On 2020-08-19 09:52:47 +1000 (+1000), Ian Wienand wrote: [...]

*If* we were to restore it now, it looks like 0.11 branch comes with an upstream Dockerfile [1]; there's lots of examples now in system-config of similar container-based production sites and this could fit in.

This makes it significantly easier than trying to build up everything it requires from scratch, and if upstream keep their container compatible (a big if...) theoretically less work to keep updated. [...]

Which also brings up another point: right now we're running it on Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS) which is scheduled to reach EOL early next year, and the tooling we're using to deploy it isn't going to work on newer Ubuntu releases. Even keeping it up in a read-only state is timebound to how long we can safely keep its server online. If we switch ask.openstack.org to read-only now, I would still plan to turn it off entirely on or before April 1, 2021. -- Jeremy Stanley

---- On Tue, 18 Aug 2020 19:35:05 -0500 Michael Johnson <johnsomor@gmail.com> wrote ----

Yes! ask.openstack.org is no fun to attempt to be helpful on (see e-mail notification issues, etc.).

+1 on making it RO and redirect users to StackOverflow or ML(fast response)..

I would like to ask that we put together some sort of guide and/or guidence for how to use stack overflow efficiently for OpenStack questions. I.e. some well known or defined tags that we recommend people use when asking questions. This would be similar to the tags we use for the openstack discuss list.

I see that there is already a trend for "openstack-nova" "openstack-horizon", etc. This works for me.

In FC SIG, we check a set of tags for new contributors in ask.o.o [1] which we can switch to do in StackOverflow. Similarly, we can start monitoring the popular tags for project/area-specific. [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/First_Contact_SIG#Biweekly_Homework -gmann

This way we can setup notifications for these tags and be much more efficient at getting people answers.

Thanks Thierry for moving this forward!

Michael

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 5:10 PM Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> wrote:

...

On 2020-08-19 09:52:47 +1000 (+1000), Ian Wienand wrote: [...]

...

*If* we were to restore it now, it looks like 0.11 branch comes with an upstream Dockerfile [1]; there's lots of examples now in system-config of similar container-based production sites and this could fit in.

This makes it significantly easier than trying to build up everything it requires from scratch, and if upstream keep their container compatible (a big if...) theoretically less work to keep updated. [...]

Which also brings up another point: right now we're running it on Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS) which is scheduled to reach EOL early next year, and the tooling we're using to deploy it isn't going to work on newer Ubuntu releases. Even keeping it up in a read-only state is timebound to how long we can safely keep its server online. If we switch ask.openstack.org to read-only now, I would still plan to turn it off entirely on or before April 1, 2021. -- Jeremy Stanley

Hi everyone, I have a question regarding read-only ask.openstack.org. I understand the decision to make it read-only but one thing still bothers me since I look up problems from time to time. And I noticed that you can't expand all comments if there were more than a few. Users were able to expand by clicking "see more comments" but that's not possible anymore. Is there any way to make the whole page visible, maybe remove that button and kind of "auto-expand" all comments? Some of the comments might have valuable information. Regards, Eugen Zitat von Bernd Bausch <berndbausch@gmail.com>:

Thanks for calling me out, but I am certainly not the only one answering questions.

After the notification feature broke down entirely, leaving me no way to see which questions I am involved in, it's indeed time to move on. I agree with the change as well.

Bernd.

On 8/18/2020 7:44 PM, Thierry Carrez wrote:

...

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

Hi, thanks for your response and the clarification. I guess at some point most of the content will be obsolete, but I understand that it has to end at some point.

I fear that ask is not giving us that much control on what's enabled and disabled in "read-only mode". I see there is still pagination to access later answers... Would you have an example of a question with the "see more comments" behavior ?

One example would be here: https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/128442/how-to-setup-controller-node-ha... Regards, Eugen Zitat von Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org>:

Eugen Block wrote:

...

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding read-only ask.openstack.org. I understand the decision to make it read-only but one thing still bothers me since I look up problems from time to time. And I noticed that you can't expand all comments if there were more than a few. Users were able to expand by clicking "see more comments" but that's not possible anymore. Is there any way to make the whole page visible, maybe remove that button and kind of "auto-expand" all comments? Some of the comments might have valuable information.

