On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:47 AM Barry Scott <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On 30 Nov 2022, at 01:03, Jeffrey Walton <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 5:33 PM Patrick O'Callaghan
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I don't do social media. I won't start now. I refuse to be the product
> on a private platform.
>
> I am the same way, but forums need not be social media and are essential
for any community that wants to embrace new users.  Many of my younger
colleagues
are not interested in email lists (because their email gets overwhelmed by
SPAM).

Its not social media. Its discourse that is open source.
>
> Python and fedora already have discourse servers up and working.
>
> discuss.python.org and https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/
>
> Personally I find them easy to use and better then email mainly because i
> can use markup to format code and other text.
>
>
I have been using remote sensing forums from ESA and NASA for years.
Forums are essential for
remote sensing as you need to be able to share images. so have been used in
this community for decades.
The ESA Forum sends email with replies to my posts.  A simple reply can be
made with email, but I generally
find it easier to reply using the forum software.

I do worry that bad actors will find ways to drive people away from forums:

NASA recently replaced the remote sensing forum I was using with a section
in a forum that supports many
different NASA Earth Data programs.   NASA gets a lot of attention from bad
actors, so in addition to an
Earth Data user login, the new forum requires a CAPTCHA code for each
post.  If I take too long researching
a response the CAPTCHA expires, so I have to compose a complex response
offline.  This has greatly reduced
the number of active participants.

A colleague once suggested that access to specialized resources should
require a correct answer to a "skiill
testing" question.  Recently the NASA and ESA forums have seen an increase
in (new) users posting images
with error messages where text would be better because the current search
tools don't scan images (I often r
eply to such posts with OCR text so searches will find the thread).  The
current education system doesn't teach
students how to report problems (platform details, steps to reproduce the
problem) so the forums have started
getting too many posts with titles like "How to I solve Error: permission
denied".

-- 
George N. White III
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