Proposing development discussion forums

[Andrew Godwin]

Hi everyone,

This might be slightly controversial, but I would like to propose that we have a forum for discussing Django development (and potentially user support), alongside the mailing list and maybe, eventually replacing it.

My full reasoning is below, but in short, it would be more accessible for new users, have a better UI, give us the ability to moderate away problematic posts, be better for privacy, and still allow email-based interaction.

At DjangoCon AU, the opening keynote was an invited speaker from the Rust community (E. Dunham, https://twitter.com/QEDunham). I invite you to watch the full talk if you are at all interested in how another language handles their community (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW7PxyrCBR0), but the takeaway for me was their use of forums rather than mailing lists.

The Django mailing lists were an excellent choice when Django began, but I feel they have aged out of the modern Web somewhat. The user interface for accessing them is particularly poor, which makes it particularly bad for new contributors.

In addition, when looking at how to organise the effort to help bring async into Django, something more dynamic, and more segmented, than mailing lists would be incredibly useful. I don't want to drown out the list in specific discussions of how to port certain features, but we need to have those discussions somewhere permanent and asynchronous (so not IRC).

The mutability of a forum is also not to be overlooked - as well as allowing things like pinned posts and post edits for small issues (or a living header on a long discussion topic), it also allows for permanent removal of things that break the Code of Conduct. On the people front, it also allows people to post without their email being public, allows for name changes, and provides for someone's right to be forgotten via anonymisation of prior content.

Now, I'm not suggesting we kill the mailing list and switch over or anything like that; instead, I suggest we run an instance of Discourse as a test, and use it as the primary discussion area for async work, as well as anything else that people want to discuss - with the expectation that anything important still goes out to this mailing list.

Why Discourse? Apart from being a mature, open source forum project, it's also very fully featured, and even supports subscribing and interacting with the forum over email, so it can still fit into an email-based workflow. There are also plenty of small niceties, like the option to have it hosted for us via a paid service, or the ability to use GitHub for login rather than requiring a separate username and password. It also helps that Rust seems quite happy with it.

I'm mostly asking for the "temperature of the room" on this one - if we get some small objections, I think a trial period is still worthwhile. If there are major objections, then I'd like to ask people what their alternative suggestions are for solving this sort of communication.

Do I think this would replace the mailing list? Not in the short term, but maybe if it takes off and we all like it better. I personally would interact with django-developers a whole lot more if I could just subscribe to certain topics (rather than trying to emulate that with an email filter as I do now!), and honestly the same thing for django-users. That said, I also recognise that diluting the support/discussion pool is not exactly an attractive idea, which is why I'm asking for input!

Thanks,

Andrew

[אורי‎]

Every Google Group also has an online forum:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/django-developers  

אורי

u...@speedy.net

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[Andrew Godwin]

‪On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 10:16 PM ‫אורי‬‎ <u...@speedy.net> wrote:‬

Every Google Group also has an online forum:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/django-developers

Indeed, I am aware of this, I usually use it when I link threads on Twitter.

However, it is not really a forum in the sense I am describing - one that has categories, editable posts, and the ability to selectively get email for certain categories or threads rather than all-or-nothing. The Groups forum interface is more just an online mailing list interface, with all the problems of the underlying list model.

Andrew

[Markus Holtermann]

Thank you for bringing up the idea, Andrew.

As expressed at PyCon AU, I'd be interested in giving an alternative to a mailing list a shot. Something that supports subscribing to topics sounds like a good idea to overcome the amount of mails one may not be interested in.

Cheers, Markus

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[Carlton Gibson]

I've thought about this sort of thing a few times. My concern has always been that it'd be "just one more channel" when there are already too many to follow: here, django-users, IRC (multiple channels) and so on. 

If we did it under the aegis of the Django (Org/...SF) and we as a group of active folks said that that's where we'd hang out, I think it would work, and would unify those channels. So +1

What does it need from Ops? (Is there a `docker run-my-service`? Could we leverage djangoproject.com (and GitHub) logins, or are they always going to be separate?)

Super. 

Carlton

[Adam Johnson]

I'm up for a forum. I started replying on mailing lists because that's what there is, but it does get pretty messy and single thread driven.

PHPBB anyone? Shame there isn't a mature Django based forum (that I know of).

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Adam

[אורי‎]

It would be funny if the Django developers forum will use phpBB...

אורי

u...@speedy.net

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[Aymeric Augustin]

Hello,

I'm in favor of trying Discourse.

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Aymeric.

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[Fran Hrženjak]

Just skimming this mailing list occasionally, I find pretty comical all those "I think you found the wrong mailing list" replies. Not that there is anything wrong with that, what else can one do? Just imho any new communication channel should have a way of moving messages to a correct place. Maybe near the top of the list of requirements :D

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[gaurav jain]

This sounds good to me, plus this can be a all in one django spot for django developer specially new developer

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[Andrew Godwin]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2019 at 3:30 AM Carlton Gibson <carlton...@gmail.com> wrote:

What does it need from Ops? (Is there a `docker run-my-service`? Could we leverage djangoproject.com (and GitHub) logins, or are they always going to be separate?)

Markus has done more investigation on how to run it, though my impression is that it's relatively easy since he had it up before I'd got off the plane back to the US. Not sure about the djangoproject.com login situation - we need to investigate how flexible the plugin system is, and it might need OpenID on the Django end.

Andrew

[James Bennett]

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but I am a bit skeptical of the long-term archival utility of forums, in large part due to my experience as a moderator of some decent-sized ones. I think making them useful for that purpose is going to require about the same level of manual curation as, say, the wiki on code.djangoproject.com does now.

[Lee Trout]

I’ve moderated a couple small-medium forums (2k-8k) members as well as participated in many online. 

I am in favor of moving to a forum system for a lot of reasons. I’d be curious who would be the community manager(s) (not moderators per se) and if the tone would be similar to the docs and wiki or closer to the IRC channel and a bit relaxed. It is potentially an opportunity to curate a lot of great community information similar to the PyCoders newsletter with advanced tutorials, QA on popular third party libs like storages or getting started with the  cookiecutter layout. 

I agree with James- it will take a moderation team and some manual work to keep it moving smoothly. 

I know PHPBB is the de facto board system but I’ll toss out a hat tip to XenForo.com. It’s in use for Advrider.com and performs very well. 

On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 5:04 AM James Bennett <ubern...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but I am a bit skeptical of the long-term archival utility of forums, in large part due to my experience as a moderator of some decent-sized ones. I think making them useful for that purpose is going to require about the same level of manual curation as, say, the wiki on code.djangoproject.com does now.

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[Andrew Godwin]

I agree James - forums tend to age slightly worse than mailing lists for archival content, but I'm hoping the improved experience in the moment makes up for it.

Plus, our current mailing list archive depends on a service from Google, and I trust those less these days (though I hope Google Groups is probably going to be around for a long time).

Andrew

[Andrew Godwin]

Another point has been raised to me by someone off-list - adding a forum would significantly increase the surface area that the Code of Conduct team have to cover (and potentially become one of the biggest time sinks required), so we need to consider them in any decision.

Andrew

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