Open Stack

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
>