In my view, Having an official forum will make our projects grow faster and users can access Openstack easier. Take a look at K8S or Icinga. They are very good at helping people to access their platform by having a nice forum. I can help set up and configure the forum. I hope Openstack will become more and more mature and grow. Nguyen Huu Khoi On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 12:34 PM T Koksal <tevfikkoksal64@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello

I totally agree with Nguyen! I believe, as a new comer into Openstack I have concluded that there is the expectation from the user the to have pre-existing knowledge of the platforms. Additionally, the documentation is all-over and unstructured for someone wanting to learn.

TK

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 7:05 AM Bernd Bausch <berndbausch@gmail.com> wrote:

...

There used to be ask.openstack.org, but since nobody maintained the website, it became unreliable and was eventually disbanded. At the time, we were encouraged to ask questions at superuser.com and, in case it's related to programming, stackoverflow.com. There is also https://www.reddit.com/r/openstack, which is probably less "official" but seems more lively than the two Stackexchange sites.

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 7:56 AM Nguyễn Hữu Khôi < nguyenhuukhoinw@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello guys.

Openstack is a very interesting project, many questions from users will make it grow more and more but I see that people, including me, still ask the same question. It is hard to sort or find knowledge by this way.

If we hope this project spreads for people, we need a new way to share knowledge and skills, we are in the modern world but the way to access and exchange information in this project is too obsolete. This is a wall to slow down this project. Nguyen Huu Khoi

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for a while, then they disappear or lose interest and nobody else volunteers to take over, site decays into a state of outdated misinformation and frustrated users who ask questions but get no useful answers, eventually we tear down the service because having it in that state is worse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

the main reason we do not have an offical fourm any more is that we do not have enough contibutors to maintain one.

In my entire life, I've never seen a technology that's used so widely, but so few people are involved in. At this point, I can nearly name all the active OpenStackers in the United States off the top of my head. On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 4:57 AM Sean Mooney <smooney@redhat.com> wrote:

...

In my view, Having an official forum will make our projects grow faster and users can access Openstack easier.

Take a look at K8S or Icinga. They are very good at helping people to access their platform by having a nice forum.

I can help set up and configure the forum.

I hope Openstack will become more and more mature and grow. openstack has had 26 releases over 10+ years and many we would see it as a very mature comunity. in fact it has past the hype/fast groth phases and is into the more stable grandule eveolving and sustaining

On Mon, 2023-01-30 at 13:33 +0700, Nguyễn Hữu Khôi wrote: phase. the main reason we do not have an offical fourm any more is that we do not have enough contibutors to maintain one. as was noted in the tread that is why ask.openstack.org was removed.

the opendev infra team is small and manages alot of service on behalf of the comunity 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.

it would likely be better to collaberate with an exsitign froum or opensouce comunity then host our own at this point. e.g. stackoverflow or perhaps a matrix/mastadon space of some kind.

the other problem is getting the people with the knowlage to partake. many wont have the time to be active in such a fourm.

many of the active members of our comunity have been wearing 2 or 3 hats already and may not have the mental bandwith to also act as support in an offical fourm and answer questions. that would leave the questions eitehr unanswered or to experinced users/operators.

some of the more exprience operators may have bandwith to step in, in fact having an operator lead fourm might be more interesting as if there is a common issue and/or a solution that they comeup with that could be feed back to the project teams to fix or implement for them. its equally likely they will be busy running there clouds and the questions will be unansered or poorly answered.

its a gap i just dont know if its one that can be simply filled.

...

Nguyen Huu Khoi

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 12:34 PM T Koksal <tevfikkoksal64@gmail.com>

wrote:

...

...

Hello

I totally agree with Nguyen! I believe, as a new comer into Openstack I have concluded that there is the expectation from the user the to have pre-existing knowledge of the platforms. Additionally, the

documentation is

...

...

all-over and unstructured for someone wanting to learn.

TK

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 7:05 AM Bernd Bausch <berndbausch@gmail.com> wrote:

...

There used to be ask.openstack.org, but since nobody maintained the website, it became unreliable and was eventually disbanded. At the time, we were encouraged to ask questions at superuser.com and, in case it's related to programming, stackoverflow.com. There is also https://www.reddit.com/r/openstack, which is probably less "official" but seems more lively than the two Stackexchange sites.

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 7:56 AM Nguyễn Hữu Khôi < nguyenhuukhoinw@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello guys.

Openstack is a very interesting project, many questions from users will make it grow more and more but I see that people, including me, still ask the same question. It is hard to sort or find knowledge by this way.

If we hope this project spreads for people, we need a new way to share knowledge and skills, we are in the modern world but the way to access and exchange information in this project is too obsolete. This is a wall to slow down this project. Nguyen Huu Khoi

On 2023-01-31 19:21:06 -0500 (-0500), Michael Knox wrote:

I would be happy to contribute and maintain. If that's the ask.

