Hi Garren, thanks for thinking ahead on this one.
On 2020-03-12 10:32, Garren Smith wrote:
Hi All,
The CouchDB slack channel has been a real success with lots of people
asking for help and getting involved. The main issue is that it is not
searchable so we often get people asking the same questions over and over.
The user mailing list is great in that sense that if you have subscribed to
it you have a searchable list of questions and answers. However, it's
really not user-friendly and judging by the fact that it has very low user
participation I'm guessing most people prefer to use slack to ask questions.
I've been really impressed with how the FoundationDB forum[1] and the rust
internal forum work [2]. I find them easy to use and really encourage
participation.
I've been having trouble getting Discourse to send me email notification
when someone follows up to my responses to a thread I didn't start. I
think I've enabled the correct settings, but it's not acting as
expected. Hrm.
I do know that Discourse has a full "mailing list mode," I just haven't
wanted 100% of the email from FoundationDB's forum to end up in my
inbox. (I *would* want that for user and dev@couchdb.a.o.)
I would like to propose that we move our user and dev
discussion to Discourse or a forum that works as well as Discourse. I think
that would make it really easy for users of CouchDB to look up answers to
questions and get involved in the development discussion.
I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure we could get all discourse threads to
automatically email back to the user and dev mailing list so that we still
fulfill our Apache requirements.
We'd for sure have to have everything land on the Apache CouchDB mailing
lists as well as here to meet Apache rules and regulations. And, of
course, Infrastructure is going to have to approve the move, possibly
the Board as well.
With the lists still existing forever, Discourse would need to be
configured to accept email responses as well, from people emailing dev@
or user@, meaning a *bi-directional email gateway* will likely have to
be written/integrated. (I very much doubt Infra will be willing to
redirect dev@/user@ _directly_ into Discourse.)
Thus, the bottleneck on the proposal is going to be Infrastructure's
desire to move ahead, as well as their ability to put resources on
solving the integration issues (unless you're willing to directly
volunteer to help code that up.)
Infra may, for instance, want to host Discourse themselves (if I recall
correctly, it is self-hostable), and may find some friction between that
and the nascent Pony Mail project that serves out lists.apache.org - if
not technically, from human factors.
You should, at a bare minimum, familiarise yourself with
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?d...@couchdb.apache.org and determine
why it doesn't meet our needs. A bullet-point list would be prudent;
Infra is bound to raise this as their first point.
I know its a big step away from what we're used to with our mailing lists,
but I think it would definitely open up our community.
I'm in support of the idea, but the devil's in the implementation
details. Like our efforts with git, and Slack, someone is going to have
to work together with Infra on this for a few months to make it reality.
I really hope you're volunteering to step up to that role. I certainly
don't have the time.
Cheers
Garren
-Joan
[1] https://forums.foundationdb.org/
[2] https://internals.rust-lang.org/
