Re: [License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
[moving to infrastructure@, with license-discuss@ on BCC now] Brian Behlendorf br...@behlendorf.com writes: On Mon, 11 Feb 2013, Karl Fogel wrote: Matthew Flaschen matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu writes: See http://www.discourse.org/ and http://discourse.org/ It is still in beta. I tried it out, and while it looks promising, it certainly wasn't ready for prime time as of a few days ago. Although their web site and FAQ do not seem to say so explicitly, the code so far indicates that they regard email (incoming and outgoing) as just another way of accessing the forum conversations. If so, that would be great! http://www.rants.org/2008/03/06/thread_theory/ has my thoughts on why. Has anyone tried Groupserver? http://groupserver.org/ It's been on my check-it-out list since forever. It's mature and still actively being developed supported, and GPL-licensed. Yes -- I looked at it a while ago, and have been meaning to again. My personal short list for solutions so far is: GroupServer Sympa Discourse (the new thing) The first two are in production use. I've heard mixed reviews of both. I tried to set up a Sympa instance once, a couple of years ago, and had to give up after spending too many hours. Things might be better now (or maybe it would have been fine if I'd been willing to make a long enough initial investment in setting it up). I don't know of anything else out there that really does the trick and is open source. Mailman 3 looked promising, but it has looked promising since roughly the Crimean War and it's still in development :-). -K ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
Matthew Flaschen matthew.flasc...@gatech.edu writes: On 01/05/2013 09:42 PM, Luis Villa wrote: I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people here have email clients that they have chosen and customized specifically to deal with their workflow. So I'm very reluctant to make anyone less productive here by forcing them to use bad software. I haven't tried it for a serious project yet, but Discourse is new open source discussion software and seems quite promising. It's by some of the people behind Stack Overflow. It's under GPLv2 (http://www.discourse.org/faq/). See http://www.discourse.org/ and http://discourse.org/ It is still in beta. I tried it out, and while it looks promising, it certainly wasn't ready for prime time as of a few days ago. Although their web site and FAQ do not seem to say so explicitly, the code so far indicates that they regard email (incoming and outgoing) as just another way of accessing the forum conversations. If so, that would be great! http://www.rants.org/2008/03/06/thread_theory/ has my thoughts on why. But even if that's what they intend, I still don't know how ready the email functionality actually is, of course. -K ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
On 01/05/2013 09:42 PM, Luis Villa wrote: I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people here have email clients that they have chosen and customized specifically to deal with their workflow. So I'm very reluctant to make anyone less productive here by forcing them to use bad software. I haven't tried it for a serious project yet, but Discourse is new open source discussion software and seems quite promising. It's by some of the people behind Stack Overflow. It's under GPLv2 (http://www.discourse.org/faq/). See http://www.discourse.org/ and http://discourse.org/ It is still in beta. Matt Flaschen ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
Luis Villa wrote: I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people here have email clients that they have chosen and customized I would definitely discourage forums. I think a lot of forums are created for vanity reasons, and forum services play on that because they are really after trackable advertising targets (the need to login means that, even if you don't post, and therefore allow personal targetting, the ad-rotator can ration repeats). The result tends to be fragmentation of the discussions, as multiple, competing, forums get created. Also the need to pull the postings, and that it is difficult to get them out of the cloud, make them a hassle for readers. (On the other hand, it is true that relatively few people know how to use mailing lists these days. There seems to be an increasing number of people asking on list to be unsubscribed (not here, that I've noticed), and, in combination with GUI user agents, with poor quoting support, bottom quoting of the whole of a long thread is becoming the norm.) (Unsubribe me requests tend to come out in batches, so people seem to grin and bare it for a long time first. It seems that a lot of people fail to realise that they subscribed to a public list, and almost accuse the list administrator of spamming them!) -- David Woolley Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want. RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam, that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
Luis Villa l...@tieguy.org writes: I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people here have email clients that they have chosen and customized specifically to deal with their workflow. So I'm very reluctant to make anyone less productive here by forcing them to use bad software. Similarly, I'm strongly disinclined to create another inbox for list members; again, I want this list to be productive, and additional inboxes are a source of anti-productivity in the world.