On Fri, 27 May 2022 05:01:24 +0000, Attila Pinter wrote:
The latter used to work really well, but now with the proliferation of non-affiliated sites like stackoverflow, communities (and sub- communities) can self-organize wherever they want to. The onus is now less on the people in those communities to go to the 'official' venues; it's more now on the 'sponsor' (not quite the right word, but it'll suffice) to be aware of those venues and to incorporate them into their community plan (or not, and to just let those unofficial places organically grow).
All true, however the brdiges are a great way to keep things connected and avoid fragmentation. With that said we should probably not connect the user base to the developers if we want to keep our volunteers sane.
I understand the desire to keep the developers 'insulated' from users, but a lot of times, having the volunteers act as the middleperson between the user and the developers is counterproductive.
On the Facebook group, for example, we strongly encourage difficult/ complex technical questions go to the forums, where threading is easier to follow and there is more technical expertise. If it's a development- related question, we direct them to bugzilla and the MLs. But I'm always surprised at how many people insist "no, I asked here, don't send me somewhere else, just answer my question" - even when the expertise in the FB group just doesn't exist.
This is true for most platforms I think, but for instance on Telegram, Discord and Matrix (all bridged) we do have the expertise to help with more complex things before opening a ticket on Bugzilla. This kind of community support is actually pretty good to also remove the added burden from the developers, maintainers.
It can, sure - and some people work better with immediate response. Others prefer the approach of asking a question and then waiting for an answer. It partially depends on the severity and impact of the problem, and partially on the personal preference of the person asking the question. While it seems that these days people don't tend to search first, a lot of people do (and it can be hard to know that if they don't say something), and forums tend to be better for that kind of searching.
The forums would be a much better place? Sure, but our forums are outdated in terms of UI/UX. I don't like to use it either which is said since - as you said it too - we do have the best expertise there, and the most amount of knowledge. I think the move to Discourse has been a long standing topic as well which I think would move to forums to a current, modern forum tech with a better UI/UX which would probably benefit everyone.
We've talked for years about migrating to Discourse, yes. We also used to have an NNTP gateway, but since SUSE was sold, the NNTP gateway has been shut down (the old NNTP server was a proprietary system that was licensed to run on a specific system, and the company that made it stopped selling it, so they couldn't get a replacement license to move to another server). I did a lot of testing with innd, but only ever used it for testing - I just don't have the time to devote to setting it up and securing it properly. But I know a lot of users (myself included) miss having an nntp server to connect to for the forums - that's something that can unify things like the MLs and forums - I access the MLs through gmane using pan; I just find web forums to be horribly inefficient if you're trying to keep up on hundreds of threads and keep an eye on everything going on. Discord had an NNTP gateway as well, but it's no longer maintained, so someone would have to pick it up and update it if we went back to providing that kind of functionality (which I think we should).
Unfortunately, I don't see this trend reversing itself. Either we go where the users are, or we just don't talk to them until our community platforms entice them to come over to the 'official' spaces, and there's a lot of inertia to overcome in order for that to happen.
I think in terms of "Official" the other platforms listed on https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Communication_channels should be considered official communication channels. Some channels has a larger user base in their community than registered members overall in the Project. Not every user wants to have an openSUSE account, or want to use the forums as David pointed it out, rightfully so. Developers in the project has been long relying on their choice of communication platforms so not much need to change that, and it is well within their right to pick the platform they see best fit their needs.
Absolutely. But at the same time, that drives the fragmentation of the community.
Users on the other hand IMO shouldn't interact with developers directly.
I think ultimately that's up to the individual developers. Some developers really like talking to their users, and I think (having worked in the software industry for a couple decades) that there are benefits to having developers talk with users. Often times, developers develop something that suits their needs (especially in the OSS world, where that's a major driver), but users' needs can be (and often are) different, and driving adoption of OSS solutions depends on actually meeting users' needs. That said, I understand what you're saying here - and it's really no different than having sub-forums in a forums structure to keep discussions on-topic and focused. It's an organizational structure more than anything - we have a section in the forums for KDE apps (for example) and a section for network issues - and while *some* topics might cross both of those sections, the majority do not. A forum shouldn't just be one big container that holds *everything*, because finding things in that kind of space is difficult. But you can go overboard the other way and get too granular, which creates problems as well.
This would be a pretty good topic for a community meeting which we have twice a week.
It would be; unfortunately the timing hasn't worked out for where I'm based with my work schedule - as I recall, the meetings are pretty early in the morning my time (I'm on the US West Coast). -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits