Hello guys,
The moment is here - finally! I have set up a new server with Discourse running on it - again. But this time, this all looks a lot smoother with our brilliant new infrastructure underneath it.
I would like to give you an update and what has happened recently and what is going to happen, and where I need your help.
So what has happened?
I built out people.ipfire.org. You have all seen this. This is now our new place where people register for an account and where they put in a couple of details about themselves. Normal users might not spend too much time here, but we will definitely use this a little bit more because it is the place where we host our phone conferences, contact other people, manage accounts and so on.
All services that we have (Bugzilla, Patchwork, Wiki, etc.) are already connected to it. What was missing is the forum.
Therefore I built a single-sign on solution for Discourse now. There is no registration possible on Discourse. This is only possible through people.ipfire.org.
I think this is super simple, and working great!
What is going to happen next?
Since this milestone was taken now, we are ready to start our migration to Discourse.
I have an announcement post ready (https://blog.ipfire.org/post/the-new-ipfire-community-portal, https://community.ipfire.org/t/welcome-to-the-new-ipfire-community-portal/24...), but I am not going to send this out, yet. Inviting people to an empty forum is a bit like walking into an empty restaurant - it feels a bit awkward.
So, before we start with the migration process as outlined in this post, I would like you to log in to Discourse, play around a little bit, find some things that might need change. Even start a post on something so that we get the place a little bit more lively.
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.
I would like to hear your feedback on this. I would like to avoid having an extra category for every single option on the web UI and every single add-on, because simply nobody will find the correct category when there are a hundred to choose from. At thee same time, when someone is searching through the forum, the categories should be helping them to find the right thing very quickly. So it is difficult to get it right I believe.
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.
This is a great opportunity now for a fresh start and I am looking forward to be able to talk to more people of our community. It is large, but people do not chat much. Hopefully that will change.
I will need to do some things on the backend. We only have one LDAP/Kerberos server right now and we need more for redundancy. The user experience of people.ipfire.org and the login could be slightly improved, too, but I think it is good enough for a launch. I will improve the logos on Discourse before we are ready to launch though.
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.
Okay, enough of me talking. Please head over to https://community.ipfire.org, log in, test, and let me know what you think.
Best, -Michael
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
Hi,
Thank you for your feedback :)
On 26 Oct 2019, at 05:33, ummeegge ummeegge@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
Hey,
So since I have not received much feedback (except from Erik) I suppose we are ready for the launch.
Therefore I would like to invite everyone for an
IPFire Community Portal Launch Party
on this Monday, November 4, the usual time when we have our IPFire Telephone Conference at 8 pm CET, in the usual conference room one.
I guess this not enough of a reason to pop some champaign, but bring a nice drink, some good fun and we will celebrate this huge milestone together!
See you there!
-Michael
On 24 Oct 2019, at 10:36, Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org wrote:
Hello guys,
The moment is here - finally! I have set up a new server with Discourse running on it - again. But this time, this all looks a lot smoother with our brilliant new infrastructure underneath it.
I would like to give you an update and what has happened recently and what is going to happen, and where I need your help.
So what has happened?
I built out people.ipfire.org. You have all seen this. This is now our new place where people register for an account and where they put in a couple of details about themselves. Normal users might not spend too much time here, but we will definitely use this a little bit more because it is the place where we host our phone conferences, contact other people, manage accounts and so on.
All services that we have (Bugzilla, Patchwork, Wiki, etc.) are already connected to it. What was missing is the forum.
Therefore I built a single-sign on solution for Discourse now. There is no registration possible on Discourse. This is only possible through people.ipfire.org.
I think this is super simple, and working great!
What is going to happen next?
Since this milestone was taken now, we are ready to start our migration to Discourse.
I have an announcement post ready (https://blog.ipfire.org/post/the-new-ipfire-community-portal, https://community.ipfire.org/t/welcome-to-the-new-ipfire-community-portal/24...), but I am not going to send this out, yet. Inviting people to an empty forum is a bit like walking into an empty restaurant - it feels a bit awkward.
So, before we start with the migration process as outlined in this post, I would like you to log in to Discourse, play around a little bit, find some things that might need change. Even start a post on something so that we get the place a little bit more lively.
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.
I would like to hear your feedback on this. I would like to avoid having an extra category for every single option on the web UI and every single add-on, because simply nobody will find the correct category when there are a hundred to choose from. At thee same time, when someone is searching through the forum, the categories should be helping them to find the right thing very quickly. So it is difficult to get it right I believe.
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.
This is a great opportunity now for a fresh start and I am looking forward to be able to talk to more people of our community. It is large, but people do not chat much. Hopefully that will change.
I will need to do some things on the backend. We only have one LDAP/Kerberos server right now and we need more for redundancy. The user experience of people.ipfire.org and the login could be slightly improved, too, but I think it is good enough for a launch. I will improve the logos on Discourse before we are ready to launch though.
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.
Okay, enough of me talking. Please head over to https://community.ipfire.org, log in, test, and let me know what you think.
Best, -Michael
-
Michael Tremer -
ummeegge