New Q&A Site to Ask Puppet Questions

[Dawn Foster]

Today, we are launching the beta version of a new question and answer
site where you can ask any Puppet questions or provide answers for
questions from other Puppet users and developers.

The idea is to give you another way to ask questions if you aren’t a
fan of mailing lists or IRC. It’s similar to a forum, but is more like
Stack Overflow. You can get a good feel for the type of questions
people are asking by visiting the Ask site now:
https://ask.puppetlabs.com.

With the focus on asking questions, it is a little harder for people
to digress into endless debates. However, the main benefit is that
great answers and knowledge live on, and it gives us a better place to
point people for good answers than mailing list archives. Because this
Q&A site lives on puppetlabs.com, you can easily do a google search
with site:puppetlabs.com along with your query to find answers to
questions along with relevant documentation and other information all
in the same location.

We are still working through a few last bugs, and I expect that you
will find a few bugs, too. We have a project in the bug tracker where
you can see existing bugs, file new bugs or suggest improvements:
https://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/ask/issues

Visit ask.puppetlabs.com to get started.

Please ask your questions, answer some existing questions, file bugs
to let us know what isn’t working, and be patient while we fix your
bugs :)

If you have any questions or concerns about the new Q&A site for
Puppet, please let me know.

Thanks,
Dawn

[Jeff McCune]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Dawn Foster <da...@puppetlabs.com> wrote:

Today, we are launching the beta version of a new question and answer
site where you can ask any Puppet questions or provide answers for
questions from other Puppet users and developers.

I bet nobody has a question that can stump the entire community.  =)  I also can't avoid playing the karma point game, so please try and post your trickier questions.

-Jeff 

[Peter Brown]

Any chance of using my existing puppet forge account to sign in to that site?

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[Dawn Foster]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Peter Brown <rendh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any chance of using my existing puppet forge account to sign in to that
> site?

Unfortunately, not yet. I'm planning to get the user accounts integrated between
Forge, Ask, bug tracker and other puppet stuff sometime next year along with
better profiles for community members so that you can find each other's posts,
modules and other stuff more easily.

Dawn

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[Peter Brown]

On 18 December 2012 14:11, Dawn Foster <da...@puppetlabs.com> wrote:

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Peter Brown <rendh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any chance of using my existing puppet forge account to sign in to that
> site?

Unfortunately, not yet. I'm planning to get the user accounts integrated between
Forge, Ask, bug tracker and other puppet stuff sometime next year along with
better profiles for community members so that you can find each other's posts,
modules and other stuff more easily.

Awesome.

Single sign on can be tricky to setup but fun in the long run. I would be recommending using something like openauth or some kind of authentication server like FreeIPA.

Or you could cheat and nail all the services to an external "provider" like twitter, google oe FB which you are doing on the ask site so my guess is you have thought of that already. :)

That's a big job. I would offer my help but I am sure you have a bunch of people you can call on. :)

Good luck!

[jcbollinger]

On Monday, December 17, 2012 4:13:40 PM UTC-6, Dawn Foster wrote:

Today, we are launching the beta version of a new question and answer
site where you can ask any Puppet questions or provide answers for
questions from other Puppet users and developers.

The idea is to give you another way to ask questions if you aren’t a
fan of mailing lists or IRC. It’s similar to a forum, but is more like
Stack Overflow. You can get a good feel for the type of questions
people are asking by visiting the Ask site now:
https://ask.puppetlabs.com.

I hope the new help channel is successful.

 

With the focus on asking questions, it is a little harder for people
to digress into endless debates. However, the main benefit is that
great answers and knowledge live on, and it gives us a better place to
point people for good answers than mailing list archives. Because this
Q&A site lives on puppetlabs.com, you can easily do a google search
with site:puppetlabs.com along with your query to find answers to
questions along with relevant documentation and other information all
in the same location.

At the same time, a Google group such as this one is also similar to a forum if you access it via the web interface, and there is already a community coalesced here.  The majority of new threads here are questions, and as far as I know, the group's archives are preserved indefinitely.  Although we do have debates from time to time, that seems a small proportion of the traffic.  And although the group is hosted at Google, it's controlled by PL staff.  Plus, I can get the group delivered to my mailbox if that's the way I want it.

So I guess I'm saying I don't really understand what makes ask.puppetlabs.com different, or why it makes sense to establish another PL-controlled, community-based assistance resource.  Or, indeed, why I should be interested in answering questions over there when I already do that here.

I do hope the project is successful, as I said, and I apologize for being a wet blanket.


John

[Dawn Foster]

No problem at all. Many of us who have been using mailing lists
forever are perfectly comfortable with them. I like mailing lists,
since I can filter things coming in and quickly scan through them to
find the important things that I want to respond to.

There are others who really don't like email, are intimidated by it,
or who just want something different. Many of those people would
prefer to use something else. Unfortunately, the Google Groups web
interface isn't a great choice, either. It's more forum like, but can
be painful to use.

The idea is that the people who like the mailing lists will continue
to ask and answer questions here. The mailing lists will never go away
- in my opinion, they are the basis for most technical communities,
especially open source communities.

The Ask Q&A site just gives those people who prefer something more
like stack overflow (with voting and other interactivity) also have a
place where they can feel more comfortable asking questions.

On the one hand, I hate fragmenting the community by introducing yet
another site, but I also want everyone to feel comfortable asking and
answering questions. Hopefully, the Ask Q&A site will be a place where
people can also get great answers to questions.

Dawn

[Khoury Brazil]

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Dawn Foster <da...@puppetlabs.com> wrote:

The Ask Q&A site just gives those people who prefer something more
like stack overflow (with voting and other interactivity) also have a
place where they can feel more comfortable asking questions.

Dawn

 

It also incentivizes answering questions with a reward system that can be more appealing to some folks who might otherwise refrain from contributing. I'm pretty excited about this since I often feel uncomfortable asking questions on the mailing list that I think are stupid but would have been fine asking them on a site like ask.puppetlabs.com.

---

Khoury