use Discourse as a primary
communication method for a while in order to generate this? My
suggestion would be the infra team - which is mainly myself, Ewoud, Eric
and Michael. It won't be the largest amount of traffic, but at least it
would be some. Thoughts?

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden]

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  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 
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 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Martin Bačovský]

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  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 
> 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
> > --
> > Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
> >
> > --
> > 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.
>
>
>
> --
> Later,
>   Lukas @lzap Zapletal
>
> --
> 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, 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Eric D Helms]

I think about this in two ways:

 1) Who are our lists for?
 2) How can we provide the most value through our lists to the audience?

Often I find digging up old threads to reference to users more painful than
it should be. Often, I am curious about popular or trending threads and
cannot find this information easily. This latter point I think can be
important for users and developers if there is a hot button breakage or
workflow topic being discussed. Often, when I want to answer a user, I find
the interface of email lists to be limited when it comes to including
screenshots, or writing code blocks. Further, I find asking users for
information to help with debugging difficult because they have limited
options for attachments or screenshots for inclusion. Often I find writing
structured emails for things like proposals or recaps difficult. 75% of the
time I am going to prefer email given it is what I am used to and my
primary interface for everything else. But 25%, I want something more.

If Discourse can help solve these problems, and make the users of the lists
experiences better when interacting amongst themselves as well as
developers then a big ole +1 from me. Mailing lists are great, times
change, users change, requirements change.

Mailing lists are for communication, and whatever increases communication
the most I am all for.

Eric

On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Lukas Zapletal  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 
> 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
> > --
> > Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
> >
> > --
> > 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.
>
>
>
> --
> Later,
>   Lukas @lzap Zapletal
>
> --
> 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.
>



-- 
Eric D. Helms
Red Hat Engineering

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

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  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
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> --
> 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.



-- 
Later,
  Lukas @lzap Zapletal

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Neil Hanlon]

I also think it's important to note that just because things like mailman
have existed for years and will continue to exist for years does not mean
they're always the best tool for the job. As open source developers it's
also important to be _open_ to change, and always to evaluate what the best
tool to get the job done is. A false dichotomy for sure, but: can I
continue running CentOS 5 or Solaris 10? Sure, but it probably will
stagnate me from doing what I want to do. It's like doing "DevOps" by using
clusterssh to run commands on all your servers instead of a config
management tool.

Greg is right--many would-be new developers _are_ turned off from things
like mailing lists. I know because I used to be turned off by them--and to
a certain extent, still am. There's nothing worse than finding a `-dev`
list on google for an issue you're having and not being able to find or
indeed _know_ if there's a response to a thread: Forum-type solutions don't
have that issue, and as long as they support email, even if it's not
"first", then I think any distruption in workflow, if limited, is worth it
to encourage new voices. I recently graduated from University, and know a
lot of people that wouldn't step near a mailing list for development--and
would be especially reluctant to contribute to them.

To many "next gen" developers, email is not the workflow they will choose
to adopt, and sticking with listservs because they have always been and
will always be is not a good enough reason in my opinion.


(Please note this is mostly random rambling on my behalf, and entirely
opinion based to attempt to give insight from someone who's only recently
joined the whole process)



On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 1:45 PM Greg Sutcliffe 
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
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> --
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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

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
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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Putting what I think is the more important part first ...

On 03/11/17 13:30, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> What we are running is a mailing list here.

We are running a mailing list *today*, and you're right, I want to
change that. This may well be where we simply have to stop and let
others join in the conversation, as I don't think either of us is going
to back down ;)

> It's a mailing list, we are open source developers and this is our
> way of communication.

It's *your* preferred way of communication, yes (and probably mine too,
to be honest). Don't forecast that onto all 2500 users signed up to our
lists, though - we may be in a minority. I'll quote from the Art of
Community here:

"Each type of contributor will have different preferences. Software
developers generally prefer content to be delivered directly to them.
They are typically most comfortable with mailing lists and RSS feeds
(updated content from websites and online resources) and don’t like to
have to refresh a browser to see if new content exists. This is part of
why many (typically Western) developers don’t get on very well with forums."

"Users are (typically) different. Users often love forums for their
accessibility and simplicity. The conversation flow is clear, the
interface is friendly, and the web browser is a familiar window
to that world. Users are used to having to refresh their browser to see
if updates exist. They are used to visiting many websites to find
content, and they generally feel uncomfortable about technical barriers
to these discussions and content. Users just don’t like to jump through
hoops, particularly technical hoops that can easily trip them up."

Now our users are more technical than most, but still, this has been my
experince as well - users want shiny, developers do not. Honestly I'm
surprised no one else has complained along with you yet :)

> I understand how this is supposed to work technically, but will my
> gmail.com handle this correctly? This is not how e-mail lists are
> supposed to work. Will my MUA work correctly? Won't I see broken
> threads because folks will introduce new shiny feature into Discourse
> that does not play with plain emails anymore? I can't tell. Yeah you
> set up a testing instance, but there is almost no real traffic and I
> really don't know how it will look like with thousands of emails. My
> MUA handles millions of them just fine.

These are well documented standards. In my emails I'm seeing what I
think are the right headers:

List-ID: 
List-Archive: 
List-Unsubscribe: 
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
In-Reply-To: <90019b41-28a7-babc-65da-5843e2098...@emeraldreverie.org>
References: <90019b41-28a7-babc-65da-5843e2098...@emeraldreverie.org>
Precedence: list

That, I believe, should be sufficient, and things are getting threaded
here, at least with the volume I have.

As you say, we need more volume to be sure, which is *exactly* why I've
made a test category for people to mess with before we take any
decisions. Please try it out! We won't know unless we try, and that
means at least a few people making a thread in the testing area, with
mailing list mode enabled (under personal prefs > email)

(Note there's a 2 min delay in creating new topics, 30s delay betweem
posts to the same topic, and a 5s delay for any new post - going faster
than that will mean you'll get a bounce)

Also, it seems Ohad didn't get around to enabling the mailforward I
requested, which is why topic creation by email was failing (yay DNS).
I've re-used the dev one for now, emails to community-...@theforeman.org
seem to be working fine for creating topics in the test area (i've
started one to test inline replies with too, which see to be persed nicely).

> Ever been to XdaDevelopers searching for Android ROM? 

Oh god, XDA is awful, yes, we are not going there. But the fact is we
have some issues with our users list (the dev list benefits less from
this, again because of that quote above, but it *does* benefit, and I
don't want to run a forum *and* a list). You may not like recommended
topics, but it could be of significant benefit to the users group (and
actually it can be restricted by category). Like any tool, if you use it
wrong its a bad thing (like XDA).
> My response is not about "look here is an alternative HyperKitty". I'd
> be fine with any other mailing list

And there's our impasse, I want to move away from a list. But it doesn't
change the choice in front of us:

* do nothing
* switch mailing list for minimal improvement
* switch to a forum, big upheaval but potential big payoff

> Yeah, feels like I am the only one. Not a good feeling, really.

Give it time. I doubt you are alone, and this debate is not done.

Cheers,
Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

> So if I understand, you're OK with a web interface for creating /
> managing a conversation that you don't want in your inbox in Hyperkitty,
> but not happy with exactly the same workflow in Discourse? I find that
> hard to resolve, can you clarify?

All I want is standard mailman-like list experience. This is a
regression in behavior, a change from a list to forum. Let me explain
down below.

> I disagree with the word "hack" here, I think Discourse also works fine
> over email. In all the testing I've done, the only thing I'm seeing is a
> minor issue with format=flowed URLs (and tbh not all mail clients
> support that either). You can set the mailing-list mode flag and it will
> email you everything, you need never log into the UI again. I've had
> that flag set for the last week, and can confirm that I was recieving
> everything and could reply/start threads just fine. How is this
> different to a mailing list?

I understand how this is supposed to work technically, but will my
gmail.com handle this correctly? This is not how e-mail lists are
supposed to work. Will my MUA work correctly? Won't I see broken
threads because folks will introduce new shiny feature into Discourse
that does not play with plain emails anymore? I can't tell. Yeah you
set up a testing instance, but there is almost no real traffic and I
really don't know how it will look like with thousands of emails. My
MUA handles millions of them just fine.

