On 2023-01-30 12:55:52 +0000 (+0000), Sean Mooney wrote: [...]
our prvious fourm attempt largely went unmainteined for years. if one was to be created again it would need to be automated, maintaiend and hosted with several people commiting to maintaining it. [...]
And for those who may have forgotten or haven't been around long enough to remember, that was not the first "official" OpenStack user forum site either. The same pattern gets repeated: someone's very excited about setting up a forum site, they have the energy to maintain it for a while, then they disappear or lose interest and nobody else volunteers to take over, site decays into a state of outdated misinformation and frustrated users who ask questions but get no useful answers, eventually we tear down the service because having it in that state is worse than nothing at all. One need only look at wiki.openstack.org for a remaining example of this sort of commons neglect. I personally manage to find only enough time to delete spam and block the accounts of would-be abusers, but most of the information in it is outdated and the server is so behind in terms of upgrades that it's going to need to be taken offline if something doesn't change.
the other problem is getting the people with the knowlage to partake. many wont have the time to be active in such a fourm. [...]
Yes, this is why the openstack-discuss mailing list combines user and developer discussions. Just like how getting users and developers together at conferences makes for more productive conversations, users learn faster by being exposed to the development discussions and developers are more likely to notice and help answer questions from users. One of our goals as a community is to turn our users into maintainers of the software over time, so forcing them to communicate in a different place and separating them from the current developers only makes that outcome less likely. We need fewer walls between these parts of our community, not more.
its a gap i just dont know if its one that can be simply filled. [...]
The OpenDev Collaboratory is in the process of upgrading our mailing list software to a platform which has a forum-like searchable web archive and the ability to post to mailing lists from a browser without needing to use E-mail. The lists.opendev.org and lists.zuul-ci.org sites have already moved to it if you want to see how it works, though the collaboratory sysadmins are in the middle of ironing out some cosmetic issues before moving forward with remaining sites. Due to the volume of activity and size of its archives, the lists.openstack.org migration is likely to happen sometime in early Q2, around April if all goes according to plan. In my estimation, that should satisfy much of the desires of those who prefer a web forum, while not breaking the existing experience for people who would rather use mailing lists. -- Jeremy Stanley