Alternative to Google Groups suggestion

[Arlen Beiler]

I was about to forward this to Jeremy and then remembered that last time I emailed him directly he gave me his thoughts and then said I should post it on the group so we can hear everyone's thoughts. I'm pretty sure he would say that this time too. So here it is.

Another software community much like TiddlyWiki has been using Yahoo Groups for years. Just a few weeks ago they finally moved to groups.io. This is the email announcing that move and listing the reasons and benefits. Perhaps it has what we need. I thought the hashtag feature was especially interesting. 

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: rde...@dc3.com [ASCOM-Talk] <ASCOM...@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 29, 2018, 06:42
Subject: [ASCOM] ALERT: ASCOM-Talk is Moving. Please Read This
To: <ASCOM...@yahoogroups.com>

 

Greetings ASCOM-Talk members --

With 2018 being the 20th Anniversary year of the ASCOM Initiative, it is time we moved away from the outdated Yahoo! Groups system and onto a much more modern and functional forum system. Also, along with this improvement, we are offering separate discussion areas to our two primary groups: Platform users and ASCOM application / driver developers.

Why are we doing this?

• Yahoo! has started injecting commercial advertisements into the message list
  
• Posting with inline images is klunky and sometimes only email subscribers can post or see them
  
• Attachments are not saved with messages, forcing us to use the "Files" system which has become clogged with what is now mostly trash.
  
• You cannot make corrections to a post once it is out there
  
• People complain of lost messages
  
• Conversations are hard to follow in many cases
• Searching is severely limited

The ASCOM Talk moderators took a look at the many newer and more powerful systems out there and we have chosen Groups.io as our new platform. Here are some of the reasons we picked Groups.io:

• It supports email-based participation like Yahoo. We considered this a 100% essential requirement. Only a few of the forums out there can even do it and Groups.io does a great job.
  
• The site itself, and its discussion interface is simple, clean, and minimalistic. I personally found Yahoo! Groups difficult to use and non-intuitive, perhaps because it is an afterthought interface on an old-fashioned 'listserv' mailer.
  
• Only an email address is required to join, no frustrating and confusing requirement for a Yahoo! login and forced yahoo.com email etc.
  
• We can integrate with GitHub, the Open Source repository used by the ASCOM Platform. This feature has made Groups.io very popular with Open Source projects.
  
• It supports hashtags for enhanced searching, a vast improvement over Yahoo.
  
• You can elect to receive only the messages you want: Mute threads and hashtags. THIS IS HUGE! From time to time we all see giant threads discussing something we are not interested in and that, as email subscribers, clog up our email box. You will be able to mute these at the source in the new system. 
  
• Separate Help and Developer forums will also reduce the noise for each of those groups. Most importantly, new users with Platform problems won't need to be exposed to obscure-looking programming discussions when all they want is help with their installation or usage.
  
• You can post new threads and replies with Rich Text/HTML, Markdown, or plain text. Their editing interface is excellent.
  
• You can also edit already-posted messages. How many times have you wished you could go back and fix errors in your posts?
  
• Other modern-day conveniences are provided like a Group Wiki, Calendar, Database, Chat service, and a Photos library.
  
• We can migrate existing users from Yahoo, eliminating the need to make people re-subscribe.
  

A number of busy astronomy groups including several LX200 groups, Losmandy, Gemini, MI-250, and Mallincam have already moved from Yahoo! to Groups.io. ASCOM is using the paid groups.io service and we have contributors who will fund this, so you can be assured of not seeing adverts in the future should groups.io decide to enhance its revenue stream on the free version of its service.

What will happen?

Shortly, we will initiate the groups.io automatic migration process and our request will be added to their migration queue. When complete, all of the historic ASCOM-Talk messages and our current user base will have been migrated and we will close the Yahoo forum.  You will receive notification and welcome emails when the transfer has been completed, in the meantime, please continue to use the Yahoo forum as normal.

There is currently high demand for the migration service and it may take some days or weeks before the migration is effected.