The offer is appreciated, but you'll need top clarify what you mean by "maintain" in that case. Are you offering to install and run the service? And for how many years can you commit to doing that?

mailing lists and IRC are not overly useful, 24 hours in #openstack is just people connecting and disconnecting.

This is actually an example of why the past web forum attempts never worked out. Users are told to go ask questions in the #openstack channel, where few people with answers have any incentive to hang out, so it's unsurprising that you at best hear crickets there. This mailing list is a converged communication channel also used by people working on the software, and so I see far more questions posted here getting answered as a result.

There is a great community here and the user support is fragmented.

People are also already asking and sometimes answering questions on StackOverflow, Reddit, Slack, and so on. Adding a web forum on top of the existing options for places to ask questions seems likely to lead to even more fragmentation (perhaps you have suggestions for how to address that challenge?). I apologize if I seem overly skeptical, but after more than a decade of trying things and then seeing people propose the same things that didn't work before, I've become quite cautious of such offers. -- Jeremy Stanley

On 2023-02-01 16:03:14 -0500 (-0500), Michael Knox wrote:

All good, Jermey, I was just offering to add support/help. I work for an Openstack company here in Canada, just putting my hand up to help out :)

As I said, it's appreciated. What we're mainly lacking is people willing to help run and administer the systems our community already relies on, so the suggestion of adding more needs to come with clear responsibilities and commitments for long-term maintenance.

I don't see a cohesive end user/community "home", I could be wrong and happy to be if I am not seeing it. IRC is problematic in that it requires a persistent connection, there is no "record" if you are disconnected, for you to see an answer to your question, for example.

I agree it can be troublesome for people who weren't steeped in IRC since the dawn of the Internet. I've seen lots of folks having a positive experience with Matrix as a more modern successor to IRC. The federated Matrix network includes bridges to popular IRC networks, including OFTC where the OpenStack community's channels reside. If you have a Matrix account, you can join OpenStack channels through the OFTC bridge and automatically get persistence and history, as well as things people expect out of newer chat platforms like embedded media sharing, emojis, reactions, and so on. I personally consider this very mailing list (openstack-discuss) as the de facto home for the project however. It's where the OpenStack TC mandates governance decisions be mulled over before approving, where team leads publish summaries of in-person interactions, where we announce meetings and gatherings and pretty much everything else, and also where you're free to ask for help and are most likely to get useful suggestions in return.

Perhaps I can ask you, is the current system working? If so, I will pop back into my box.

Nothing is ever perfect, and I welcome ideas for improving what we have. I just worry when people suggest doing what we've already tried multiple times and found didn't work. -- Jeremy Stanley

I've not been active in the OpenStack community for some time now but I wanted to give my two cents about this. This was one of my biggest issues when first trying to get into and understand OpenStack. It's an amazing piece of software but it's completely dead on Server Fault and Stack Overflow. There's like 1 question about it per month, usually with no answers. Currently, I feel like the only way to discuss OpenStack is through IRC. But again, I'm not sure that just creating the "OpenStack Exchange" as a subforum of the Stack Exchange network would necessarily change this. Maybe it's more of an engagement issue rather than the actual platform (although I think that IRC should not be the only place for the community to be, as I perceive it to be today). Anyway, I really hope that this changes someday and there are as many OpenStack questions in forums as there are for Ansible. :)

On 2023-01-31 15:57:32 -0800 (-0800), John van Ommen wrote: [...]

In my entire life, I've never seen a technology that's used so widely, but so few people are involved in.

In that case, thanks for volunteering to help!

At this point, I can nearly name all the active OpenStackers in the United States off the top of my head. [...]

Your comment prompted me to review the code contributor statistics I pulled for the 2022 annual report. Of the 966 people whose changes merged to OpenStack projects last year, 92 listed "US" for the location in their foundation profiles. Unfortunately, 407 either had no foundation profile or didn't list a location in theirs, so it's hard to know exact numbers, but "US" was the most common of the 49 countries listed (for those who did list one), and if we were to assume people from all countries are equally likely to list their location then that suggests that "US" code contributors make up approximately 16% of the total, so maybe something like 159 people. Not everyone who contributes to OpenStack does it by writing the software, they're just the easiest subset to measure since we have queryable public records of that activity, so depending on what you mean by "OpenStackers" the number could be a lot higher. The problem underlying commons neglect is not that there are too few people involved in the project, it's that there's too small a proportion of those people who have the interest or time to help maintain the commons. If anything, it gets worse the larger the community becomes. Lots of people go to the beach, but not many people take a trash bag with them and pick up garbage when they see it. The more popular the beach, the harder it becomes to keep it clean. -- Jeremy Stanley

