I resonate with your concerns Robert. It's because most questions are asked in the DingTalk group which has close to 10,000 people now. Here're my observations and thoughts.
Group chat is great for marketing, announce news and updates, broadcast live streams/events, and is just TERRIBLE for ask-answer questions and discussions (may be ok for 3-5 :) surely not 10,000...) We probably all experienced the problems - content not really searchable, topics lost fast, too much noise, people post questions without evening doing any homework first, etc. I personally have muted that group chat and haven't really look at it for a long time, and I do feel the heat in the group is also going down because of the problems. Mailing list is indeed old school, but it still exists nowadays for its own reasons - searchable, async communication, topic focused, etc. And I believe all technical discussions and ask-answer should happen in the mailing list, not in that group. IMO, the root cause is that we haven't clarified what that DingTalk group should be really used for, and how it should work together with our user-zh mailing list. We created that group chat and kind of just let it drive to its own directions. This is a good time to reflect on how we should position that group and mailing list. As mentioned above, I believe the group chat should only be used for marketing/interacting, announcing news and updates, broadcasting live streams/events, etc, and all technical discussions should be diverted to user-zh mailing list. I cc-ed a few organizers and drivers of the DingTalk group so that they can share their thoughts. Bowen On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 2:19 AM Robert Metzger <rmetz...@apache.org> wrote: > Hey all, > > the user...@flink.apache.org is now a few months old and I wanted to hear > how things are going. > > From the number of people in the DingTalk group (5000 ?), I would have > expected more people to use the mailing list. But I also understand that > mailing lists are an outdated technology from the last century. > > These are the numbers of messages per month: > Feb: 72 > Mar: 170 > Apr: 119 > May: 62 > Jun: 10 > > Is there anything we can do from our side to help adoption of that mailing > list? > For example: Are messages from the mailing list showing up on Baidu when > looking for common problems with Flink? If not, does it makes sense to have > a mailing list archive on a server/domain in China? > > Best, > Robert > > > > On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 11:42 AM YuZhao Chan <yuzhao....@gmail.com> wrote: > > > That's great. > > >