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[TonyM]

Very interesting, we must look at it, but honestly it sounds like yahoo groups is crap compaired to google groups, but yes we deserve better than GG

Thanks for sharing, I will have a look.

Tony

[PMario]

Hi Arlen,

Looks interesting. .. The main problem I see is the 1GByte space for the free product.

10GB are 10$/Month and

1TB are 200$/Month.

see: https://groups.io/static/pricing

----------

If I'm reading it right.

The second problem is: It can't import the GG archives. see: https://groups.io/static/googletransfer ... Notes at the end of the page.

-mario

[Mark S.]

At the meta level, who are these people and how do we know they'll be here in say, 3 years? Is there a list of groups they're already hosting? Or a way to review them? Seems like you would want to know how the service has been working for actual groups at size.

-- Mark

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Arlen Beiler wondered ...

Another software community much like TiddlyWiki has been using Yahoo Groups for years. Just a few weeks ago they finally moved to groups.io...

 

Perhaps it has what we need. I thought the hashtag feature was especially interesting.

Ciao Arlen

Very interesting. I have a few comments after looking at a few groups it serves.

Upsides...

• They seem to take seriously the fundamental issue of transitioning very large user groups ... https://groups.io/static/googletransfer
  
• It could be an "evolution" in that its in some ways similar to GG (integrating both fora and email), rather than a complete break in method that other routes could involve. I think that is good for continuity.
  
• Whether, in practice, the transition could work out that well I'd need know more. I couldn't get fully clear on that from what I was able to look at.
  
• It has a degree of integration with other systems (e.g. "Github - Post to your group whenever code is committed to a repository.")
• Sections for files; chatrooms; subgroups, a wiki etc.
  

Downsides...

• Unlike for Yahoo, for GG it would not be able to transfer the existing archives. That's a real downside for a route based on transitioning. (They write... "NOTE: Due to a bug in Google Groups, we are unable to transfer the archives for your group.")
  

Things to know more clearly...

• What would the longer-term costs potentially be? https://groups.io/static/pricing
  
• What kind of sense can one make of its potential longevity, stability and reliability? And what are existing users experiences of it?

Caveat: Maybe with a bit of thought GG better might achieve near the same?...

Arlen: I thought the hashtag feature was especially interesting.

• I'm not sure that folk in our GG group realise that Google does support a basic (if somewhat crude) tagging system already; as well as a category system. https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2645570?hl=en
  
• The issue is someone needs to maintain it for it to be viable. That implies a, or a few, moderators to develop & maintain it. That issue would apply in a transitioned system too.
  
• PS: I'm unclear if or how GG tagging could or would work for email posters.

Overall my sense is its interesting and deserves a closer look at the details and how they work in practice.

Just initial thoughts

Josiah

[Mark S.]

On Friday, October 12, 2018 at 3:52:05 AM UTC-7, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

• Unlike for Yahoo, for GG it would not be able to transfer the existing archives. That's a real downside for a route based on transitioning. (They write... "NOTE: Due to a bug in Google Groups, we are unable to transfer the archives for your group.")
  

Not that big of a deal since GG would still be there and the problem with GG is the difficulty of finding things in the archives anyway.

What kind of sense can one make of its potential longevity, stability and reliability? And what are existing users experiences of it?

Exactly. Never heard of this entity before this week. Reliability and branding do have some relevance.

Then again, I'd say there's a 40% chance that GG will disappear in the next 5 years.

 

Caveat: Maybe with a bit of thought GG better might achieve near the same?...

Worth investigating.

-- Mark

 

[Arlen Beiler]

I think the fact that a lot of groups are moving to it is partly an indication that it will stay around for a while.

As far as the pricing, I thought that was just for attachments, but that is a valid concern. Google Groups is free, but Google just announced they are going to close Google Plus, so I don't know what will happen with Google Groups. I'm actually surprised Google Groups is still around. I guess there is always Yammer and Reddit.

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[Mohammad]

Alternative solution

Question2Answer is a free and open source platform for Q&A sites

I think there is an alternative solution. It is to have a dedicated platform for question and answer!

