Re: Testing Discourse for Debian
On Sun, 12 Apr 2020 13:15:23 -0700
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Ihor Antonov <ihor@antonovs.family> writes:
> > On Sunday, April 12, 2020 11:51:27 AM PDT Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> [...]
> So, I should be clear that I personally have only a small amount of
> experience with Discourse and haven't looked into the details of its
> features. But there are a lot of reasons for investigating that sort of
> forum software, more generically. Here are a few.
> [...]
+1
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1782/
[I really wanted to just leave it at that, but...]
I think being able to easily indicate a +/-1 would be a huge benefit for
debian-style conversations. There are four distinct long-winded discussions
that I can immediately recall over the last year where people have reached out
to me or others over IRC to express frustration/agreement with a topic/email,
but they never mentioned it on the mailing list. These same people (myself
included) would likely have added a simple indication of approval/disagreement,
especially knowing it is not an entirely new email to be read by every reader.
I haven't used discourse yet, but if it's able to send me an email for new
conversations and updates for conversations/categories I'm subscribed to, that
means an infinitely smaller inbox, less noise, and more time/attention on the
things I care about. ... I'm sure it can, those seem like standard features.
Speaking of more recent events, I can see where certain longer-lived topic
categories would be helpful, such as a help-needed (or team-needs-help)
category. Rather than the FTP-Masters team firing off periodic emails hoping
that someone this round reads it and bites, they could create the topic in that
help-needed category and leave it for people interested in seeing how they can
help Debian.
I'm sure that same logic applies to many teams, where burn-out and and serious
demotivation happens long before anyone external to the team is aware of the
problem, which exasperates simpler problems. Continuing to pick on my favorite
team... this is applies ftp-masters, where the training process itself is
extremely demotivating simply because of the lack of manpower available for
reviewing our reviews.
A lot of these supposed benefits are speculation, since I haven't used the
service yet, but it's probably time to check out this new-fangled forum stuff.
At a glance, it looks like these features (and other subscription refinements)
are available. They sound like they could (possibly) drastically improve how we
communicate, raise concerns, gather consensus, etc.
Cheers,
--
Michael Lustfield
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