Dear all,
On 24.10.2016 10:00, Ankur Sinha wrote:
[...]
While I consider ask as quite a success - it does give users the
ability to help other users, I do think we have wayy too many channels
where users ask for help. At the moment, I see:
- IRC
- ML (users)
- Ask
- fedora-forum
then, we have social media and other channels the community doesn't
actively monitor/administer:
- FB
- Quora
- G+
- stackexchange and friends
Most social media channels constantly get help requests, and we seem to
always have new Fedora related groups/pages cropping up that are not
community owned.
I agree, there are a lot of channels in parallel and maintaining
them is
a lot of work, but...
Keeping up with all of these is a full time job really. I would be
much
happier if we could reduce this somehow - maybe funnel it all to one or
two places:
- IRC for urgent issues requiring "live troubleshooting"
... IRC is good
for urgent help but not sustainable because knowledge is
not aggregated, not archived, and not accessible by others that may have
a same or similar question.
- fedoraforum - for issues that require more discussion and can be
solved over a longer period of time.
... I disagree with the idea or attempt to
replace Ask with fedoraforum.
A Q/A site is just not the same as a forum. (see below)
One for "live chat", the other for "ask and follow up
later"?
Both of these have well established sub communities. I don't quite see
the point of having both fedora-forum and the ML. They both provide
support in a similar style. Fedoraforum is a proper forum where
questions/threads can be pinned and all that - this can't be done on
the ML. In spite of hypperkitty making the ML much easier to use, I
don't see a lot of people actually searching the archives before
posting a question.
The disadvantage of a traditional forum vs. Q/A site is that
in a forum
threads sometimes grow crazy and the answer gets buried under a lot of
noise. The beauty of a Q/A site is that (if people properly vote up and
down), you have your answer right under the question. Much more
efficient. And for dynamic content, users just edit and adapt their
answer instead of producing an endless thread.
As for ML: I think, there is a similar problem: Find a similar
question/problem and the correct answer can be difficult and include a
lot of reading (of potentially unrelated stuff).
As you can guess, I very much like to concept of Q/A sites for
troubleshooting and supporting the community. We could just migrate to
StackExchange and Co. but I find it weird to host Fedora knowledge on a
non-free system.
Here is my suggestion: Can we find someone that sponsors the development
of an askbot fork, fixing and adapting it to our needs? Let's say Red
Hat Winter of Code - and we find a couple of students that are willing
to fix it?
I don't know how we can control this on social media, though -
on the
FB group, for instance, I've pinned a post requesting people to use
AskFedora for troubleshooting, but we still get questions (and a *lot*
of self promotion/spam). We could have slightly tougher rules without
appearing unfriendly - for instance ban self promoters/spammers (we
aren't doing this yet). For questions, we can politely redirect them to
our established channels.
TLDR: close down ask, ML; add a proper "get help" page to the website
that redirects to either IRC via webchat (live chat) or fedoraforum.
(In my book, end users should not be redirected to wiki pages from such
a nicely designed
getfedora.org website - but our web presence is a
topic for another day). I don't think replacing askbot with another
tool will work either - we'll just have the same issues again.
Re TLDR: keep
askbot alive, it's efficient (for end-users) and different
from all other types of existing forums/MLs/IRCs, and find someone that
patches the major bugs and annoyances.
Cheers,
Florian