One solution is to use the free platform Question2Answer (https://www.question2answer.org/) and 

setup it on tiddlywiki.com  with an address like qa.tiddliwiki.com or forum.tiddlywiki.com

It will be under the control of domain admin (like Jeremy or other admins) and have many features requested here!

Easy to setup, choose the best answer, rank answer (+/-), rank responders , spam control, setup categories like basics, plugins, developers, ...Supports theme and different languages

No worry about closing Google group, no extra cost (or little extra), backup and archive previous q&a and many more!

The Question2Answer Bot has found 22,626 Q2A sites in 40 languages, showing a total of 17,016,019 questions and 13,445,683 users. 87 sites were added in the past month. The list below shows a selection of 19 Q2A sites with at least 10,000 questions.

https://www.question2answer.org/sites.php

Cheers

Mohammad

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Arlen Beiler wrote:

Google Groups is free, but Google just announced they are going to close Google Plus, so I don't know what will happen with Google Groups. I'm actually surprised Google Groups is still around.

Since Google is a private company its always possible. BUT I think its highly unlikely for reasons I explained here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/xpDmaA5X_5E/ztg3TrhXBgAJ. GG is at an entirely different scale than Google Plus. It is truly vast.

My general impression is Google feels obligated to it (because of the history of how it took over several other services that, essentially, previously formed a public domain). Obligated, but doing as little as possible to make it easier to use as they can't profit from it.

I guess there IS a question mark. But then, if so, that question mark would be upon everything.
I'm not ready to go to that place yet.

Just thoughts
Josiah

[ILYA]

It might be crazy idea but would it be possible to use tiddlywiki itself.

When email is received the script would create a new tiddler.

Are the any plugins which implement a forum like solution for tw5?

If it doesn't exist how hard it would be to create? It could be useful in other contexts as well. For example my team often have a need to discuss some feature. Multiple proposals can be submitted and discussed at the same time. We tried lots of things and couldn't find a good solution:
- forums - doesn't support nested levels
- issue tracker (one big issue) - conversations are interleaved
- issue tracker (an issue per proposal) - it is hard to see the current status of the threads
- slack service topics - doesn't persist conversations

Ideal solution would be to see hierarchy of discussions on each topic with number of messages (total/day/week) in each subtopic. By clicking on subtopic title it would unfolds in place.

Best regards,
ILYA

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Lost Admin]

You mean this? https://www.reddit.com/r/tiddlywiki

I don't know who created it.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

ILYA wrote:

It might be crazy idea but would it be possible to use tiddlywiki itself.

Its getting closer. Jeremy recently commented something like "we should eat our own dogfood".

I'm not sure about the list being on TW but meaningful Indices to it, Example Materials, Plugin "fetching", Peer-to-Peer interaction on specific topics is looking much more possible.

Mostly the issue is to get to the point its working well first. The connundrum is you can't experiment your way to this using the actual group. We need proven ongoing reliability first for any alternate central means of communication.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Mark S.]

On Friday, October 12, 2018 at 8:27:18 AM UTC-7, @TiddlyTweeter wrote:

My general impression is Google feels obligated to it (because of the history of how it took over several other services that, essentially, previously formed a public domain). Obligated, but doing as little as possible to make it easier to use as they can't profit from it.

That's what everyone thought about G. news feed. They drove competitors out of business with their superior offerings. Then they dropped it. News feed services are very light compared to forums.

G. spent millions on Sketchup. Had a Sketchup "Evangelist". Books were written. Lot's of excitement. Sold it overnight to a company that makes fishing equipment.

There's something like 40 or more projects in the Guugle graveyard. Except for search, I don't think the G is really committed to anything.

-- Mark

[Jed Carty]

ILYA,

I have Bob set up to be multi-user and it would be simple enough to create a system that can receive email and then make a tiddler out of it to be either directly added or checked by moderators and then added. As part of TWederation we made a discussion forum in tiddlywiki which we could extend to work with the newer version of Bob.