Mailman will be here for another 20 years and more. It will work as
long as e-mails are alive. And I do believe it's not going anywhere.

> It has to be said, I do like Hyperkitty, and I agree it would be an
> improvement over Google Groups. However, it doesn't address many of the
> use cases in my original post (and followups):

All of these are nice things, Greg. But these are irrelevant.

What we are running is a mailing list here. It's a mailing list, we
are open source developers and this is our way of communication.

People do not need "powers". Powers to do what with? Lock topics?
Create complicated sub-groups structures? Mute people or delete posts?
This is what I hate about forums. Pins and banners? Totally hate
these. Ever been to XdaDevelopers searching for Android ROM? God
that's awful, this is how it all ends - complicated pinned neverending
threads with things like "This post is reserved". And dozen of
"recommended topics" which are always totally irrelevant.

Let's just run a mailing list please. If you want to do your
statistics or gamify this, take this offline. There are tools
generating mail statistics. Fedora have concept of badges, it is all
doable.

> The summary seems to be that Discourse can do *everything* Hyperkitty
> can, and from my testing, even the email support is first class. Both
> are open, both can be hacked on if needed, both can be hosted or
> self-hosted. But only Discourse brings more power and flexibility to the
> table, both immediately, and for anything other needs we may have in
> the future.

You are comparing apple and orange here. A forum with a mailing list.
I say let's stick with an orange, a mailing list.

My response is not about "look here is an alternative HyperKitty". I'd
be fine with any other mailing list (*) with nice user archive with
easy entry for newcomers. It's about keeping our discussion where it
belongs.

(*) mailing list - a software that keeps emails in plain form not in
some kind of a database

> I'm *very* interested to hear others views though!

Yeah, feels like I am the only one. Not a good feeling, really.

-- 
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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Thanks Lukas - I wanted a healthy debate, and now I've got one :)

This is indeed constructive - you've forced me to go back and examine my
starting post more than a few times while writing this. That's a very
good thing - we need to be sure of our goal here.

There's a lot of good points here, and some not so good, so let me try
to return the favour of some constructive criticism. I'll start with the
points addressed to me, and then move on to comparing Hyperkitty with
Discourse.

On 03/11/17 10:52, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> I was planning not to reply, but I can't sorry.
> I am sorry Greg, I know you invested a lot in this and you have some
> positive experience in the past.

Don't be sorry. This is a big change thats proposed, and we're not going
to make everyone 100% happy. It well may be that I'm one of the people
that's not happy with what we come to agree on :)

Protyping things and working to improve the community is my job. It's
not time wasted if the community decides to go another way. Again, no
need to be sorry. We all want a good outcome.

 I don't like Discourse at all. <<<
>  Well my experience with Discourse is
> rather bad, mostly from https://forum.turris.cz/

So I'll go into your arguments for Mailman / Hyperkitty further down,
but you don't really say why you dislike Discourse - is it *solely* that
it's not a mailing list, or is there more to it?

> I also understand you might not be fully available for couple of next
> months and it's just you if I understand correctly with experience
> maintaining Discourse. I would rather preferred hosted solution on a
> free as in freedom service (Fedora lists).

You comment makes it sound like you're not aware of this (apologies if
you are), but Discourse is also open source, and the hosting is on our
own infra.

As for myself, I will not be entirely gone, I'm just going to be a
normal community member with a dayjob for a bit. I would expect to reply
to urgent things within a few hours at most, there will be a decent
selection of admins & moderators, and other people will have root access
as per our base Puppet users module that goes on all our servers - I
wouldn't be that irresponsible with something so critical to our
operation. It's also true that we'd want to migrate in the early hours
of the morning when all is quiet, and I'd be available for that for sure.

OK, lets talk about software :)

Rather that reply to each point individually, I want to try and gather
your points and then compare them, so please do correct me if I miss
anything.

