Announcing discuss.akka.io!

[Konrad 'ktoso' Malawski]

Dear hakkers,

We’re pleased to announce a new way to communicate with the core team and communities around the Akka projects (including Akka HTTP, Alpakka the various persistence plugins and all other community projects), as well as downstream projects such as Play and Lagom: discuss.akka.io

The “Discuss Akka” forum is co-hosted under the discuss.lightbend.com domain, along with discuss.playframework.com and discuss.lagomframework.com, and aims to help those communities be closer to one another. Each of the discuss.* domains, directs you to the category that the domain mentions, so you can go directly to discuss Akka things by using the discuss.akka.io domain, without having to navigate the “big” forum.

This is something we’ve been working towards since many years, moving the Play Framework’s backend to Akka HTTP, and collaborating more and more closely between the teams and communities. We hope that this move will further help connect those communities, and see those tools as colleagues with different use cases, as in fact they’ve always been positioned as -- Akka being a low level toolkit, and Play and Lagom providing high level building blocks for websites, or microservices with more guidance.

To further explain what’s going to happen next to the other communication channels, and what their intended use is:

What about the gitter channels?

The gitter channels (akka/akka for discussing “using Akka”, and akka/dev for “developing Akka”) remain as-is. As do the various other chats about technologies around Akka. We find those chats tremendously valuable in connecting with the community in a more “chatty” and real-time fashion.

Over the years of using Gitter however, we noticed that its ease-of-use (especially for beginners, new to the community) is a double edged-sword: we noticed many multiple-paragraph questions with code snippets be pasted into the gitter chats, and if no answer was received, the same question would be posted again and again. Other questions which require more in-depth writeups and thinking also “get lost in the chat”, and thus such users did not get the best experience, which they could have gotten on the mailing list -- if only they got there.

To help remedy this issue, we want to increase accessibility to a proper discussion forum, where long questions as well as design debates have enough place to breathe, and not get lost in other chatter. Thus, introducing the new discussion forums at discuss.akka.io

What happens to the akka-user mailing list?

The mailing list, whom people following Akka since it’s early days surely have learnt to love, even with its numerous flaws, will be transitioned into a read-only mode. This will not happen immediately, however we’ll try to direct all new questions to the new forum, and eventually flip the switch to mark akka-user as an read-only archive.

We took this decision after much thought, debate and considering the various up and down sides of handling it very seriously. We know that a mailing list work-flow is very precious for people used to working with them (plenty of us including), however in order to grow the community as a whole, and also help making the discussions on such forum more searchable and accessible, we decided that this move will be beneficial for everyone involved.

If you enjoy working with mailing-lists, and would like to continue to do so with the new forums, please have a look at the hints in the Discuss Meta topics, where we prepared hints on how to set up the notifications to work as-if a mailing list.

Forums are complementary to StackOverflow

Since the question about "why not 'just' move to stack overflow?" is likely to come up every now and then, we'd like to address it right away, as we make our move from the mailing list to the new forums:

We greatly value the StackOverflow community and think it's a great place for what it's been designed for – Q/A style questions. Often times however, questions about Akka tend to require some more discussion and understanding the architecture where the person asking is applying the technology. This discussion style is able to yield more useful advice, even if the opening question is vague or perhaps by itself is not really a question but discussion topic to begin with. Such discussions do not fit the StackOverflow model very well, which is why we see the discuss forums *complementary* to the StackOverflow questions, which also have their own tremendous value.

Please keep using the #akka tag and answering questions on stack overflow as you always have been, thank you!

What if I want ASAP 24h/7d responses?

Nothing changes in this aspect. The public communication channels were always best-effort, although we and the community do try to help as much as possible. If you really want the best-in-class and as quickly as possible answers and support, this is what Lightbend has been offering since the beginning and will continue to do so.

We hope that this new forum will be an enjoyable place for both old and new Akka users, contributors and hakkers alike. Please help us making this transition a pleasant experience (though some bumps are to be expected), as the excellent hakkers you all are, thank you! :-)

--

Happy hakking,

Akka Team

[Alan Burlison]

On 13/03/18 13:58, Konrad 'ktoso' Malawski wrote:

> We took this decision after much thought, debate and considering the
> various up and down sides of handling it very seriously. We know that a
> mailing list work-flow is very precious for people used to working with
> them (plenty of us including), however in order to grow the community as a
> whole, and also help making the discussions on such forum more searchable
> and accessible, we decided that this move will be beneficial for everyone
> involved.