The problem is that we had 5 or 6 active people working with TWederation and only two or there doing development and for Bob no one else has made a public server so testing and developing the inter-server components hasn't been possible.

One big thing that I want to stress in all of this is we shouldn't go from google groups to a solution that is only better than google groups, because of the effort involved in the transition we should make sure that we have a good option before moving, not just an ok option.

[@TiddlyTweeter]

I fear you are right.

For me dropping GG (with its very significant, deep web history [I was a tiny part of, I guess]) would tell me NOTHING now can last.

The implication being: whatever: you now need adaptable solutions that can migrate more easily as it all private companies & we subject to fiat.

I'm still not quite there yet though.

Philosophically yours
Josiah

[Arlen Beiler]

If we are going to do that, we should really just dust off stackoverflow.com. Most of the wikitext and javascript related questions could easily be moved there. More community-related questions such as suggestions and philosophical think-tank type discussions would continue to happen here. So would plugin and software announcements. Plus they have a really good chat room setup that works very well for this type of thing. If comments start getting into a discussion, the system suggests moving the whole conversation to a dedicated chat room, which is very nice. There are also some simple things that can be done with the tags. 

Then I think we should open the Github wiki for anyone to contribute to, assuming of course that it has a revision history so we can rollback malicious or mistaken edits.  I don't think we have to worry much about spam. On the other hand, we should really be using Wikibooks or any one of the other publicly available services besides GitHub to compile information. 

Wikibooks is actually really good for that type of thing and has several software communities on it already. The nice thing about Wikibooks is that because the Mediawiki software it runs on is so popular, we can easily export it to other formats and do a ton of other stuff with it. But it doesn't have to be Wikibooks. There are plenty of places that support Markdown as well as other formats. And it wouldn't actually be that hard to modify TiddlyWiki to be a single-page app that displays one page at a time or load tiddlers directly from the server in a sort of static format but which could also be edited directly and saved back to the server like MediaWiki. It would even be possible for MediaWiki to be the backend and TiddlyWiki to be the frontend. But better to have TiddlyWiki on the backend serving static pages and just add a couple tweaks to allow for the massive multiuser headache that is created when you try to mimic Wikipedia. 

Just my thoughts at 2 AM. 

Arlen

On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 11:10 PM Mohammad <mohammad...@gmail.com> wrote:

Alternative solution

Question2Answer is a free and open source platform for Q&A sites

I think there is an alternative solution. It is to have a dedicated platform for question and answer!

One solution is to use the free platform Question2Answer (https://www.question2answer.org/) and 

setup it on tiddlywiki.com  with an address like qa.tiddliwiki.com or forum.tiddlywiki.com

It will be under the control of domain admin (like Jeremy or other admins) and have many features requested here!

Easy to setup, choose the best answer, rank answer (+/-), rank responders , spam control, setup categories like basics, plugins, developers, ...

Take a look and 

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[@TiddlyTweeter]

Mohammad: The Q & A idea is okay. Problem is that GG activists are small in number & some of us are not Q & A people. For instance, I occasionally like to make jokes or write rambling investigations which sometimes turn out to be worth doing even though they are no way Q & A. If it cuts my expression down I don't want to do it as a main thing. Strict Q & A is out for me.

Arlen: I think stackoverflow.com was a great idea as a supplementary system to GG. I think the main problem was/is their very particular rules on meeting targets. The TW GG group is exceptionally high quality even on very low numbers of participants. Stackoverflow has NO concept of enthusiasm. So once you try to get into it it feels like a series of meaningless hurdles to get over that WE are already over. I do think the final quality is good. But IMO it can only be, at best, a sub-sector to support TW. TBH, we NEED more people (activists) to even begin to make something of places like stackoverflow.

Best wishes
Josiah

Arlen Beiler wrote:

If we are going to do that, we should really just dust off stackoverflow.com. Most of the wikitext and javascript related questions could easily be moved there.

[Arlen Beiler]

I actually mean the stackoverflow.com site itself. That site is much easier to get into and many software libraries use it as their main support channel.

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