Re: Migrating our IPFire Forum to Discourse

[Michael Tremer <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>]

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Hi,

Thank you for your feedback :)

> On 26 Oct 2019, at 05:33, ummeegge <ummeegge(a)ipfire.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Michael,
> great work and nice to see the new infrastructure is growing also with
> new tools for the community and to bring the whole new environment
> closer to another.
> 
> Wanted to give some thoughts, ideas and questions in here.

Yes, the new infrastructure performs a lot better and we have spent so much time on it and built so much automation into it that we are now really saving a lot of time.

But it is a thing that is never finished and so we will always update it and add new things :)

> On Do, 2019-10-24 at 10:36 +0100, Michael Tremer wrote:
>> Hello guys,
>> 
>> All services that we have (Bugzilla, Patchwork, Wiki, etc.) are
>> already connected to it. What was missing is the forum.
> It might be an idea to line the other platforms out or set links to
> them in the forum. Several bug reports but also reguests to integrate
> community development comes to the forum and needed to be redirected to
> the appropriate sections.
>
>> What is going to happen next?
>> 
>> Since this milestone was taken now, we are ready to start our
>> migration to Discourse.
> Is there a ~date for this ?

Yes, I hope that we will be able to launch this next Monday, 4th Nov during our usual telephone conference. I will send invites for a little launch party :)

> 
>> The new forum is called “IPFire Community”, because I consider the
>> word forum to be a little bit dated. I have also done some changes to
>> how it works: There will be no German section any more, because that
>> was always a bad idea and has to go. I would like you to help me to
>> police that as best as we can. Then, I removed the “development”
>> area, because I believe that we do not need to have this on here at
>> all. We have mailing lists for devlopment, bugs should be reported in
>> Bugzilla, etc. I would like to separate those two things. The
>> “configuration” section is also gone, because pretty much everything
>> on the forum is about how to configure something. It was a non-
>> category. Now, I have split this into networking issues with some
>> sub-sections for larger topics like QoS, Web Proxy and WiFi. There is
>> a security section for IPS, Firewall Rules, etc. I considered VPNs to
>> be important enough to have their own category. Mainly to be able to
>> split it into OpenVPN & IPsec, too.
> Regarding the dropped development section, we did there a lot of
> testings in the community with regular users but always only a few
> developers this was a kind of neat since mostly developers do not have
> the time to test other stuff (which was in first place my experiences
> on the mailinglist) but also another focus/insight to the system. The
> help of the community was there ideal, also reagrding for new features
> or further developments in a project since there was a feedback to
> those where all that should belong to at the end.
> This was a kind of filter system before patches and new developments
> was send to the mailinglist which saved at the end also time in finding
> bugs but also for explanation since there was mostly also a reference
> to look for not only for the core developer but also for the community
> after the changes has been released and it was not only a four eyes
> principal but a multiple eye quality management possible.

Yes, I agree. This is not ideal that this is gone and agree with what you are saying.

However, I believe that this “parallel project” is worse.

In the past, there have been loads of bugs been reported to the forum somewhere. Very often even in a post and not even an extra thread. Nobody has seen those, investigated them and most importantly nobody fixed them. A forum does not track those reports even - at all.

I think IPFire could be a lot better because those small bugs which they usually are make the user experience a little bit shit. They are nasty problems, but they are not bad enough that someone really tries to have them fixed. So we need to channel them into the bug tracker.

Do I want people to publicly debug their problems somewhere on the devel mailing list? Do I want people to dump a half-baked bug report there? No. Absolutely not. I regard the development mailing list a little bit like an office. There has to be enough information flow that everyone knows what it is going on, but when everyone is sitting at their desks, there needs to be enough quietness to be able to concentrate on something. For example: If we have 100 emails on there a day, nobody will be able to do any coding because we are all busy with reading emails.

So it all has upsides and downsides.

I would vote for trying it this way now and move people to the mailing list and bugtracker and teach them how to use those tools. I think this is key. Many people learned from GitHub that you just throw some information around. A bug, a pull request. And then someone will hopefully handle it. That is not what I want. We all should be playing a small role in this, but nobody should be doing this as an almost full-time job.

We have a development area on the wiki: https://wiki.ipfire.org/devel

How is that as a general guide for people to know when and where to report things?

Do you think that we will lose debate with this approach? I believe that we already have enough places to developers to chat, users to put forward their suggestions… It is all there and we do not need the forum.

Which does not mean by the way that a VPN problem cannot be talked about in the VPN section. I think this is even better than posting everything into “development”, because isn’t it all development?

> I can understand that you want to prevent a kind of parallel project
> development but this is only one side of the whole in my opinion.
> 
>> The challenges ahead
>> 
>> The whole migration is risky, we all need to do our best to keep the
>> conversation going and invite people over. Blocking access to the old
>> forum will probably make people rather angry than anything else. This
>> has to happen, sooner rather than later, but we should try to make it
>> as smooth as possible.
> I think so, especially a english only platform will be a problem for a
> lot of people not sure where this leads to.

Yes, but we have talked about this 1000 times before. The motion was put forward, a conversation was being had over weeks and a decision was made. There were no objections that were valid enough to change the mind of the group.

I hope that we will be all very disciplined about this and help other people to follow this rule.

>> There will also be the problem to fight spam accounts, which we now
>> have to implement ourselves. We will have to see how this goes, but I
>> cannot imagine this being even worse than what we have right now with
>> our forum.
> This is a main problem i think since ecspecially in the last
> weeks/months there needed to be deleted several thousands of spam
> accounts in only a few days in the forum. This problem have the
> potential for an own employment if there is no good automated first
> line of defense and even if, there needs to be more then one or two
> people which regularily checks the posts but also irregularities in the
> registrations but this might be then a people.ipfire.org problem and
> have not that much to do with the administartion of the community
> platform ?!

Would it make sense to have some notifications being sent to a group of moderators that will then delete an account if it looks suspicious? What makes an account suspicious? We only have a name, an email address and potentially an IP address. All of this does not really tell you if someone is a spammer, or does it?

> Some thoughts from here.

Greatly appreciated. Looking forward to hear your answers to my questions.

Best,
-Michael

> 
> Best,
> 
> Erik
> 
> 
>