Hi all,
If you've been avoiding the Discourse mega-thread because you're super
busy, I hope this summary will be useful. I'll keep it short(ish) and
still represent eveyone accurately (I hope).
TLDR: cautiously positive overall, some great debate, next steps at the
end of this mail
Some stats so far:
- 14 people have recovered password & logged in
- 8 topics, 41 posts to Testing Area
- 218 emails sent (that escalated fast, but can do 50k/month for free)
- For the foreman-dev discussion:
- 8 people involved
- 35 replies (20 mine)
So that's 7 people who've tried the UI but haven't commented yet, and a
whole load more who haven't looked yet.
On the discussion, I see (I hope this is fair!):
- 3 in favour (myself, Eric, Neil)
- 2 cautious (Martin, Ewoud)
- 1 cautious, with a change to implementation (Ivan)
- 1 against, countering with another solution (Lukas)
- 1 neutral, just asking a question (Andrew)
Eric is in favour of better communication tools. Neil supports the
argument that there are users being turned away by mailing lists. Ewoud
made the point that sometimes we have to accept changes to workflow to
benefit the community.
Martin & Ewoud both made good points about plain email being second
class. The initial STMP provider was causing issues, we've moved to
Mailgun and all seems fine with email now, see [1] for a threaded Mutt
example.
Lukas was clear that he's against a forum, and proposed a move to GNU
Mailman plus Hyperkitty archive viewer. There was some good debate about
the features/benefits/drawbacks of forums vs mailing lists here, so I
encourage you to read those posts if you're undecided.
Ivan seemed happier to try the forum out, but proposes running
side-by-side with the mailing list for a trial period. My concern here
was how to construct such a fair trial - again, worth a read. He also
suggested using a forum for -users and a list for -dev. I agreed that's
an option, but ideally we'd have everyone on the same platform.
What next?
Most of the pushback seems to be on mailing list mode (entirely fair)
but the root cause for that has been identified and fixed (it wasn't
Discourse). Mailing list mode really does feel the same to me as Google
Groups now (there's even a List-ID header to filter on), and I hope that
feeling will be the same for others.
Overall there seems enough support to working on this, but we have no
need to rush to a conclusion. While we continue tests, I will now spend
a little time on styling and setting it up to look like how we might
actually use it:
- I've changed the default view back to "Categories" from "Latest"
- I think it's more informative for newcomers, but let me know your
preference.
- I think it's more informative for newcomers, but let me know your
- The imported lists are locked (view-only) so that we don't give the
idea that posts here go back to the mailing lists. I'll also make:- A "Support" category (i.e foreman-users-alike)
- A "Development" category (i.e. foreman-dev-alike)
- An "Events" category for demos, conferences etc.
- These will get inbound email addresses once Ohad is back next week.
- I'll also try adding a template to the Support category, since
templated posts was something that came up in an offline discussion.
Testing Area will stay, it may as well for now. Feel free to play around
in any of the boards. Other suggestions for things people would like to
try are welcome!
Discourse has many plugins[2] so I may try adding a few that could be
useful. I don't want UI clutter, but integration with other systems is
often useful. If you browse and see any good ones, let me know.
We do need more traffic. Those who haven't activated their account yet,
please do! Testing of @mentions, joining groups and using @group
mentions, and trying the templates (once done) is especially welcome.
[1] https://gist.github.com/ekohl/60f3b5bdc6559800835b9f2ea0df13c1
[2] https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin