On 4/21/23 19:39, Jaroslav Prokop wrote:
On 4/21/23 17:42, Matthew Miller wrote:
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 :)
Oh, probably an important related feature I noticed after looking at
Chris Adams' response,
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.
[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.
Heh, sounds like a fun side project to try to transform it into a tree
structure.
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
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,
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 think enhancing the visibility after I expand replies for the posts in
the "thread" would be better.
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/34526
But 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'm afraid none that could be automated, but I am not one strong on metrics.
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_ athttps://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
and "must read" level stuff where I think we point to Fedora devel
mailing list (or equivalent for SIGs).
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.
I agree that we need some kind of recommended presets.
Matthew has a nice overview of the forum structure at
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/navigating-fedora-discussion-tags-categories-and-concepts/35555
But no one wants to read guides to just be able to communicate. Neither
newbies, nor the old-timers :)
So we need something very simple as well, like: if you are used to
fedora-devel, here is the recommended setup (theme?, subscriptions, set
of defaults) for you. You can get more from the Discourse, but you don't
have to.
Same for other active mailing lists.
Also, personally I am waiting for the Discourse sidebar. You can see it
on the main forum https://meta.discourse.org/ but it is not finished and
therefore not rolled out to Fedora instance yet.
While I like that one thread can be tagged via different tags, I still
prefer to think about forum as a collection of rooms, not a single flow
of all things to which I am subscribed to. And I can choose to enter the
dedicated room or not to enter.
I can right now click on a specific tag to get the list of things
relevant to it, but it is not the same. Sidebar provides that always
visible room list, which we are used to on IRC, Matrix, Slack or in the
mail client, and therefore makes this "room structure" much more
obvious. And I think it would help a lot to improve the navigation in
the current unstructured "tag cloud".
...
And now I think that maybe we should setup a set of tags with -room
suffux, as it is describes it better than the -team which we seem to be
using now.
#devel-room, #qa-room, #packaging-room, etc.
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.)
That is good to know.
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.
Glad to see it is a way of interacting with the forum.
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!
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.
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,
Jarek
--
Aleksandra Fedorova
bookwar
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