[simplification] Making ask.openstack.org read-only

Eugen Block eblock at nde.ag
Wed Jan 27 13:38:15 UTC 2021


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 at 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
>>






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