Hi Eugen,

I fear that ask is not giving us that much control on what's enabled and disabled in "read-only mode". I see there is still pagination to access later answers... Would you have an example of a question with the "see more comments" behavior ?

More generally, note that we'll hit a dead-end in April when the ask server LTS distribution will cease to be supported, and we have nobody in the community with time to work on porting the ask setup to more recent distributions... So the plan is to turn it off.

At that point ask.openstack.org content will be lost, unless we somehow make a static copy somewhere. The Internet archive has copies of ask.openstack.org but they do not seem to run very deep. If anyone has ideas on how we could preserve that content without spending too many cycles on it, please share :)

-- Thierry Carrez (ttx)

Alright, thanks for looking into it. Zitat von Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org>:

Eugen Block wrote:

...

...

I fear that ask is not giving us that much control on what's enabled and disabled in "read-only mode". I see there is still pagination to access later answers... Would you have an example of a question with the "see more comments" behavior ?

One example would be here:

https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/128442/how-to-setup-controller-node-ha...

Thanks. It seems the "see more comments" button is a variation on the "add a comment" button, so its action is unfortunately blocked by the read-only flag.

-- Thierry

Radosław Piliszek wrote:

[...] The double quote sign breaks the string improperly. Once that is fixed, the JavaScript functions should come back.

I can't see the repo in opendev so can't send a patch there. Perhaps you can help?

The read-only message is set here: https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/modules/openstac... Thanks! -- Thierry Carrez (ttx)

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 8:35 PM Radosław Piliszek <radoslaw.piliszek@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 6:09 PM Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org> wrote:

...

The read-only message is set here:

https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/modules/openstac...

Thanks!

Thanks, Thierry. Seems my searchitsu failed.

I found one other issue so at least we will fix the rendering issue (as the syntax error has only unknown consequences).

See [1].

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/opendev/system-config/+/772937

And hooray: it fixed the 'see more comments' and made the message display when trying to add new. -yoctozepto

I apologize for reviving this but I just wanted to figure out if there was something I missed. The site was previously up but into read-only which was good enough to get from Google --> ask.openstack. It seems that it was completely shutdown in May. Was this the expected path after the read-only setup? On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 3:40 AM Eugen Block <eblock@nde.ag> wrote:

Yeah I just tried that, awesome! :-) Thank you very much for the effort!

Zitat von Radosław Piliszek <radoslaw.piliszek@gmail.com>:

...

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 8:35 PM Radosław Piliszek <radoslaw.piliszek@gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 6:09 PM Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org> wrote:

...

The read-only message is set here:

https://opendev.org/opendev/system-config/src/branch/master/modules/openstac...

...

...

Thanks!

Thanks, Thierry. Seems my searchitsu failed.

I found one other issue so at least we will fix the rendering issue (as the syntax error has only unknown consequences).

See [1].

[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/opendev/system-config/+/772937

And hooray: it fixed the 'see more comments' and made the message display when trying to add new.

-yoctozepto

On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 at 12:44, Thierry Carrez <thierry@openstack.org> wrote:

At that point ask.openstack.org content will be lost, unless we somehow make a static copy somewhere. The Internet archive has copies of ask.openstack.org but they do not seem to run very deep. If anyone has ideas on how we could preserve that content without spending too many cycles on it, please share :)

It might be possible without scraping the site. It appears you can iterate on all pages indexing questions with: https://ask.openstack.org/en/questions/scope:all/sort:activity-desc/page:<NUMBER_FROM_1_TO_910>/ Each question can be retrieved directly by its ID without having to know the last part of the URL. For example, https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/24115/ redirects to https://ask.openstack.org/en/question/24115/sample-data-of-objectringgz-cont... So, if an administrator could extract all question IDs from the database, you could feed the question URLs and the index pages to the Wayback Machine Save Page Now service, for example via this library: https://github.com/pastpages/savepagenow Although without a working search engine the usefulness of the archive is limited.