This has been my experience also. Some companies value my participation in the community, but many disallow it. My present job doesn't even allow me to email the list from my work email. Our business depends on Openstack, but we contribute nothing to the community. When we fix bugs that are affecting us, those fixes are not shared with the community. We pay Redhat for licensing and (useless) support of RHEL and RHOSP, but when I need support I go begging to the community. I consistently advocate for us to stop spending money on licensing and support of an inferior product, and to deploy our resources more productively by participating in the community, but I'm just a sysadmin so nobody pays any attention. On Wednesday, February 1, 2023, 11:29:56 AM EST, Jay Faulkner <jay@gr-oss.io> wrote: The problem underlying commons neglect is not that there are too few people involved in the project, it's that there's too small a proportion of those people who have the interest or time to help maintain the commons. If anything, it gets worse the larger the community becomes. Lots of people go to the beach, but not many people take a trash bag with them and pick up garbage when they see it. The more popular the beach, the harder it becomes to keep it clean. I've been working on OpenStack, off and on, for almost 9 years. (I'm US based; fwiw). What I've found in my career is that it's incredibly hard to get an OpenStack jobs with enough freedom to help with the commons. Many jobs before my current one wanted a solid line to be drawn between the exact patches you were working on and how it benefited the company you worked for. This made it difficult to work on anything but high-impact bugs and features, aside from the time I used, sometimes under the radar, to review code and keep things flowing. With the commons; it's incredibly difficult to draw those lines. That means that these contributors, working for a company that only has interest in supporting OpenStack in ways that have a direct, measurable impact on their product, are consuming from the commons but are not contributing back. I don't know what the solution is; but the above represents the reality for a large number of OpenStack contributors. If you're one of them, please know I appreciate your contributions, and contributing where you can. If you're not; maybe spend a few more minutes thinking about and contributing to the commons since not everyone can. -Jay FaulknerTC MemberIronic PTL  

On 2023-02-08 13:09:45 +0200 (+0200), Adrian Andreias wrote:

IMHO, some issues with using a mailing list are:

- it's harder to browse and search the archive and you don't have threads organized by (sub)categories - requires some extra steps jump in and to reply to a specific thread if you're not already subscribed to the ML - mail filter per subject [prefix] does not fully work as not all messages use a prefix - other idiosyncrasies like reading a ML email message and if you want to share it, you need to go to the archive URL, find the message and copy the link [...]

Perhaps you missed my other reply, but those are merely properties of the current mailing list software we're using. They're not inherent properties of all mailing list platforms. This is why we're in the process of upgrading to software which does not have many of the limitations you've listed above. It's not going to be the ideal web forum interface, but it seems to strike a good balance of features while not compromising on functionality for people who prefer E-mail based discussion. For an example, here's one of the lists we've moved to the new platform already: https://lists.opendev.org/archives/list/rust-vmm@lists.opendev.org/ If you have an account you can reply right in your web browser, no need to subscribe and send E-mail messages. Posts subscribers receive include an "archived at" URL so they can just share that directly. You're right that categorization and filtering based on subject keywords is not a panacea, it's more of a convention we've established to help people more easily skim messages so they can identify which ones may be of interest or which ones they can safely ignore, and that people new to the community are not all that aware of what keywords we've standardized on nor how to apply them (we do link to that information from the list description, but I'm sure it could be improved on). There's also the option to extend the archive interface for better categorization of messages.

A modern, open source, forum, like Discourse [1], can be used as a ML as well [2], and you can even subscribe to categories (instead of relying on ML subject prefix). So, Discourse is probably able to accommodate those die hard mailing list lovers as well. :) I think migration can be done without disturbing or requiring any action from the ML subscribers. [...]

I've personally been struggling to engage in the Python packaging community ever since the distutils-sig ML was forklifted to Discourse a couple of years ago. The only people who will tell you it's an effective mailing list platform are the people who exclusively use its WebUI. It destroys quoting, destroys threading, eats signed messages, lets participants go back and edit their posts so that what you replied to is no longer what the post says, lets participants delete posts or even entire discussions... it may be a good platform for social interaction but it's quite dreadful for a long-term historical record of discussions. But more to the point, I don't think it's possible to force the community to move to a different platform even if we wanted to. You don't really move a community that way, you reform the community out of the people who are ambivalent to the discussion platform plus the people who refused to use the old platform but like the new one, minus the people who liked the old platform and not the new one. For example, we have a lot of discussion happening in IRC as well. Closing down our IRC channels in favor of native Matrix channels wouldn't mean that those discussions necessarily move to Matrix. They'll move, but they may simply move to other unofficial IRC channels, or to Slack or Discord or... I don't object to someone setting up a web forum dedicated to answering OpenStack user questions, by all means give it a go. I don't personally have time to manage it, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. I'm not going to stop trying to improve our mailing lists though, and I definitely don't think it's a good idea for us to tell the people who want to use a mailing list that they should stop using it in favor of some different means of discussion. There's no lack of places for people to discuss things, and closing down one platform doesn't ensure that discussion moves where you intend. -- Jeremy Stanley