On Thu, 2016-10-20 at 14:09 -0400, Matthew Miller wrote: > There are a handful of very active members who put in a lot of work > and > effort; it isn't just a vacant lot full of weeds and bricks, which > would make the decision easy. > > We never did get a "meta" site set up, so there's not really a great > place to have this discussion (which is why I'm having it here). I > guess I'll start a discussion there with the [meta] tag. I'm one of the admins/mods at AskFedora. So, when the site was hosted initially, the idea was that some of us community members would help it turn into a sort of self maintaining knowledge base - where users could help other users (once we had enough users on Ask). It does seem like we do have quite a few users helping other users which is nice. If you look at my activity now, I've intentionally reduced it to a bare minimum so that users can answer questions and get their rewards. (as a mod, I can edit all posts etc and that still gives me all the cookies). Most of my time was used up rephrasing questions/summaries, redoing tags and finding duplicates anyway. Askbot isn't perfect, and we've known quite a few issues for a while. We used to actively hassle upstream with our issues, but at some point, we gave up http://askbot.org/en/questions/scope:all/sort:activity-desc/tags:askfedora/page:1/ (Upstream using their askbot instance as a bugtracker is a major pain too, and a perfect example of how the application is being used for purposes other than what it is designed for) As Kevin said already, it is basically a case of us having neither the skills nor the time to continually tweak Askbot to make it more Fedora specific. We had hotfixes and things from time to time, but this, of course, is extra work for infra, and we really do prefer not having to carry these. While I consider ask as quite a success - it does give users the ability to help other users, I do think we have wayy too many channels where users ask for help. At the moment, I see: - IRC - ML (users) - Ask - fedora-forum then, we have social media and other channels the community doesn't actively monitor/administer: - FB - Quora - G+ - stackexchange and friends Most social media channels constantly get help requests, and we seem to always have new Fedora related groups/pages cropping up that are not community owned. Keeping up with all of these is a full time job really. I would be much happier if we could reduce this somehow - maybe funnel it all to one or two places: - IRC for urgent issues requiring "live troubleshooting" - fedoraforum - for issues that require more discussion and can be solved over a longer period of time. One for "live chat", the other for "ask and follow up later"? Both of these have well established sub communities. I don't quite see the point of having both fedora-forum and the ML. They both provide support in a similar style. Fedoraforum is a proper forum where questions/threads can be pinned and all that - this can't be done on the ML. In spite of hypperkitty making the ML much easier to use, I don't see a lot of people actually searching the archives before posting a question. I don't know how we can control this on social media, though - on the FB group, for instance, I've pinned a post requesting people to use AskFedora for troubleshooting, but we still get questions (and a *lot* of self promotion/spam). We could have slightly tougher rules without appearing unfriendly - for instance ban self promoters/spammers (we aren't doing this yet). For questions, we can politely redirect them to our established channels. TLDR: close down ask, ML; add a proper "get help" page to the website that redirects to either IRC via webchat (live chat) or fedoraforum. (In my book, end users should not be redirected to wiki pages from such a nicely designed getfedora.org website - but our web presence is a topic for another day). I don't think replacing askbot with another tool will work either - we'll just have the same issues again. -- Thanks, Regards, Ankur Sinha "FranciscoD" http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha
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