Re: Migrating our IPFire Forum to Discourse

[ummeegge <ummeegge@ipfire.org>]

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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.

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 ?

> 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.

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.

> 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 ?!


Some thoughts from here.

Best,

Erik