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On 4/21/23 17:42, Matthew Miller wrote:
Oh, probably an important related feature I noticed after looking at Chris Adams' response,On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 10:50:42AM +0200, Jarek Prokop wrote:also drives us towards more scattered communications. Our infamous mega-threads are not really effective for getting to community consensus, and tend to bring out the worst in us.Passionate people generate passionate discussion. The only thing you will gain by a forum is that at the point the message will not be deemed appropriate, it will probably be deleted or "beatified" by the mod team. The passion from our human nature will not go away with a platform change.That's true -- and I'm not looking to get rid of passion, or silence opinions. But when something is _really_ out of line (often written in the heat of the moment), it's better to have options to ... as you say, beautify* the conversation. That makes it better for other people participating, and better for the person who has a chance to make their point in a more constructive way. * also, to fix typos :) I had a small concern about people changing messages too radically, where the conversation will then lose meaning, the software actually supports history and colorful diffs. Heh, sounds like a fun side project to try to transform it into a tree structure.[snip]A discussion to a technical change, for me, will forever be in a ticket. No matter the "wider discussion platform" projects will always have bug trackers where one can create a ticket.Of course. That's not what I'm talking about. Consider for example this: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2817. That's not about the technical decision itself -- it's an branch of the conversation that should have been here.biased towards those for whom it is working just fine. But, core Fedora development discussion can’t be limited to that ever-shrinking group. Consider who isn’t here. The problems are real, and the trend isn’t in a good direction.But, is it shrinking due to a platform, or something other?I don't think Fedora contribution and activity overall are shrinking. And I'm quite convinced that the platform is part of it.It makes me want to try discourse out, not saying I'll stick around,I'm glad to hear that.I am, luckily, not paid to read forums with no threading. IMO, a stream of posts with mentions of previous posts is not threading. Threading begins and ends on new topic posts AFAICT on discourse.It's not presented as a tree, but there _are_ threads of replies. Finally, noticed what it does, it made me a bit confused as the first response was the same as in the "global" flow of the topic,If you see something like "2 replies" under a particular post, you can click that and the view will be restricted to just those replies, which you can then follow further. Example: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/future-of-encryption-in-fedora-desktop-variants/80397/83?replies_to_post_number=83 but the message under it changed. I think that it should be better visible that they are actually replies. It seems to hide other replies and only show those that are part
of the "thread". Do they accept RFEs? :) I'm afraid none that could be automated, but I am not one strong on metrics.But also, yes — when something really diverges in Discourse, it should be a new topic. A moderator can move things after the fact (like I did with https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/getting-systemd-homed-working-properly-on-fedora-workstation/81004) but even better, when replying, you can create a linked topic. See https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/site-tip-create-linked-topics-for-deep-dives-or-tangents/34526But I'd be happier if there was some tangible metric how to measure if we got more *related to the topic* engagement. I would hate to see 20 "+1" posts from "random" users counted towards "it is better now".That's reasonable. Do you have suggestions for a good metric? I'll just throw out some ideas: 1. Number of unique contributors 2. How many unique posts these contributors interacted with 3. "quality" of the post. I think one could go by the length and verbosity of the post. E.g. "Yeah seems like a good change" is not as valuable as a deeper dive/analysis into a hypothetical problematic. (especially if we consider that the platform has +1 equivalents in reactions :)) 4. Number/frequency of interactions. Maybe a combination of 1. and 4. would have value. But we can worry about that a bit later than "right now". In Project Discussion, each different Fedora team can have its own tag, and you can subscribe to those that you’re interested in. Cross-posting is easy: tag a post with multiple teams.I'd be interested in having a kind of "crossroad sign", to direct me towards tags what I would care about from a packager perspective. Not happy about this change, but it would make my experience a bit better...There's a big _index_ at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tags, but that's probably bit much (while at the same time not containing enough description). What would this "sign" ideally look like to you? Usually we put these into "might want to follow" in various resources. Perhaps a relevant tag list in the Fedora documentation? There
are various onboarding Basically a recommendation of "follow new proposals with tag #proposals, packaging questions with #packaging ...... tags on Fedora Discussion" TBH, I enjoy simplicty, in time of writing, I was imagining
something akin to a wiki page with a few lines on recommended
tags. That is good to know.That said, it is web-first software. (Or mobile, if that’s your thing.) That requires some adjustment, I know. I hope opening up a Fedora Discussion tab – or keeping one open — becomes an easy habit.If I was a volunteer that's the thing I'd remember once in a blue moon that it even exists. But I guess that's just person to person :).There _are_ email notifications, and you can interact by replying to them. (You can even +1 or <3.) There is also a "digest" mail sent automatically if you're not active, showing active topics possibly of interest, which can serve as a more-frequent-than-blue-moon reminder. (You can turn this off, of course.) Glad to see it is a way of interacting with the forum.As a person in my early 20s, I hate how everything is becoming web centric and no one can convince me to feel otherwise. While I am hearing from varying people around me, how it must be bad using email, it provides client-side filtering unparalleled by any platform that I used in the past.It's fine, but it's no NNTP. That was really the best. :) Do take a look at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/guide-to-interacting-with-this-site-by-email/25960 It's not perfect, but it's better than most other forum software's email interfaces. I will always remember email communications, but the only constant is change, and I am a very much "let's try and see" kind of person.I enjoyed Fedora being on mailing lists, nothing ever came close to the threading of emails. I was not getting lost in threads of conversation while still being under the umbrella topic, no need to open who knows how many links to read all tangents.I appreciate your perspective, feedback, and willingness to try this out! If this is going to end up as a positive result for the Fedora Project as a whole, well, I'll be happy about that. Thanks, |
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