[1] That said, I know Karl and the infrastructure team have looked at forum options with an eye towards using them for forums for members. So if any of them have thoughts on the state of the art I'm all ears - it is possible that there is now good web forum software that integrates well with email and is pleasant to use from the web. I'm open to the idea at all because, as has been pointed out, our current archives are awful (hard to browse, hard to search, etc.), and part of the purpose of license-review (and to a lesser extent, license-discuss) is to create a permanent record of OSI's thoughts and wisdom on licensing. I acknowledge Rick's concern about not getting information into local storage very easily, but IMHO it is much more important to create information that is publicly accessible and so useful for future generations of people who deal with licenses, and if a web forum, maintained by OSI's infrastructure team, can help us with that, I'm strongly in favor. The answer is probably Sympa (http://sympa.org/), but IMHO Infra has its hands full getting a wiki set up soon. I certainly agree that the in-browser experience with Mailman is not up to modern standards, and the next version of Mailman appears to be ever-receding, sadly. So we'll probably switch away from it eventually, and when we do, having a good online forum-like interface should be part of the requirements for any new system. There's no reason we should have to choose between two interfaces. The underlying objects are the same -- discussion threads -- and whether a user interacts with those objects via email or via a browseable forum interface should be up to that user. This is how Sympa works I believe, and AFAIK how all modern message-based discussion systems work. -K http://lifehacker.com/5364596/reduce-your-inboxes-to-streamline-your-workflow-and-reduce-stress On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 1:10 AM, Lior W. opensource.*.n...@neverbox.com wrote: Please don't take it the wrong way, but this seems like an opportunity to ask to move this mailing list to a forum. If you make sure it has un/subscription features.(both in general and in specific topics) and the ability to personally block someone, I think it could solve the aforementioned issues. Be sure you'll be neither the first nor the last to make the transition from a mailing list to a forum. I personally witnessed a very old mailing list out of the blue transitioning to a forum. Even one day earlier, no one could have imagined the subscribers getting along with it. But nowadays no one even remembers that it used to be a mailing list. On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Kuno Woudt - k...@frob.nl +opensource+nwo+5ddf229e06.kuno#frob...@spamgourmet.com wrote: Hello, On 01/03/2013 05:04 AM, Luis Villa wrote: If you have concerns about someone’s conduct, you can speak to them directly, you can speak directly to the list moderators, or you can discuss the conduct on the list. For those who feel the need to speak directly to the list moderators it is perhaps useful to make that into a link which when followed informs them who the list moderators are and how to contact them. -- kuno / warp. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
[License-discuss] web forums for license-* [was Re: proposal for revising code of conduct]
I've personally never seen open source forum software that wasn't an abysmal nightmare from a usability perspective, whereas many people here have email clients that they have chosen and customized specifically to deal with their workflow. So I'm very reluctant to make anyone less productive here by forcing them to use bad software. Similarly, I'm strongly disinclined to create another inbox for list members; again, I want this list to be productive, and additional inboxes are a source of anti-productivity in the world.[1] That said, I know Karl and the infrastructure team have looked at forum options with an eye towards using them for forums for members. So if any of them have thoughts on the state of the art I'm all ears - it is possible that there is now good web forum software that integrates well with email and is pleasant to use from the web. I'm open to the idea at all because, as has been pointed out, our current archives are awful (hard to browse, hard to search, etc.), and part of the purpose of license-review (and to a lesser extent, license-discuss) is to create a permanent record of OSI's thoughts and wisdom on licensing. I acknowledge Rick's concern about not getting information into local storage very easily, but IMHO it is much more important to create information that is publicly accessible and so useful for future generations of people who deal with licenses, and if a web forum, maintained by OSI's infrastructure team, can help us with that, I'm strongly in favor. Luis [1] http://lifehacker.com/5364596/reduce-your-inboxes-to-streamline-your-workflow-and-reduce-stress On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 1:10 AM, Lior W. opensource.*.n...@neverbox.com wrote: Please don't take it the wrong way, but this seems like an opportunity to ask to move this mailing list to a forum. If you make sure it has un/subscription features.(both in general and in specific topics) and the ability to personally block someone, I think it could solve the aforementioned issues. Be sure you'll be neither the first nor the last to make the transition from a mailing list to a forum. I personally witnessed a very old mailing list out of the blue transitioning to a forum. Even one day earlier, no one could have imagined the subscribers getting along with it. But nowadays no one even remembers that it used to be a mailing list. On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Kuno Woudt - k...@frob.nl +opensource+nwo+5ddf229e06.kuno#frob...@spamgourmet.com wrote: Hello, On 01/03/2013 05:04 AM, Luis Villa wrote: If you have concerns about someone’s conduct, you can speak to them directly, you can speak directly to the list moderators, or you can discuss the conduct on the list. For those who feel the need to speak directly to the list moderators it is perhaps useful to make that into a link which when followed informs them who the list moderators are and how to contact them. -- kuno / warp. ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss ___ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
