On Fri, 2022-05-27 at 10:36 +0200, Lukáš Krejza wrote:
Dne pátek 27. května 2022 7:01:24 CEST, Attila Pinter napsal(a):
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. Users on the other hand IMO shouldn't interact with developers directly. FOSS projects seen the issues with that and continue to suffer that burden. I would keep developer communications separate from user space, for example I wouldn't bridge the KDE IRC with the Telegram openSUSE group, but would bridge it with say the Discord or Telegram KDE group for contributors to easily interact with each other. This is up to the contributors or the project though, and not a decision that should be made by the anyone else. If X project decides to keep everything on IRC and doesn't care about other platforms that is fine, but they will be just walled of from new contributors who would be interested to help out, but doesn't know how to use IRC or simply doesn't want to. Bridges solving that. If developers wishes to also provide support or interact with the community of users they can pick the group to go to, but their space is not getting spammed by feature or support requests. Lastly Bugzilla ticket should only be opened when something is actually broken. The community support is actually pretty good at helping out with this one, and upgrading the forums would be a great service to further strengthen that effort. May have went a bit off their.. Anywho, it is possible that I see this matter a lot less gloomy since solutions do exist. Problem starts when the solution gets ignored ^_^ This would be a pretty good topic for a community meeting which we have twice a week.
I still don't understand why majority does not consider IRC + Mailing Lists just enough. Connecting to IRC is just easy as hitting alt+F2, write "konv" and hit enter... Also the UI seems much cleaner and easier to me. It's also faster and the UI is not overloaded, the network overhead is much smaller... Could be sufficient for a contributor with some existing knowledge of how things work, whom to contact, where to subscribe etc.
I did some "unexpected" experiment with Robert (in cc) from SUSE Community yesterday, and the barrier seems to be high for a new commer. Perhaps clear instruction how to communicate from home page would help. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Communication_channels is good, but again you need to know what you're looking for.
But that's my personal view i guess. Truth is, if IRC stops being the "official" communication channel, i am not going to install Discord or anything, just for supporting users. All Open Source projects I contribute to are on IRC and i have never had problem finding right answers there, under one app. For announcements and anything more "official", the Mailing List is always the only right place IMHO.
Regards, Gryffus