So I think you're saying:

* Mailing lists are fine
  * email-centric
  * Open / data liberation etc
  * indexed by Google
* Hyperkitty has
  * Social logins
  * Web-based message sending

In addition, playing with the Fedora instance (admittedly briefly) I
also see:

* Some thread metrics (days inactive / old, tags, etc)
* Participants in thread
* some list metrics (active posters, list activity

I can't see the list from a manager's point of view, so I'm not sure
what level of metrics it can provide, but in general I'm sure that its
better than Google Groups. Did I get everything? I hope so, I don't want
to misrepresent you.

Lets start by removing the things that Discourse also does. It's open
source (https://github.com/discourse/), self-hosted on our own infra,
and will be indexed by Google once I make it public. It also supports
all the same social logins - I just kept it to GitHub to match Redmine.
So that leaves us with:

* Mailing lists are fine
  * email-centric
* Hyperkitty has
  * Web-based message sending
  * Some post & thread metrics
  * Tag support (presumably UI only)

There is, however, an interesting conflict in your mail - you say you're
happy to start threads and manage a conversation entirely in the
Hyperkity UI:

> I sometimes use this for lists I don't want to get into my inbox on a
> daily basis and it works just fine. To start a thread, it's just a
> simple link and HyperKitty will just ask you to Sign-In with one of
> your existing accounts. Super fast

So if I understand, you're OK with a web interface for creating /
managing a conversation that you don't want in your inbox in Hyperkitty,
but not happy with exactly the same workflow in Discourse? I find that
hard to resolve, can you clarify?

> Benefits? Mailman works great over email, it's not just some hack

I disagree with the word "hack" here, I think Discourse also works fine
over email. In all the testing I've done, the only thing I'm seeing is a
minor issue with format=flowed URLs (and tbh not all mail clients
support that either). You can set the mailing-list mode flag and it will
email you everything, you need never log into the UI again. I've had
that flag set for the last week, and can confirm that I was recieving
everything and could reply/start threads just fine. How is this
different to a mailing list?

It has to be said, I do like Hyperkitty, and I agree it would be an
improvement over Google Groups. However, it 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

Quick update...

A few people have been posting to the users/dev categories on Discourse,
so let me quickly clarify - there is no sync Discourse -> List. Anything
you post there will not make back to the lists.

To help prevent that, for now I've locked those 3 categories. Admins can
still post, but everyone else just has See permissions. Obviously we'll
unlock that if/when we move over.

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

I was planning not to reply, but I can't sorry.

>>> I don't like Discourse at all. <<<

I was hoping to get rid of Google Groups in favour of - wait for it -
GNU Mailman! Yeah, you might think this would be step backwards, but
let me explain.

GNU Mailman is the core of open source. It's the heart, really.
Similarly as git or other things. It helps to communicate millions of
people for decades and it is nothing wrong with it. What is
problematic and old is the entry barrier (it's a list) and the default
mailman archival tool you may have already seen. This is how it looks
like:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/weechat-dev/

Yeah, old, clunky interface and there is a need for new users to
register into the list to be able to post. But hey, this has been
already solved! It's called HyperKitty and Fedora already migrated to
a year ago! Look, nice and clean interface with ability to send
message right away from your browser:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/

When you click on Sign In, there are about a dozen of account
integrations including Google Plus, OpenID, GitLab, GitHub, Twitter,
Facebook or StackExchange. That's plenty, way enough for our users to
get started.

Then click on an archive (not list) and click on Start New Thread.
Yes, as easy as that. You can test on this testing mailing list:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-mailman3%40lists.fedoraproject.org/

I sometimes use this for lists I don't want to get into my inbox on a
daily basis and it works just fine. To start a thread, it's just a
simple link and HyperKitty will just ask you to Sign-In with one of
your existing accounts. Super fast:

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/test-mailm...@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/new

Benefits? Mailman works great over email, it's not just some hack, it
its main purpose. You also have a lot of options when you are
receiving mail (daily, weekly, no copies etc), data is yours and not
somewhere in cloud if you want to, archives are very fast and
searchable via Google or anything pretty much. And your whole history
is just bunch of emails, data liberation in practice. When I compare
this to Google Groups or Discourse it also loads faster as there is
less JavaScript I think.

