Migrating from the elixir-lang-talk mailing list to Elixir Forum

[José Valim]

TL;DR - Give Elixir Forum a try.

Hello everyone,

The elixir-lang-talk mailing list was set up during the language early days. The community has grown since then and we believe the elixir-lang-talk mailing list has reached its limits in terms of effective communication. It doesn't provide a way to categorize contents, its search is limited, the lack of tools for maintenance makes it hard for us to manage it, etc.

At the same time, many of you reached out to us and recommended Discourse. Numerous languages and frameworks use Discourse to power their forums. Fortunately, AstonJ has been running for the last couple months a Discourse-based forum for Elixir at http://elixirforum.com

I would like to encourage you all to give Elixir Forum a try. Elixir Forum was created for the community and the plan is to move away from this mailing list. For those who still prefer the mailing-list style of communication and delivery, the forum can also be used as a mailing list so there should be no loss in terms of functionality.

We look forward to seeing you there and hearing your feedback!

PS1: The elixir-talk-core mailing list won't be moved to Elixir Forum and it will continue restricted to Elixir language development discussions. We are studying other options for those.

PS2: The old threads here won't be moved to the forum. elixir-lang-talk will remain open for a while but we recommend new threads to be posted on the forum.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

[Chris McGrath]

I appreciate why you’re doing this but as I’ve never been a fan of Discourse I’m sorry to hear this.

I’ll give http://elixirforum.com/t/how-to-use-this-forum-as-a-mailing-list/90 a go and see how well it works.

Chris

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[Michał Muskała]

What about ecto and phoenix lists? Are they staying on Google groups
or moving to the forum as well?

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/elixir-lang-talk/3D788722-A27F-4D7C-AE25-238CFB0D9CB4%40chrismcg.com.

[Hassan Schroeder]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 5:49 AM, José Valim
<jose....@plataformatec.com.br> wrote:
> TL;DR - Give Elixir Forum a try.

TL;DR - I have, for several weeks, and I'm still strongly -1 on this.

1. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Forum is high - the mods seemingly
encourage OT nonsense like "What are you watching on TV". Yes,
you can opt out of "topics", but it's still noise. Only one example.

2. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Discourse-as-mailing-list option is
also high - very poor UX (e.g. I really don't need to see the author's
avi along with the original poster's on *every email*, and again only
one example).

I could go on, but I'll just leave it at: this doesn't feel like a step forward.

--
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.s...@gmail.com
http://about.me/hassanschroeder
twitter: @hassan
Consulting Availability : Silicon Valley or remote

[José Valim]

What about ecto and phoenix lists? Are they staying on Google groups
or moving to the forum as well?

Those are specific to each project and they should decide what makes most sense for them apart from this discussion.

[José Valim]

1. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Forum is high - the mods seemingly
    encourage OT nonsense like "What are you watching on TV". Yes,
    you can opt out of "topics", but it's still noise. Only one example.

2. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Discourse-as-mailing-list option is
    also high - very poor UX (e.g. I really don't need to see the author's
    avi along with the original poster's on *every email*, and again only
    one example) 

Thanks Hassan.  Please bring up those points so we can effectively discuss them. Maybe those topics could be acted on, for example, by making the OT categories opt-in and by improving the e-mail. If you are not comfortable with discussing them here, feel free to ping me and/or Aston privately.

[Jim Menard]

I strongly agree with Hassan. I'm not sure if you're asking him to
copy those discussion points to the Forum or discuss them here,
though.

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[Alexei Sholik]

1. The noise-to-signal ratio of the Forum is high - the mods seemingly
    encourage OT nonsense like "What are you watching on TV". Yes,
    you can opt out of "topics", but it's still noise. Only one example.

You can also opt-out of whole categories. As long as non-technical discussions are kept in specific categories and all other discussions are put into categories that make sense for them, it should be quite straightforward to preemptively opt out of seeing topics that you're not interested in.

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[Chris McCord]

I was originally against a web-forum, but I've since come around to the idea and I think it will be a great asset for the community. As we grow, we need to be proactive about best serving support/discussions/announcements and it has been clear to me that the elixir-lang-talk ML was outgrowing its usefulness. One thing I ask is folks give the forum a chance and work with the moderators to tailor the forum into the kind of place the community wants to be a part of. Constructive criticism goes a long way so let's make this a great place for ML-lovers and forum-lovers alike :)

–Chris

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[Robert Virding]

How will this relate the Elixir slack team?

