Google Groups is a somewhat UNWIELDY instrument ....

[Josiah]

Ciao all

After much sweat and endless toying I figured out how to look back over posts here in a way i could finally find relevant stuff. Sometimes they are gold. Often mush unless you have the time to wade through entire threads.

What DOES stand out is that with ...

1. decent tagging of OPTIMAL answers
   
2. more cross-linking to relevant resources
   
3. a bit more thought by (informed) contributors that discussions could really helpfully add to documentation, possibly create it ...
   

... in short, it could solve a lot of the "documentation gap". As is I see perpetual re-creation of the wheel.

The IRONY is this group has to be one of the most user-friendly on the planet that's losing its history daily.

I am not NOT convinced that the way Google Groups work is optimal for what is needed.

Best wishes

Josiah

[Duarte Farrajota Ramos]

I think this has been brought up many times before and TiddlyWiki Google groups is not going away anytime soon.

I started using Stack Exchange network of sites recently though (more specifically Blender.Stackexchange) and I've been loving the format and the way it works.
I wonder if it would be adequate for TiddlyWiki, but from my experience everything indicates that it could work quite well.

[Josiah]

Ciao Duarte Farrajota Ramos

Transfer is painful. You lose people. BUT I dunno. What I SEE is ongoing loss of CUMULATION. I know its been said before. But NOTHING happened. Even here there are tagging tools, not used.

J.

[Duarte Farrajota Ramos]

Nothing happened because I don't think there's any intention of moving. It's also probably a good sign that the current tool serves the community well enough.
I don't think any information has been lost, you can easily use search to find all older posts.

[Josiah]

Ciao DFR

on "search for older posts" I agree for techies.

i completely disagree for anyone else.

j

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Is it possible to get an archive from the groups - so that we could explore ways to take it somewhere more searchable? I did a quick google and I think the admins might be able to get one - @jermolene do you see something like that? If you make me an admin for a week, I'll have a play to see if I can do it and extract what I can. Otherwise there are a few scrapers specifically for GGroups that I can try.

Regards,

Richard

[Mat]

The only realistic option I can imagine is TWederation. By "only realistic" I mean that even if there are other solutions, there is not enough incentive to switch to those whereas TWederation is of interest for many other TW-matters and communication-within-TW matters.  I think TWederation will partly replace the google groups but it will likely be a bit too "odd" for beginners to dive into immediately and so this google group will likely remain. Hopefully we'll get the UI good enough so that it'll be more and more useful.

Do help along with TWederation if you care about the matter :-)

<:-)

[Josiah]

Ciao Richard

basically anyone who can make on okay result from the stubborn reality here would get my vote. x

J.

[Josiah]

Ciao Mat

I seen activity on TWFederation. I have NO idea what it is exactly. I do notice its a sweet-point with promise.

HOW will it benefit a normal user?

Best wishes
Josiah

[Duarte Farrajota Ramos]

Just to make it clear it's not that I'm particularly fond of Google groups, it's just "good enough". As a tool it works fairly well but it's not extraordinarily remarkable or efficient.
It feels kind of buggy at times and stagnated, I think google hasn't updated it in ages and it feels abandoned. I just think the benefits of moving haven't outweighed the trouble of migrating yet.

As for TWederation I have only been to the forums very superficially lately; I've heard the term thrown around several times but didn't quite grasp the whole concept behind it.
From what I gathered it's about "federation" right? As in show external content from other sources (possibly other TiddlyWikis?) under the same host wiki, am I right?

Kind of like the plugins library architecture currently works, if I am not mistaken? Is that it or am I far off?
Anyone care to explain in few words what it is? Genuinely curious.

[Josiah]

Ciao

Noted "good enough". I kinda agree. Very reluctantly,

"Twederation" I think is important, though I only have a very vague idea what it is.

J.

On Thursday, 23 June 2016 01:25:15 UTC+2, Duarte Farrajota Ramos wrote:

Just to make it clear it's not that I'm particularly fond of Google groups, it's just "good enough". As a tool it works fairly well but it's not extraordinarily remarkable or efficient.
It feels kind of buggy at times and stagnated, I think google hasn't updated it in ages and it feels abandoned. I just think the benefits of moving haven't outweighed the trouble of migrating yet.

As for TWederation I have only been to the forums very superficially lately; I've heard the term thrown around several times but didn't quite grasp the whole concept behind it.
From what I gathered it's about "federation" right? As in show external content from other sources (possibly other TiddlyWikis?) under the same host wiki, am I right?

Kind of like the plugins library currently works, if I am not mistaken?Is that it or am I far off?

[Mark S.]

The google groups doesn't seem any worse than the other alternatives, and probably not as prone to hi-jacking as  the self-served packages. The main problem is that TWC and TW5 conversations are mixed. Also, and I hope someone could prove me wrong, there's no way to filter your search results by users (except yourself). My approach is to do a search and sort by date so that the newest stuff comes up on top.

Part of the reason that the wheel gets re-invented so many times, is that someone keeps changing the lug bolts on the wheel.

Twederation seems to be a long way off, though it seems the core technology -- pulling from other TW's, is working. If you try it, you'll see the problems. You don't have to have a hosted account to pull from other members. There are additional complications that pages hosted on http sites can't pull from https sites (or is it the other way around?).

Twederation (TWED), as I understand it, is a collection of TW pages, each of which is hosted by it's own master somewhere out there on the web. Each individual will "pull" content from other members of the  Twederation, including content that that member has pulled from other members. So the system, in theory, is highly distributed. The only special member will be the main host, who is responsible for maintaining the master list of TWED members. If you are not on that list, then you can still pull from other members, but they are unlikely to pull from your content since they won't know where you are. It's a little unclear to me why any member of the TWED couldn't create a new card for a new member and thus start their TWED participation. Actually, the central host is something of a  weakness, if you wanted a system that was hard to suppress and that could keep on working in the absence of a given "disappeared" individual.

Mark

[Duarte Farrajota Ramos]

Sounds quite fantastic, almost like a peer-to-peer collaborative decentralized wiki sort of thing. Thanks for the explanation.
Hope it someday becomes usable in the grand scheme of things

[Ákos Szederjei]

I looked at the alternatives for GoogleGroups for another group, but
there is not much to choose from.

YahooGroups is the only "commercial but free" solution, but no one know
it's future. No point to move there.

If one would like to host one's own GroupServer
(http://groupserver.org/) comes to closest to GoogleGroups capabilities.
I am not sure that is so much better than GoogleGroups, besides being
open source and all.

The rest are mostly mailing list only solution (no web interface) programs.

I came to the same conclusion that GoogleGroups is not particularly
exciting, but there I found nothing better either.

[Sylvain Naudin]

Hello,

For french community, I run a Discourse instance (https://forum.tiddlywiki.fr) and I really like it.
I've don't setting e-mail reply but i's possible.
There is a wiki flag to convert a post thread.

I think it's a good option to leave a Google Groups, but It cost a server ;)

[Josiah]

Salut Sylvain

IMO, that is definitely better than Google with your Category system. Its also great to see Tutorials built in.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Alex Hough]

Hi All,

I vote that we remain with Google Groups.

I read the posts though gmail. Each one gets filtered. 

I can star the posts i like

Using TiddlySnip I can make links to threads on my node.js TW

For me the current set up is perfect.

best wishes

Alex

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[Josiah]

Ciao Alex

I kinda reluctantly agree. Mainly because its there & used & "sort-of" okay, given the equal poorness of the main competition & the nightmare of any putative transfer. A point others have hammered home to me.

However, its worth commenting that the things you are doing that make it usable for you sound like they are NOT native to GG. They are your informed adaptation to it.

The French list is lovely IMO, though they are a lower volume group. Bit it gives an idea how something decently organized can function. https://forum.tiddlywiki.fr

Best wishes
Josiah

[Alex Hough]

I think Google Group is a good muse for the TiddlyWiki project. TW is a tool which fills the gaps between email and other sites.

Alex

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[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Alex,

Perhaps the solution is Google Groups +, where the + is some tool we deploy to make sure our conversations remain useful into the future. It would be great if we could automate a process of archiving this group to our own searchable wiki (perhaps with something like IFTTT)

Regards,

Richard

[Jeremy Ruston]

For me personally, the important thing about Google Groups is that alongside the web interface it also offers the functionality of a traditional mailing list. Thus I can work with the messages using my standard email client, meaning I can read and post messages when offline.

