Dear all, On 24.10.2016 10:00, Ankur Sinha wrote: > [...] > 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. I agree, there are a lot of channels in parallel and maintaining them is a lot of work, but... > 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" ... IRC is good for urgent help but not sustainable because knowledge is not aggregated, not archived, and not accessible by others that may have a same or similar question. > - fedoraforum - for issues that require more discussion and can be > solved over a longer period of time. ... I disagree with the idea or attempt to replace Ask with fedoraforum. A Q/A site is just not the same as a forum. (see below) > 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. The disadvantage of a traditional forum vs. Q/A site is that in a forum threads sometimes grow crazy and the answer gets buried under a lot of noise. The beauty of a Q/A site is that (if people properly vote up and down), you have your answer right under the question. Much more efficient. And for dynamic content, users just edit and adapt their answer instead of producing an endless thread. As for ML: I think, there is a similar problem: Find a similar question/problem and the correct answer can be difficult and include a lot of reading (of potentially unrelated stuff). As you can guess, I very much like to concept of Q/A sites for troubleshooting and supporting the community. We could just migrate to StackExchange and Co. but I find it weird to host Fedora knowledge on a non-free system. Here is my suggestion: Can we find someone that sponsors the development of an askbot fork, fixing and adapting it to our needs? Let's say Red Hat Winter of Code - and we find a couple of students that are willing to fix it? > 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. Re TLDR: keep askbot alive, it's efficient (for end-users) and different from all other types of existing forums/MLs/IRCs, and find someone that patches the major bugs and annoyances. Cheers, Florian _______________________________________________ infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to infrastructure-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
