On 2018-10-30 08:38, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
On maandag 29 oktober 2018 19:31:54 CET Jonathan Riddell wrote:
Discourse is modern forum and mailing list software. Examples at
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ or https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
I went to a talk at the Embedded Linux Summit about how Fedora moved
to use
Discourse. Similar to the discussion of moving away from IRC we had
last
year I see people moving away from mailing lists and new contributors
not
wanting to get into them. Our KDE Forums also look quite old school.
In
Fedora they moved to Discourse and mailing lists and forums and saw a
marked increase in engagement.
I think KDE should consider moving away from mailman and onto
Discourse and
at the same time forum.kde.org could move to this more modern
software. It
might also help cover Boud's use case of a user support method for
people
with queries before the report a bug.
I don't think it's really comparable. Discourse might be a good
alternative
for mailing lists and forums, where people have discussions, but it
doesn't
look like a good alternative for a solution where people who have a
problem,
ask about it, and get a (semi-automatic) answer because it's been asked
a
hundred times before. It's the latter we really need :-)
If you need *both* discussion and Q&A-style support, there is this
plugin for Discourse:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer-plugin/30155.
It doesn't make it as good as I find StackExchange or AskBot, but it is
something.
But when it comes to mailing lists and forums...
kimages...@kde.org basically only gets used for announcements. All
discussions
happen on Phabricator or on IRC. Almost nobody with a question
subscribes to
the mailing list. The only thing that gets less used than the mailing
list is
the FAQ.
At a glance, the FAQ is looking good in terms of legibility:
https://docs.krita.org/en/KritaFAQ.html, how have you come to the
conclusion that it is so unpopular?
We also do get user support questions on IRC, through the web
interface, but
it's clear that it confuses people horribly. They come, ask and leave,
or
don't know what to do once they're in the channel. Much as it pains me,
for
user support, IRC is the wrong tool. It's still find for project
collaboration, though.
As for the forum, it would be good to replace that with something more
modern.
We get a lot of traffic on the forums, People don't understand the
layout of
the forums, but because there's only an RSS feed, no email integration,
I miss
a lot of questions, and it's often very unclear what the current
questions
are. And the process of registering and logging in to the forum
confuses
people a lot, too.
Can you not subscribe to https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=136 to
get e-mail notifications? Is it the identity.kde.org feature that makes
registering difficult? Could this be alleviated by allowing for OAuth2?
--
Best regards,
Hans "totte" Tovetjärn
to...@chakralinux.org
0xEB5A95EC99421F98
