Hi everyone,
This has been discussed several times on this mailing list in the past, but we never got to actually pull the plug.
Ask.openstack.org was launched in 2013. The reason for hosting our own setup was to be able to support multiple languages, while StackOverflow rejected our proposal to have our own openstack-branded StackExchange site. The Chinese ask.o.o side never really took off. The English side also never really worked perfectly (like email alerts are hopelessly broken), but we figured it would get better with time if a big community formed around it.
Fast-forward to 2020 and the instance is lacking volunteers to help run it, while the code (and our customization of it) has become more complicated to maintain. It regularly fails one way or another, and questions there often go unanswered, making us look bad. Of the top 30 users, most have abandoned the platform since 2017, leaving only Bernd Bausch actively engaging and helping moderate questions lately. We have called for volunteers several times, but the offers for help never really materialized.
At the same time, people are asking OpenStack questions on StackOverflow, and sometimes getting answers there[1]. The fragmentation of the "questions" space is not helping users getting good answers.
I think it's time to pull the plug, make ask.openstack.org read-only (so that links to old answers are not lost) and redirect users to the mailing-list and the "OpenStack" tag on StackOverflow. I picked StackOverflow since it seems to have the most openstack questions (2,574 on SO, 76 on SuperUser and 430 on ServerFault).
We discussed that option several times, but I now proposed a change to actually make it happen:
https://review.opendev.org/#/c/746497/
It's always a difficult decision to make to kill a resource, but I feel like in this case, consolidation and simplification would help.
Thoughts, comments?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/openstack