>>> My proposal is: Let's move to Fedora mailing lists with HyperKitty, it's a 
>>> reliable infrastructure. Problem solved. <<<

I am sorry Greg, I know you invested a lot in this and you have some
positive experience in the past. Well my experience with Discourse is
rather bad, mostly from https://forum.turris.cz/ but if there is some
chance to fix our terrible Google Groups, let's do it the "right way".
I also understand you might not be fully available for couple of next
months and it's just you if I understand correctly with experience
maintaining Discourse. I would rather preferred hosted solution on a
free as in freedom service (Fedora lists).

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's
> the TL;DR:
>
> * What: move Google Groups -> Discourse
> * Why: https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/
> * Can I try? - Scroll to the end for login details
>
> So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum
> software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've
> been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and
> I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts.
>
> # What?
>
> Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to
> migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups
> from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions.
> Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll
> get to that.
>
> Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please
> keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email.
> Your workflow may not be broken :)
>
> # Why?
>
> Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better
> than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great.
> The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let
> me break it down:
>
> ## foreman-users
>
> When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can
> ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For
> those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way
> rewarded for the work they do.
>
> The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is
> really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets
> 2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user
> levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the
> other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the
> Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars
> are (I have to webscrape it using 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 03/11/17 10:32, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> Greg, I have not interest in moving to any kind of web UI. I want to
> send another millions of emails, including those "+1". I think we all
> agree that any kind of migration must not disrupt way we work today -
> a plain mailing-list we all know and use for decades.

And I have absoluetly no interest in breaking your workflow. We're on
the same side here, mostly ;)

> Thanks for decreasing it. I still have concerns about the non-standard
> special per-thread address way of replies which I get.

Embedding a token in the reply-to is pretty standard, I've seen other
projects doing it. The alternative is a token in the *body* which I
think is worse. I'm hoping to get a proper wildcard mailforward in place
so the reply-to is community+@theforeman.org instead of the
underlying Gmail account at some point.

What concerns do you have with this approach?

> How do I start a new thread via email? Can I do that, can't I?

Of course. Email community+t...@theforeman.org for the Testing category.
If/when we go live, there will also be community+dev and community+users
set up to email to - for now these are disabled so that we don't get
duplicates from the list imports.

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

Greg, I have not interest in moving to any kind of web UI. I want to
send another millions of emails, including those "+1". I think we all
agree that any kind of migration must not disrupt way we work today -
a plain mailing-list we all know and use for decades.

Thanks for decreasing it. I still have concerns about the non-standard
special per-thread address way of replies which I get.

How do I start a new thread via email? Can I do that, can't I?

LZ



On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 10:58 AM, Greg Sutcliffe  wrote:
> On 02/11/17 18:35, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
>> Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:
>>
>> We’re sorry, but your email message to
>> [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8...@gmail.com”]
>> (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
>> work.
>> Reason:
>> Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
>> If you can correct the problem, please try again.
>>
>> I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
>> "yes" is still a valid one.
>
> True enough. Of course, that can be altered (seriously, there's a
> setting for *everything*) but I'll give you the Discourse reason for
> that being 20 by default:
>
> Since Discourse is intended as web-first, the idea is that instead of
> "me too", "I like this", "+1" style replies, you should be encouraged to
> click the "Like" button instead. From a discussion viewpoint, a simple
> "yes", while valid, doesn't add to the *debate*, only to the weight of a
> previous opinion, and instead of the topic author having to *manually*
> count up the '+1' posts, (s)he can just look at what got the most likes.
>
> Of course, it's tricky to click a Like by email, so I've reduced it 1
> character minimum for now. Please do test it again.
>
> Longer term, I hope we do move to using the UI features such as likes,
> polls, etc, but I accept that isn't going to happen overnight :D
>
> Greg
>
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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 02/11/17 18:35, Lukas Zapletal wrote:
> Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:
> 
> We’re sorry, but your email message to
> [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8...@gmail.com”]
> (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
> work.
> Reason:
> Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
> If you can correct the problem, please try again.
> 
> I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
> "yes" is still a valid one.

