[openstack-community] [infra] Problem with ask.openstack.org
While ask.openstack.org is not necessarily loved by many, it continues to be used, and there are still people who answer questions.
Recently, one of its features ceased working. I am talking about the "responses" page that lists all responses to questions that I have answered or commented on. This makes it very hard to follow up on such questions; I don't have a tool to see if somebody anwered my question or is the person who asked a question has provided updates.
Is there anybody who can fix this?
I know that some people would like to do away with ask.openstack.org entirely, since the software is bug-ridden and nobody manages the site. My personal opinion is that the current situation is worse than no "ask" site at all, since people might ask questions, get partial answers and no follow-up. This can create a negative view of the OpenStack community.
In short, either fix it or remove it. Unfortunately I don't have the means to do either.
Bernd.
It's definitely a tough sell. I'm not sure if it's worse to not have a community driven "a-la-Stackoverflow" style or one that is not super in shape.
I would rather see go into archive mode only if it's too much of an Operational burden to keep running :(
On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 8:33 PM Bernd Bausch berndbausch@gmail.com wrote:
While ask.openstack.org is not necessarily loved by many, it continues to be used, and there are still people who answer questions.
Recently, one of its features ceased working. I am talking about the "responses" page that lists all responses to questions that I have answered or commented on. This makes it very hard to follow up on such questions; I don't have a tool to see if somebody anwered my question or is the person who asked a question has provided updates.
Is there anybody who can fix this?
I know that some people would like to do away with ask.openstack.org entirely, since the software is bug-ridden and nobody manages the site. My personal opinion is that the current situation is worse than no "ask" site at all, since people might ask questions, get partial answers and no follow-up. This can create a negative view of the OpenStack community.
In short, either fix it or remove it. Unfortunately I don't have the means to do either.
Bernd.
Sending people to Stackoverflow directly is a good option IMO. This suggestion was made before. Of course, I would lose my 7700 karma points, but I can stomach it :)
On 8/7/2020 9:36 AM, Laurent Dumont wrote:
It's definitely a tough sell. I'm not sure if it's worse to not have a community driven "a-la-Stackoverflow" style or one that is not super in shape.
I would rather see go into archive mode only if it's too much of an Operational burden to keep running :(
On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 8:33 PM Bernd Bausch <berndbausch@gmail.com mailto:berndbausch@gmail.com> wrote:
While ask.openstack.org <http://ask.openstack.org> is not necessarily loved by many, it continues to be used, and there are still people who answer questions. Recently, one of its features ceased working. I am talking about the "responses" page that lists all responses to questions that I have answered or commented on. This makes it very hard to follow up on such questions; I don't have a tool to see if somebody anwered my question or is the person who asked a question has provided updates. Is there anybody who can fix this? I know that some people would like to do away with ask.openstack.org <http://ask.openstack.org> entirely, since the software is bug-ridden and nobody manages the site. My personal opinion is that the current situation is worse than no "ask" site at all, since people might ask questions, get partial answers and no follow-up. This can create a negative view of the OpenStack community. In short, either fix it or remove it. Unfortunately I don't have the means to do either. Bernd.
On 2020-08-07 18:09:31 +0900 (+0900), Bernd Bausch wrote:
Sending people to Stackoverflow directly is a good option IMO.
[...]
Yes, ask.openstack.org was originally created for two reasons:
1. We could not keep up with the constant spam load on forums.openstack.org, but when we wanted to shut it down we kept hearing that many OpenStack users needed us to provide a Web forum because they wouldn't/couldn't use E-mail.
2. When we approached Stackexchange/Stackoverflow about getting a site like Ubuntu had, they said OpenStack was not popular enough software to warrant that.
OSF originally contracted the author of Askbot to assist in maintaining the ask.openstack.org site, but his interests eventually moved on to other endeavors and the site has sat unmaintained (except for an occasional reboot by community infrastructure team sysadmins) for a number of years now. At this point it's a liability, and unless folks are interested in getting it back into a well-managed state I think we probably have no choice but to phase it out.
On Thu, Aug 6, 2020, at 5:29 PM, Bernd Bausch wrote:
While ask.openstack.org is not necessarily loved by many, it continues to be used, and there are still people who answer questions.
Recently, one of its features ceased working. I am talking about the "responses" page that lists all responses to questions that I have answered or commented on. This makes it very hard to follow up on such questions; I don't have a tool to see if somebody anwered my question or is the person who asked a question has provided updates.
Is there anybody who can fix this?
I know that some people would like to do away with ask.openstack.org entirely, since the software is bug-ridden and nobody manages the site. My personal opinion is that the current situation is worse than no "ask" site at all, since people might ask questions, get partial answers and no follow-up. This can create a negative view of the OpenStack community.
In short, either fix it or remove it. Unfortunately I don't have the means to do either.
I'm not able to debug the issue at this moment, but did want to point out that all of our config management is collaboratively managed in Git repos code reviewed in Gerrit. This means that if you know what the problem is you absolutely can fix it. Or if you'd prefer to turn off the service you can write a change for that as well. The biggest gap is in identifying the issue without access to server logs. Depending on the issue figuring out what is going on may require access.
Relevant bits of code: https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/manifests/site.p... https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/modules/openstac... https://opendev.org/opendev/puppet-askbot
Finally, we also expose server and service statistics via cacti and graphite. These can be useful for checking service health: http://cacti.openstack.org/cacti/graph_view.php https://grafana.opendev.org/?orgId=1
Clark
participants (4)
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Bernd Bausch
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Clark Boylan
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Jeremy Stanley
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Laurent Dumont