Discourse

[Hans "totte" Tovetjärn]

On 2018-10-30 08:38, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On maandag 29 oktober 2018 19:31:54 CET Jonathan Riddell wrote:
>> Discourse is modern forum and mailing list software.  Examples at
>> https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ or https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
>> 
>> I went to a talk at the Embedded Linux Summit about how Fedora moved 
>> to use
>> Discourse.  Similar to the discussion of moving away from IRC we had 
>> last
>> year I see people moving away from mailing lists and new contributors 
>> not
>> wanting to get into them.  Our KDE Forums also look quite old school.  
>> In
>> Fedora they moved to Discourse and mailing lists and forums and saw a
>> marked increase in engagement.
>> 
>> I think KDE should consider moving away from mailman and onto 
>> Discourse and
>> at the same time forum.kde.org could move to this more modern 
>> software. It
>> might also help cover Boud's use case of a user support method for 
>> people
>> with queries before the report a bug.
> 
> I don't think it's really comparable. Discourse might be a good 
> alternative
> for mailing lists and forums, where people have discussions, but it 
> doesn't
> look like a good alternative for a solution where people who have a 
> problem,
> ask about it, and get a (semi-automatic) answer because it's been asked 
> a
> hundred times before. It's the latter we really need :-)

If you need *both* discussion and Q&A-style support, there is this 
plugin for Discourse: 
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-solved-accepted-answer-plugin/30155. 
It doesn't make it as good as I find StackExchange or AskBot, but it is 
something.

> But when it comes to mailing lists and forums...
> 
> kimageshop at kde.org basically only gets used for announcements. All 
> discussions
> happen on Phabricator or on IRC. Almost nobody with a question 
> subscribes to
> the mailing list. The only thing that gets less used than the mailing 
> list is
> the FAQ.

At a glance, the FAQ is looking good in terms of legibility: 
https://docs.krita.org/en/KritaFAQ.html, how have you come to the 
conclusion that it is so unpopular?

> We also do get user support questions on IRC, through the web 
> interface, but
> it's clear that it confuses people horribly. They come, ask and leave, 
> or
> don't know what to do once they're in the channel. Much as it pains me, 
> for
> user support, IRC is the wrong tool. It's still find for project
> collaboration, though.
> 
> As for the forum, it would be good to replace that with something more 
> modern.
> We get a lot of traffic on the forums, People don't understand the 
> layout of
> the forums, but because there's only an RSS feed, no email integration, 
> I miss
> a lot of questions, and it's often very unclear what the current 
> questions
> are. And the process of registering and logging in to the forum 
> confuses
> people a lot, too.

Can you not subscribe to https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=136 to 
get e-mail notifications? Is it the identity.kde.org feature that makes 
registering difficult? Could this be alleviated by allowing for OAuth2?

-- 
Best regards,
Hans "totte" Tovetjärn
totte at chakralinux.org
0xEB5A95EC99421F98