Robert

[José Valim]

Elixir Slack and Elixir IRC won't be affected by this change. :)

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

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[Robert Virding]

That I understood. :-) I was thinking more along the lines of there will now be 4 places to go to follow elixir discussions and keep up with what is going on. Plus stackoverflow as well. That's pushing my limits. :-)

Robert

[José Valim]

I understand your question now, thanks Robert. Let me try to clarify how we envision all of those places working together.

Some may have noticed we did not refer to Elixir Forum as "the official" Elixir Forum because we don't intend it to be one. As Elixir Slack, Elixir School and others, the Elixir Forum is one of many places created by the community and supported by the community.

That said, the official mediums are:

* #elixir-lang on IRC

* Github repository

* The elixir-lang-talk and elixir-lang-core mailing list

Language development discussions happen mostly on elixir-lang-core and naturally on GitHub once they are past the proposal stage. Interactions in the official mediums are under our Code of Conduct. Discussions also happen on #elixir-lang but they are ad-hoc.

There are also mediums managed by the community which we recommend to adopt the same or similar Code of Conduct as Elixir's, for example, Elixir Slack and Elixir Forum.

And there are other places, like Stack Overflow, which are not managed directly by the community but many members of the community are active on.

I believe that, as more community-driven initiatives show up, there will be even more places to go to follow Elixir discussions. Naturally, some members will focus on some, others will focus on others.

I certainly understand it is beyond anyone's limit. Specially in your case Robert, since everyone appreciates and would love to have your contributions. My feedback would be for you to pick your favorite places and stick to them. :)

I hope this helps?

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

[Robert Virding]

Yes, thanks José that helps. I now know better where to look. I have already found that the #elixir-lang IRC generally has way too much traffic for me to follow unless I am explicitly mentioned. :-)

It is a typical issue you get in a growing community. Whether it is a problem or not very much depends on the quality of the various fora. In the worst case people going to the wrong forum will get bad or faulty answers to their questions. Unfortunately I don't think their is really any solution except to push for the good ones.

Anyway thanks for your reply.

Robert

[Jorg Heymans]

Hi,

For me mailinglists / newsgroups / forums are effective when they are able to disperse information in a dense way with little distraction, allowing me to quickly skim over a thread to assert if its worth reading or if it applies to a particular problem i am trying to solve. In the new forum the discussion threads are displayed with a very low signal-to-noise ratio. As an (extreme i admit) example, have a look at an annotated screencap of this thread where 3 lines of useful information (in green) fill my entire screen: http://imgur.com/693igQv. It makes it a tiring experience of scrolling and lots of eye movement to grok a thread. But i could probably get used to it. Looking in my profile preferences i did not see any settings i could tweak to improve this.

On the other hand, discussions are more easily to follow because previous posts are not automatically quoted in a reply, so there's that.

Overall it feels very facebooky to me, i understand this is where today's coders feel good hanging out so we'll just have to follow suit :-)

 Jorg

[José Valim]

Hi Jorg, thanks for the feedback.

We will continue gathering and sending those to the Elixir Forum and see how they can further improve the forum experience.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

[José Valim]

Hello everyone,

We did a very quick analysis of how developers are using the elixir-lang-talk mailing list and we retrieved the following numbers (roughly):

> We have about 2400 users and 1600 of them do not receive any notification by e-mail. Of the rest, half receives an abridged or digested version and the other half receives a notification for every message.

Given many users prefer to receive a digest, I would like to point out this option is also available on Elixir Forum. In your control panel, you will find:

> When I don't visit here, send an email digest of what's new:

And the options are, every 30 mins, hourly, daily, every three days, weekly, every two weeks. The default is set to weekly.

I hope this information is helpful for those who wish to still receive a digested version. We will find ways to make this information more prominent on the forum as well.

Thank you,

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

[Alexander]

Still, information density ruins whole impression

http://i.imgur.com/hSjUO5a.png

Two (2) (TWO) lines of useful information per page. 