True enough. Of course, that can be altered (seriously, there's a
setting for *everything*) but I'll give you the Discourse reason for
that being 20 by default:

Since Discourse is intended as web-first, the idea is that instead of
"me too", "I like this", "+1" style replies, you should be encouraged to
click the "Like" button instead. From a discussion viewpoint, a simple
"yes", while valid, doesn't add to the *debate*, only to the weight of a
previous opinion, and instead of the topic author having to *manually*
count up the '+1' posts, (s)he can just look at what got the most likes.

Of course, it's tricky to click a Like by email, so I've reduced it 1
character minimum for now. Please do test it again.

Longer term, I hope we do move to using the UI features such as likes,
polls, etc, but I accept that isn't going to happen overnight :D

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Ivan Necas]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2017 at 19:35, Lukas Zapletal  wrote:

> Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:
>
> We’re sorry, but your email message to
> [“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8...@gmail.com”]
> (titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
> work.
> Reason:
> Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
> If you can correct the problem, please try again.
>
> I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
> "yes" is still a valid one.


Hope so :)


>
> LZ
>
> On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe 
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's
> > the TL;DR:
> >
> > * What: move Google Groups -> Discourse
> > * Why: https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/
> > * Can I try? - Scroll to the end for login details
> >
> > So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum
> > software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've
> > been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and
> > I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts.
> >
> > # What?
> >
> > Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to
> > migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups
> > from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions.
> > Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll
> > get to that.
> >
> > Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please
> > keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email.
> > Your workflow may not be broken :)
> >
> > # Why?
> >
> > Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better
> > than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great.
> > The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let
> > me break it down:
> >
> > ## foreman-users
> >
> > When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can
> > ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For
> > those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way
> > rewarded for the work they do.
> >
> > The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is
> > really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets
> > 2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user
> > levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the
> > other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the
> > Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars
> > are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler ...) so I can reach out to
> > them for help, questions etc.
> >
> > Discourse also searches for likely similar topics *while* you're
> > typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing
> > support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :)
> >
> > For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic "trust
> > levels" (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators).
> > These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate
> > in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on
> > the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It'll also help me know who
> > to speak to when there's some swag to send out ...
> >
> > To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the
> > users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events
> > & CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would
> > have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose.
> > Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!"
> > but the reality is that people just don't. Discourse gives us the
> > flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the
> > need to.
> >
> > Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at
> > things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has
> > bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not
> > investigated the bots too much yet).
> >
> > ## foreman-dev
> >
> > In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and
> > notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we'll see a
> > real benefit in a couple of areas.
> >
> > Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the
> > criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support
> > (markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of
> > that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope.
> >
> > Discourse also has "like" buttons which can be used in place of "+1"
> > emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the
> > community to click the like button, even when they might not have
> > emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I
> > *hope* this will 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Lukas Zapletal]

Tried to reply with just few words and I am getting:

We’re sorry, but your email message to
[“theforeman.discourse+680bec16c469f36694d1ecef341e8...@gmail.com”]
(titled Re: [TheForeman] [Testing Area] October newsletter) didn’t
work.
Reason:
Body is too short (minimum is 20 characters)
If you can correct the problem, please try again.

I am gonna definitely hate this, can we turn this off? A reply of
"yes" is still a valid one.

