Open Stack

The email alert definitely should be the first one to get fixed :)

On Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 8:23 AM, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 04/04/18 17:26, Jimmy McArthur wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> We have a very robust and vibrant community at ask.openstack.org <
>> https://ask.openstack.org/>.  There are literally dozens of posts a day.
>> However, many of them don't receive knowledgeable answers.  I'm really
>> worried about this becoming a vacuum where potential community members get
>> frustrated and don't realize how to get more involved with the community.
>>
>> I'm looking for thoughts/ideas/feelings about this tool as well as
>> potential admin volunteers to help us manage the constant influx of
>> technical and not-so-technical questions around OpenStack.
>>
>
> Here's the thing: email alerts. They're broken.
>
> I have had my email alert preferences set to 'only subscribed tags' with a
> daily 'Entire forum (tag filtered)' email for several (like 4) years now. I
> am subscribed to exactly 3 tags.[1]
>
> For the first 3 years, I didn't receive any email alerts at all despite
> repeated fiddling with the settings. At the beginning of 2017 there was a
> software update and I started getting daily emails that are *not* tag
> filtered. (I know it was due to a software update, because the first emails
> started coming from the staging server.) Within a couple of days those
> emails started to go directly to spam, because GMail. I trained it not to
> do that any more for me, but it's unlikely most people did, and in any
> event all I get is a daily email that generally doesn't contain any of the
> questions I am interested in - even on days where there _are_ in fact new
> questions with tags that I am subscribed to.
>
> I've been able to make a reasonably significant contribution to answering
> questions because I've made it a habit to check the site itself regularly
> (and the tag filtering on the home page works really quite well). But
> anyone wanting to use technical means to give them notice about only the
> stuff they're interested in only when needed would be unable to do so. (And
> even if you fixed it at this point it'd all be sucked into spam filters.)
>
> There's other problems too - for example if somebody posts a question with
> not enough information and I post a comment asking for more, I won't get a
> notification when they reply unless they specifically @ me, which most
> people won't. (Sometimes I've discovered the replies only years later.) In
> fact in general the learning curve is way too high for people who just want
> to ask a casual question - for example, I'd say users are considerably more
> likely to respond to a correct answer by posting their own 'answer' that
> says 'It worked!' (or, worse, contains a totally unrelated question) than
> they are to click the 'Accepted answer' button - and there's no point
> trying to educate them because you almost never see the same user twice.
> Those are all broader problems with the design of StackExchange though; the
> alert thing is a feature that's supposedly present but doesn't work as
> advertised.
>
> It's also worth noting that the voting in general is fairly pointless
> because ~nobody has an account registered. So if people find a useful
> question and/or answer on ask.openstack from a search engine, they still
> won't bother to upvote because they'd have to create an account.
> Communities with critical mass like StackOverflow can use voting as a
> quality signal to surface the best content; we don't get enough data for
> that. (For reference, I've answered 237 questions and less than a dozen
> have ever gotten a second upvote - which is likely a good proxy for 'has
> ever been voted on by someone other than the original questioner'.)
>
> So, suggestions:
>
> * Fix the email subscription thing.
> * Ensure all devs have an account - perhaps by creating one for them using
> their IRC nickname & Foundation email? - and encourage people to @ each
> other when they see a question where they don't know the answer but they
> know who would (like you might add people to a Gerrit review). (Although
> realistically most of this will end up in the Spam folder... some might say
> deservedly ;)
> * Encourage teams to figure out a set of tags they want to watch, and
> encourage at least all core reviewers to log in once and set up their tag
> subscriptions so they'll see something useful when they visit the homepage.
> * Ask each team to come up with 1 or 2 volunteers to subscribe to
> (filtered!) email alerts and try to answer or triage incoming questions.
>
> For those of you already contributing there, Thank You!  For those that
>> are interested in becoming a moderator (instant AUC status!) or have some
>> additional ideas around fostering this community, please respond.
>>
>
> I'm not sure what else there is that I can't already do at my current
> karma level, but you're welcome to add me to the list and I'll try to do
> some of it in my travels.
>
> cheers,
> Zane.
>
> [1] Feel free to use your admin powers to poke around in my settings to
> try to figure out what is going on: https://ask.openstack.org/en/u
> sers/2133/zaneb/?sort=email_subscriptions
>
> Looking forward to your thoughts :)
>>
>> Thanks!
>> Jimmy
>> irc: jamesmcarthur
>>
>>
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>>
>
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-- 
Zhipeng (Howard) Huang

Standard Engineer
IT Standard & Patent/IT Product Line
Huawei Technologies Co,. Ltd
Email: huangzhipeng at huawei.com
Office: Huawei Industrial Base, Longgang, Shenzhen

(Previous)
Research Assistant
Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Lab, Calit2
University of California, Irvine
Email: zhipengh at uci.edu
Office: Calit2 Building Room 2402

OpenStack, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, OpenCompute Aficionado
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