The thing I don’t like about Google Groups is kind of my fault: my popular request I switched on the ability for posters to edit their posts. The problem now is that people like me who are reading via email don’t get to see the updates.

Google Groups does not offer a bulk export capability. There has been work done on scrapers for it (which you can find via Google) but actually the best approach is probably to extract the messages from my Gmail archive (which will be minus any edits made after the email was sent, as per my point above).

Best wishes

Jeremy

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/07914eaf-b059-4a0a-8046-3d3127ed7078%40googlegroups.com.

[Josiah]

Ciao Jeremy

I kicked this thread off. On the one hand its a can or worms. On the other its a quiet, gentle acknowledgment of "at least it basically works". Maybe I should not have done it?

But I wonder if there is a mid-point?

As far as i understand it GG allows basic tagging. Could that help make this somewhat unwieldy beast more usable? 

By way of explanation, its clear to me now that the FUNDAMENTAL issue looks like Loss Of History.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Mat]

Josiah et al,

as I already mentioned, I think TWederation is the only realistic complimentary alternative to the google groups. Some of the discussion above has implied why it is not realistic to expect some other "established solution" to replace this; loss of current history and overall just not enough incentive to do so. After all, google groups does have its merits in spite of its clear drawbacks (btw, it is absolutely incredible that the search features are so poor; it's frickin' Google we're talking about!)

So, why would TWederation be the only realistic complimentary alternative? First of all we have to look at what the google group does solve or, more correctly, what it should solve. IMO the main thing is to provide help for how to understand and build things in TW. I think a pure discussion format is NOT optimal for this. TWederation would probably allow us to build a gradually accumulating expert knowledge base, more akin to Stack Overflow but with all the power of TW filtering. "Top answers" could be assembled from tiddlers that really fit into several contexts. Eventually, this would be a good enough knowledge base diminishing the need to go to the Google groups. Just like the docs on tiddlywiki.com often are enough. Instead of "archives", good posts are integrated into any topic where they fit.

The issue raised in this thread is of course an old one. So, a few years ago I started outlining a concept for this. I was in contact with someone who was interested in helping out with key parts, but it didn't happen so I had to abandon it.

For TWederation, I envision something similar. It would allow to slice, dice and fetch among the globally available tiddlers to build up TWs that turn to particular particupants and readers. What is incredibly exciting about TWederation is that discussion can then move from "general TW issues" into niche issues (and the issues don't even have to be about TW at all!) The, say, "chemistry researchers" among us, or "the authors" or "the teachers" can in their peer group collectively build up e.g special editions or knowledge bases for their own guild. And I think what is build can be much more advanced and specific for their needs because they are encouraged when they know there is a peer group supporting it and that understand the needs for the creations.

Currently we're understandably trapped in the general for the discussions on the boards and what is publicly endorsed on tiddlywiki.com. The perfect "organic chemistry TW" can, understandably, at most be presented on tiddlywiki.com as an exotic example of what is possible with TW and it would not be desirable in the public arenas to feature 10 fantastic "organic chemistry TWs" or "bible studies" or what be it. TWederation will allow content centered TW development, very different from today.

I think we're heading for a really cool TW future!

<:-)

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Josiah

I kicked this thread off. On the one hand its a can or worms. On the other its a quiet, gentle acknowledgment of "at least it basically works". Maybe I should not have done it?

Not at all, it's actually quite a long time since we last discussed it. Things change, so it's worth revisiting these questions.

But I wonder if there is a mid-point?

As far as i understand it GG allows basic tagging. Could that help make this somewhat unwieldy beast more usable? 

We'd need people to go back over the old threads and apply the tags, is the only problem. And we'd need some easy enough way for people who are searching to discover that the tags exist. All probably worth exploring.

By way of explanation, its clear to me now that the FUNDAMENTAL issue looks like Loss Of History.

I meant to add that I think ultimately our ambition should be a TWederation based discussion forum.

Best wishes

Jeremy

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