LZ

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 4:54 PM, Greg Sutcliffe  wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As ever from me, this is long. Sorry about that, it's a habit. Here's
> the TL;DR:
>
> * What: move Google Groups -> Discourse
> * Why: https://blog.discourse.org/category/use-cases/
> * Can I try? - Scroll to the end for login details
>
> So, as some of you know, I'm a big fan of the Discourse[1] forum
> software - I use it for another community, and it's just lovely. I've
> been testing it out recently with a view to using it for Foreman, and
> I think it's time to explain my reasoning and ask for your thoughts.
>
> # What?
>
> Firstly, the "what" - what do I want to do? Simply put, I want to
> migrate from Google Groups to Discourse. That means locking the groups
> from further emails and using Discourse for our "written" discussions.
> Obviosuly there's data migration that needs to happen there, but we'll
> get to that.
>
> Before all the die-hard mailing list fans stop reading here - please
> keep reading. Discourse has options to interact entirely by email.
> Your workflow may not be broken :)
>
> # Why?
>
> Why do I want this? The short version is "because anything is better
> than Google Groups", but more seriously, I think Discourse is great.
> The reasons are different for each of our mailing lists though, so let
> me break it down:
>
> ## foreman-users
>
> When it comes to supporting our users, what matters is that they can
> ask a question, get a reply, and feel confident in that reply. For
> those who do the replying, they need to be highlight and in some way
> rewarded for the work they do.
>
> The problem with a mailing list is that neither of these things is
> really achievable. If a user (new to our list, who knows no-one) gets
> 2 different replies, who is (s)he to trust? A forum can display user
> levels, and badges, making the developer reply stand out from the
> other new user's reply. A mailing list has nothing - and worse, the
> Groups API is so bad that I barely know who our mailing list regulars
> are (I have to webscrape it using a crawler ...) so I can reach out to
> them for help, questions etc.
>
> Discourse also searches for likely similar topics *while* you're
> typing yours. This should hopefully help users to find existing
> support for their issue before they make duplicate posts :)
>
> For hard-working supporters, Discourse provides automatic "trust
> levels" (in additional to manually promoting admins and moderators).
> These trust levels allow you to unlock extra powers as you participate
> in the community, which helps to reward the people who do help out on
> the boards. Gamifying? yes, but it works. It'll also help me know who
> to speak to when there's some swag to send out ...
>
> To make this worse (for Groups) there is a confounding of data in the
> users-list today - we also use it for plugin announcements, and events
> & CFPs, and so on. This is because making a new mailing list would
> have a much smaller membership, making it not suitable for purpose.
> Yes, you can say "hey we created a new mailing list for X, sign up!"
> but the reality is that people just don't. Discourse gives us the
> flexibility to create new boards for things as-and-when we feel the
> need to.
>
> Discourse also supports plugins (its a rails app), so we can look at
> things like templates for new support issues, and so on. It also has
> bots which can be used to deal with some things (I have not
> investigated the bots too much yet).
>
> ## foreman-dev
>
> In contrast to the -users list, which is primarily support and
> notifications, dev is all about discussion. Here I think we'll see a
> real benefit in a couple of areas.
>
> Firstly, back when we discussed how to handle RFCs, one of the
> criticisms of a mailing list was the lack of rich format support
> (markdown, images, code snippets etc) - Discourse supports all of
> that. Quality of discussions should improve, I hope.
>
> Discourse also has "like" buttons which can be used in place of "+1"
> emails, and hopefully would encourage some of the quiter voices in the
> community to click the like button, even when they might not have
> emailed a +1. There are also polling options, so taken together I
> *hope* this will help us to resolve discussions better than we have
> historically.
>
> The ability to create dedicated boards for popular plugins is also
> pretty nice, if we decide to go that way.
>
> ## foreman-announce
>
> This list has historically been very low traffic. On Discourse, the
> most useful 

Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

I appreciate I tend to write a thousand words when pictures might do.
Here's one shot from the metrics (which may or may not be accurate as
it depends on the MBOX importer being correct, but you get the idea),
one from the foreman-users list index, and one from the markdown
version of this post (to which I added a poll... because I can).

* Metrics (no, I don;t know what the y-axis is either, yet...)
  https://imgur.com/vpv15b1

* Foreman-users
  https://imgur.com/0Wetjo1

* This thread
  https://imgur.com/Umc3gaW

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On Wed, 2017-11-01 at 14:15 -0400, Andrew Kofink wrote:
> I admit, I skimmed the prior emails (they were tl). I just wanted to
> ask if discourse is searchable/is indexed from the wider internet.
> I've often found relevant mailing list discussions by searching from
> Google, and I really value that.

