[Announcement] Moving to Discourse (Statement of Intent)

[Valentin Churavy]

The Julia community has been growing rapidly over the last few years and discussions are happening at many different places: there are several Google Groups (julia-users, julia-dev, ...), IRC, Gitter, and a few other places. Sometimes packages or organisations also have their own forums and chat rooms.

In the past, Discourse has been brought up as an alternative platform that we could use instead of Google Groups and that would allow us to invite the entire Julia community into one space. 

Changing something established is tricky and so we decided to move slowly on this.

Right now, we are only moving julia-dev to Discourse (see the corresponding post on julia-dev for a timeline).

We would like to solicit feedback from the broader Julia community about moving julia-users to Discourse as well, and potentially other mailing lists like julia-stats.
If you are interested in trying it out, please visit http://discourse.julialang.org.

Discourse is organised by categories so Development is the new home for julia-dev and General would be the future home of julia-users.

If we are happy with Discourse as a solution, we will move forward with the migration. The timetable would be roughly as follows:

• About 4 weeks after the move of julia-dev, decision to be made if we move julia-users
• Announcement on the mailing list, one week before the move.
• Setting julia-users into read-only mode.
• Final announcement.

If you have feedback or comments, please post them at http://discourse.julialang.org/t/migration-of-google-groups-to-discourse or in this thread.

[Robert DJ]

I would love to get away from GG, but I can't seem to find a privacy policy/terms for the new Discourse forum.

Is it the general Discourse privacy policy (https://www.discourse.org/privacy-policy/) that apply?

[Valentin Churavy]

See the about page, https://discourse.julialang.org/about there is a specific section about privacy https://discourse.julialang.org/privacy

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

[Andreas Lobinger]

Hello colleague,

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 2:43:50 PM UTC+1, Valentin Churavy wrote:

The Julia community has been growing rapidly over the last few years and discussions are happening at many different places: there are several Google Groups (julia-users, julia-dev, ...), IRC, Gitter, and a few other places. Sometimes packages or organisations also have their own forums and chat rooms.

In the past, Discourse has been brought up as an alternative platform that we could use instead of Google Groups and that would allow us to invite the entire Julia community into one space.

What problem with the julia-users mailing-list and the google groups web interface is solved by using discourse?
Why do you think (can you prove?) more centralisation will happen with discourse?
 

We would like to solicit feedback from the broader Julia community about moving julia-users to Discourse as well, and potentially other mailing lists like julia-stats.

Please define 'We'.

If you have feedback or comments, please post them at http://discourse.julialang.org/t/migration-of-google-groups-to-discourse or in this thread.

In some parts of the world, asking for feedback on a topic via a different medium is seen as unfriendly act ... but still there is this thread.

Wishing a happy day,
         Andreas

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 06 novembre 2016 à 01:49 -0800, Andreas Lobinger a écrit :
> Hello colleague,

>
> > The Julia community has been growing rapidly over the last few
> > years and discussions are happening at many different places: there
> > are several Google Groups (julia-users, julia-dev, ...), IRC,
> > Gitter, and a few other places. Sometimes packages or organisations
> > also have their own forums and chat rooms.
> >
> > In the past, Discourse has been brought up as an alternative
> > platform that we could use instead of Google Groups and that would
> > allow us to invite the entire Julia community into one space.
> >
>
> What problem with the julia-users mailing-list and the google groups
> web interface is solved by using discourse?

You can have a look at the previous thread about this:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/4oDqW-QxyVA/lw71uqNGBQAJ

I also encourage you to give a try to Discourse (this can be done
without even creating an account on their test instance).

> Why do you think (can you prove?) more centralisation will happen
> with discourse?

Centralization will be made possible by allowing for sub-forums
dedicated to each topic (stats, optimization, data...) inside Discourse
itself, instead of creating totally separate mailing lists as is
currently done. Of course people will still be free to use something
else, but that's quite unlikely.

> > We would like to solicit feedback from the broader Julia community
> > about moving julia-users to Discourse as well, and potentially
> > other mailing lists like julia-stats.
> >
>
> Please define 'We'. 

"We" meant "Julia core developers".

> > If you have feedback or comments, please post them
> > at http://discourse.julialang.org/t/migration-of-google-groups-to-
> > discourse or in this thread.
> >
>
> In some parts of the world, asking for feedback on a topic via a
> different medium is seen as unfriendly act ... but still there is
> this thread.

The idea was that we would like to see how well it works by having
people use Discourse for this discussion. But as you noted there's this
thread for people who don't want to to that.


Regards

[Simon Byrne]

Personally, I find the following an improvement over google groups:

- code blocks (copying and pasting code into the google groups interface always tends to look bad)

- the ability to edit posts

- the ability to move threads to different categories (i.e. posts to julia-dev which should have gone to julia-users, etc)

[Stefan Karpinski]

- Selectively subscribe to certain topics/categories of discussion and not others.

- Selectively see threads that reach certain quality/interest thresholds.

- Take links directly from where one reads messages

    (I really dislike the Google groups interface, so I use Gmail for reading messages, but then getting a link to a post is a real pain; the Discourse interface is much better).

- Real tools for moderation, management and administration.

- Active, open development

    Google Groups is not only proprietary, but it's also effectively abandonware.

[Tom Breloff]

+1... can we move already?  Discourse is a huge improvement.  I specifically don't answer some questions here because of the difficulty in writing answers with code.

[Valentin Churavy]

`julia-dev` has now moved to discourse. 

One possibility would be to start forwarding posts for `julia-users` from Google Groups to Discourse, but that is a one way street. So before I enable that I would like to hear what everybody thinks about it.

[Patrick Kofod Mogensen]

My take: make the move or don't.

Stuff like forwarding posts only creates confusion, and people start answering things that aren't seen by the person asking, because of the one-way-street-thing.

[Jeffrey Sarnoff]

+1 move ["don't think twice, its alright" -- Bob Dylan]

[Uwe Fechner]

If you move to discourse, the links on the Julia homepage in the section "Community->Mailing Lists" should be updated. This did not happen for Julia-Dev.

Uwe

On Tuesday, November 1, 2016 at 2:43:50 PM UTC+1, Valentin Churavy wrote: