On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:47 AM Barry Scott <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 30 Nov 2022, at 01:03, Jeffrey Walton <noloader@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 5:33 PM Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't do social media. I won't start now. I refuse to be the product
on a private platform.
I am the same way, but forums need not be social media and are essential
for any community that wants to embrace new users. Many of my younger colleagues
are not interested in email lists (because their email gets overwhelmed by SPAM).
Its not social media. Its discourse that is open source.Python and fedora already have discourse servers up and working.Personally I find them easy to use and better then email mainly because i can use markup to format code and other text.
I have been using remote sensing forums from ESA and NASA for years. Forums are essential for
remote sensing as you need to be able to share images. so have been used in this community for decades.
The ESA Forum sends email with replies to my posts. A simple reply can be made with email, but I generally
find it easier to reply using the forum software.
I do worry that bad actors will find ways to drive people away from forums:
NASA recently replaced the remote sensing forum I was using with a section in a forum that supports many
different NASA Earth Data programs. NASA gets a lot of attention from bad actors, so in addition to an
Earth Data user login, the new forum requires a CAPTCHA code for each post. If I take too long researching
a response the CAPTCHA expires, so I have to compose a complex response offline. This has greatly reduced
the number of active participants.
A colleague once suggested that access to specialized resources should require a correct answer to a "skiill
testing" question. Recently the NASA and ESA forums have seen an increase in (new) users posting images
with error messages where text would be better because the current search tools don't scan images (I often r
eply to such posts with OCR text so searches will find the thread). The current education system doesn't teach
students how to report problems (platform details, steps to reproduce the problem) so the forums have started
getting too many posts with titles like "How to I solve Error: permission denied".
George N. White III
_______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
