Moving away from mailing lists for anything except announcements would be awesome. Forums are a much better way to have solid discussions with multiple people in. Email is fine, but when you add in more than a couple people, it gets confusing fast. Forums are also far more user friendly for people who haven't learned the various ways developers communicate.
That said, if the forum idea is scrapped, please be sure to stick with Google Groups or something similar. Don't switch to something like the Debian user lists. Every time a search result pops up from a list like that when I am looking for help, I can never figure out if I've seen all the emails in the thread or not. The interface is just horrid. Google Groups at least has conversation view. On a similar subject, is there any chance we could get a real time chat app that is more user friendly than IRC? Does something exist that could sit on top of IRC and alleviate the IRC's user unfriendliness? On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 8:36:33 AM UTC-7, leslie.hawthorn wrote: > > Hello everyone, > > As we’ve begun to scale up development on three different open source > projects, we’ve found Google Groups to be a difficult solution for dealing > with all of our needs for community support. We’ve got multiple mailing > lists going, which can be confusing for new folks trying to figure out > where to go to ask a question. > > We’ve also found our lists are becoming noisy in the “good problem to > have” kind of way. As we’ve seen more user adoption, and across such a wide > variety of use cases, we’re getting widely different types of questions > asked. For example, I can imagine that folks not using our Python client > would rather not be distracted with emails about it. > > There’s also a few other strikes against Groups as a tool, such as the > fact that it is no longer a supported product by Google, it provides no API > hooks and it is not available for users in China. > > We’ve evaluated several options and we’re currently considering shuttering > the elasticsearch-user and logstash-users Google Groups in favor of a > Discourse forum. You can read more about Discourse at > http://www.discourse.org > > We feel Discourse will allow us to provide a better experience for all of > our users for a few reasons: > > * More fine grained conversation topics = less noise and better targeted > discussions. e.g. we can offer a forum for each language client, individual > logstash plugin or for each city to plan user group meetings, etc. > > * Facilitates discussions that are not generally happening on list now, > such as best practices by use case or tips from moving to development to > production > > * Easier for folks who are purely end users - and less used to getting > peer support on a mailing list - to get help when they need it > > Obviously, Discourse does not function the exact same way as a mailing > list - however, email interaction with Discourse is supported and will > continue to allow you to participate in discussions over email (though > there are some small issues related to in-line replies. [0]) > > We’re working with the Discourse team now as part of evaluating this > transition, and we know they’re working to resolve this particular issue. > We’re also still determining how Discourse will handle our needs for both > user and list archive migration, and we’ll know the precise details of how > that would work soon. (We’ll share when we have them.) > > The final goal would be to move Google Groups to read-only archives, and > cut over to Discourse completely for community support discussions. > > We’re looking at making the cut over in ~30 days from today, but obviously > that’s subject to the feedback we receive from all of you. We’re sharing > this information to set expectations about time frame for making the > switch. It’s not set in stone. Our highest priority is to ensure effective > migration of our list archives and subscribers, which may mean a longer > time horizon for deploying Discourse, as well. > > In the meantime, though, we wanted to communicate early and often and get > your feedback. Would this change make your life better? Worse? Meh? > > Please share your thoughts with us so we can evaluate your feedback. We > don’t take this switch lightly, and we want to understand how it will > impact your overall workflow and experience. > > We’ll make regular updates to the list responding to incoming feedback and > be completely transparent about how our thought processes evolve based on > it. > > Thanks in advance! > > [0] - https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrating-from-google-groups/24695 > > > Cheers, > LH > > Leslie Hawthorn > Director of Developer Relations > http://elastic.co > > > Other Places to Find Me: > Freenode: lh > Twitter: @lhawthorn > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "elasticsearch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elasticsearch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elasticsearch/c9642561-6a95-43a7-a55a-7e239cdfcdf3%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
