From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Tremer To: development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: Re: Migrating our IPFire Forum to Discourse Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2019 09:50:34 +0000 Message-ID: <942B8ABC-8309-4BEB-ADDB-A6CF91989E70@ipfire.org> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============4164222839020526779==" List-Id: --===============4164222839020526779== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi, Thank you for your feedback :) > On 26 Oct 2019, at 05:33, ummeegge wrote: >=20 > 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. >=20 > Wanted to give some thoughts, ideas and questions in here. Yes, the new infrastructure performs a lot better and we have spent so much t= ime 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, >>=20 >> 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? >>=20 >> 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 o= ur usual telephone conference. I will send invites for a little launch party = :) >=20 >> The new forum is called =E2=80=9CIPFire Community=E2=80=9D, because I cons= ider 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 =E2=80=9Cdevelopment=E2= =80=9D >> 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 >> =E2=80=9Cconfiguration=E2=80=9D 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 =E2=80=9Cparallel project=E2=80=9D is worse. In the past, there have been loads of bugs been reported to the forum somewhe= re. Very often even in a post and not even an extra thread. Nobody has seen t= hose, 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 usua= lly 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 mail= ing list? Do I want people to dump a half-baked bug report there? No. Absolut= ely not. I regard the development mailing list a little bit like an office. T= here has to be enough information flow that everyone knows what it is going o= n, but when everyone is sitting at their desks, there needs to be enough quie= tness to be able to concentrate on something. For example: If we have 100 ema= ils on there a day, nobody will be able to do any coding because we are all b= usy 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 a= nd bugtracker and teach them how to use those tools. I think this is key. Man= y people learned from GitHub that you just throw some information around. A b= ug, a pull request. And then someone will hopefully handle it. That is not wh= at I want. We all should be playing a small role in this, but nobody should b= e 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 th= ings? Do you think that we will lose debate with this approach? I believe that we a= lready have enough places to developers to chat, users to put forward their s= uggestions=E2=80=A6 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 t= he VPN section. I think this is even better than posting everything into =E2= =80=9Cdevelopment=E2=80=9D, because isn=E2=80=99t 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. >=20 >> The challenges ahead >>=20 >> 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 forw= ard, a conversation was being had over weeks and a decision was made. There w= ere 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 moder= ators 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 >=20 > Best, >=20 > Erik >=20 >=20 >=20 --===============4164222839020526779==--