[ALL] Why we dont have an official forum?

Jeremy Stanley fungi at yuggoth.org
Mon Jan 30 13:34:35 UTC 2023


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outdated misinformation and frustrated users who ask questions but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abusers, but most of the information in it is outdated and the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
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