I thought about this some more overnight - we're actually gaining here.
We often see users quoting *old* posts which are no longer accurate
because the code has moved on - with a list we can't do anything about
that. With Discourse we can update or flag those posts in some way and
redirect users to a better/newer one.

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

That's indeed one of my aims. One common piece of Discourse wisdom is not to 
have too many categories, so I don't for see one per plugin - but the system 
also has tags which would work well in the Support category (I.e. foreman-users)

A category for Infra might well make sense separate from dev discussions. I 
could also see this being limited by trust level.

I can also see us making more use of Announcements, for events and plugin 
releases.

Greg
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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Eric D Helms]

I skimmed the site over, played with configuration, clicked and tried to
play with various part of it. There are parts I'll have to get used to, and
there are parts I wish were done slightly different but overall I like the
advanced power behind it.

Thinking a loud, it seems like this might allow us to more easily expanded
topic areas in the future? For example, if we wanted to have infrastructure
focused/tagged emails, or plugins specific, or design discussions that are
marked as such?

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Greg Sutcliffe 
wrote:

> The site will be made public if/when we go live with it. I assume Google
> will index it then, I don't think it does any robots.txt stuff - certainly
> I'm using google to look up configuration questions on meta.discourse.org
> :)
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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>



-- 
Eric D. Helms
Red Hat Engineering

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

The site will be made public if/when we go live with it. I assume Google will 
index it then, I don't think it does any robots.txt stuff - certainly I'm using 
google to look up configuration questions on meta.discourse.org :)
-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Andrew Kofink]

I admit, I skimmed the prior emails (they were tl). I just wanted to ask if
discourse is searchable/is indexed from the wider internet. I've often
found relevant mailing list discussions by searching from Google, and I
really value that.

- Andrew

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 12:04 PM, Greg Sutcliffe 
wrote:

> One more point, we're currently on a free tier of our SMTP provider,
> which is limited to 6k emails / month & 200 mails / day.
>
> I'm seeing if I can negotiate a free higher tier for a FOSS project,
> but for now, go easy on the mail testing :D
>
> Greg
>
> --
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>



-- 
Andrew Kofink
akof...@redhat.com
IRC: akofink
Software Engineer
Red Hat Satellite

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

One more point, we're currently on a free tier of our SMTP provider,
which is limited to 6k emails / month & 200 mails / day.

I'm seeing if I can negotiate a free higher tier for a FOSS project,
but for now, go easy on the mail testing :D

Greg

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Re: [foreman-dev] Propsing a move from Google Groups to Discourse

[Greg Sutcliffe]

OK, some questions I expect to come up:

* Will the mailing list import be kept up to date?

Yes, I plan to update it every day or two. Happily it's incremental (no
7 hour import) but sadly it's not something that's easy to automate. 

It's also why I've not renamed the categories yet, or fixed split-users 
(where a person has used more than on email address) - since the import
recreates anything it can't find, we'd get duplicates.

The sync is one-way, nothing done on Discourse will go back to the
list, but I'd ask that you treat the list categories as read-only for
now, and play around in the Test category, in case it confuses the
importer.

* Can I use email?

Yes, entirely if you wish. The catgories will have direct in-bound
email address (only the Test category has one right now), and all
outgoing emails have a reply-to set. We've tested it, and things like
in-line replies, URLs, and formatting seem OK.

* Can I log in with GitHub (or other)?

Yes, but the catch is that while the accounts are locked, GitHub login
will still work (unlike using password reset) - so you may see
weirdness if your account is not unlocked yet. Try it if you like
though, it's enabled. If we migrate fully over, then all accounts will
get unlocked and this will work fully.

* Are there spam controls like Groups?

Yes, and we'll actually have a lot more control over automating this. I
can go into details if people want more detail

* Won't it be hard to get people to update addressbooks?

Yes. We can mititgate this. Firstly, we'll obviously give appropriate
notice to the community - I don't expect us to migrate next week.
Second, once the groups are "closed" we *could* consider redirecting
mails to the Google groups addresses to Discourse, or bounce them back
with an appropriate message to the user. The categories will have in-
bound addresses, so they just need to update 2 addresses in their
contacts.

Hit me with more!
Greg

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