[Theron Boerner]

I agree on the issue of density. The default discourse theme is far nicer than the one ElixirForum has. Could we go back to that but with minor color changes?

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[eksperimental]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2016 18:21:50 +0200
José Valim <jose....@plataformatec.com.br> wrote:

> That said, the official mediums are:
>
> * #elixir-lang on IRC
> * Github repository
> * The elixir-lang-talk and elixir-lang-core mailing list

Does this mean that the mailing list will still be available as a way
of communicating?

Personally I think the forum contains way too much information, in the
form of messages and categories, but at least all the posts that would
fit in what it is sent nowadays to the mailing list mostly fits in the
Elixir Questions category (and to a lesser extent
announcements and ideas to foster the growth of the community)

While the forum can be promoted as main medium of communication,
I think it won't hurt to keep this list as last redoubt ;-P

[Aston J]

Hi everyone,

Firstly thank you all for your feedback. José has been pinging me every time a new post has been made here and we have been discussing and reviewing things. We have already made several changes to the forum resulting from your feedback and we will of course continue to evaluate and review everything over the coming weeks and months.

With regards to the quantity of posts. It is expected that a forum will have a higher turnover of posts than a mailing list and that the culture will be slightly less 'strict'. There are of course pros and cons to this (one is perhaps more suited to the needs of a growing community, the other to an already established one), and so to make things easier for those of you who prefer a more mailing-list like experience we have come up with several options:

1 - You don't have to subscribe to the whole forum, you can pick and choose the sections that interest you most. You can even mute individual threads if they no longer interest you. Together the Elixir Questions and Elixir News sections probably most closely resemble what you have here on ELT.

2 - You can set your options to have the forum send you a digest in your absence. This can be set to hourly, daily, every three days, weekly or even every two weeks. The default setting is weekly.

3 - If you would prefer not to be alerted to every new post (even to posts in sections that interest you) you can follow our Twitter account which tweets a link to every new publicly-visible thread. If you're not on Twitter and would really like something like this that alerts you via email, option 2 above is worth a look and if you find that that is still not to your taste, we can consider creating a series of threads which users can 'watch', and then have the forum automatically post a link to every new thread in them - in other words, you'll receive an email notifying you of every new thread.

Hopefully these options will be adequate for most people's needs, but if not, we can continue exploring.

On to the second point of the forum design.

Firstly I'd like to assure you that a lot of care and thought has gone into the design - even if it may not be immediately apparent. We have been running forums for over a decade now (some, the biggest in their sector) and we have gone through a number of iterations and styles in that time. We have settled on the post style you see on the forum for some very good reasons.

1. Posts are deliberately self-contained and spaced in the way that they are because it helps to give a better sense of user ownership over their posts. This also stops what you post being lost in a wall of text. There are of course other design principles at play too, such as of being uncluttered, clean, with a clear hierarchy of information, and as well as consideration to responsive layouts etc. 

2. The forum utilises an optimum reading width. Our brains quickly get fatigued reading wide columns of text. This is why the text doesn't span the entire width of the window.

3. The forum is designed to minimise fatiguing. This is due to the open and spacious design, the clear self-contained representation of individual posts, attention to how different forum elements work together (and contrast) and so on. Irrespective of the amount of information presented, the forum should remain very comfortable to read over long periods of time. 

All of the above helps to promote user engagement, quality posts and site stickiness. Of course there is more involved than the above, but this is a bit of the reasoning behind some of the design choices made and to highlight that the purpose of a forum isn't just to display information, it is to do that in addition to making it easy to absorb, to promote care and consideration and to entice people to come back, and keep coming back.

With that said, we have actually tweaked the design following some of your feedback. We tightened up the spacing between post text and post controls. We also removed a little space from the post separators, and a bit more from above the thread title (something that shouldn't have been there in the first place and I imagine something that crept in on updating the forum at some point!)

I would be very grateful if you could give the forum a try and if you still feel the same way in a fortnight or so, let us know in the feedback thread that we are going to post around about then. I am hoping that you will see the benefits and come around to our way of thinking :-)

[Aston J]

Just a very quick update to say that we are currently running a poll on post spacing - if this important to you please drop by and place your vote: 

http://elixirforum.com/t/which-post-style-do-you-prefer/411

(You need to be logged in to see the Feedback section)

Thanks!