> If you enjoy working with mailing-lists, and would like to continue
> to do so with the new forums, please have a look at the hints in the

> Discuss Meta <https://discuss.lightbend.com/c/meta> topics, where we

> prepared hints on how to set up the notifications to work as-if a
> mailing list

> <https://discuss.lightbend.com/t/how-to-use-the-discuss-forum-as-a-mailing-list/61>

Which says:

> Warning about the “mailing list mode”
>
> While Discourse offers a so-called “mailing list mode” that you can
> enable in your email settings in your preferences this mode is “all
> in”, and will deliver you emails for all categories in this forum. If
> your tagging and filtering skills are good, you may indeed want to
> try the mailing list mode and set up filters in your email client
> fine tuned such as you would normally. If you find a setup that works
> well for you, please do share it so others may also benefit from your
> findings.
>
> Since this forum is shared between various tech, you most likely will
> find this style of interaction too noisy. We instead recommend tuning
> the notification settings, with combination of watching categories2
> for an optimal user experience.

In other words, despite what's said in the announcement there is no
useable emailing mode in Discourse. This must be the 4th or 5th mailing
list that I've been on that's been replaced by Discourse, and I've
learned not to argue against it because switching to Discourse seems to
accompanied by be some sort of religious conviction about how much
better it is, which it is futile to argue against.

What I will observe is that in the other cases I've seen the switch made
the usefulness of the forum plummets because the people with experience
and who provide much of the benefit simply don't make the transition to
Discourse as it requires visiting yet another website and trawling
through a clunky web interface to see if there's anything interesting
and they simply don't have the time or patience to do that. As a result
the conversation rapidly degenerates to really basic "How do I get X to
work" questions that would be better off on Stack Overflow.

Looking at the https://discuss.lightbend.com site it's clear that
Lightbend have made a corporate-level decision to abandon mailing lists
and switch to Discourse, presumably because the PHBs think Facebookising
the interactions between Lightbend and their community looks prettier.
That's a shame, as I certainly won't be using it.

--
Alan Burlison
--

[Johan Andrén]

Sorry to hear that you dislike Discuss so much you won't be coming along there Alan.

I'd like to point out though that the decision to move to a forum was in fact not at something coming from a pointy haired boss but rather something we had discussed internally in the team for quite some while.

What we have found is that the lack of searching and categories and easy navigation on the mailing list made users, especially newcomers, ask the same questions over and over again. We in the core Akka team spend quite some time moderating and answering questions here and we want a tool where we (and others in the community ofc) can help as many users as possible with minimum effort. We think that the categories and tags etc. in discuss will help us do that. We also hope this will help reduce some of the noise in the Gitter channels.

In addition to that we also see synergies in bringing the Lagom and Play communities closer, this may be a bigger gain for those projects as they are to some extent built on top of Akka but it also brings benefits to the Akka community in growing it, hopefully leading to more people being able to help out and answer questions, that may previously have been lurking in the other two project mailing lists only.

I don't think this will change your mind, but felt that the picture you painted was a bit unfair and I wanted to clarify that this was a move driven by us engineers.

..

Johan Andrén

Akka Team

[Alan Burlison]

On 16/03/18 11:17, Johan Andrén wrote:

> Sorry to hear that you dislike Discuss so much you won't be coming along
> there Alan.

I've tried to use it and thereby over time come to like it, but it's
vile and I won't use it unless I personally have a specific question
that I need an answer for - I certainly won't be following the
discussions the way I do on the email list. I've learned a lot about
Akka by simply reading the email list traffic but I won't use Discuss
for that - sorry.

> What we have found is that the lack of searching and categories and easy
> navigation on the mailing list made users, especially newcomers, ask the
> same questions over and over again. We in the core Akka team spend quite
> some time moderating and answering questions here and we want a tool where
> we (and others in the community ofc) can help as many users as possible
> with minimum effort. We think that the categories and tags etc. in discuss
> will help us do that. We also hope this will help reduce some of the noise
> in the Gitter channels.

I think the 'unsearchable email archives' is a convenient myth and that
newbies will ask the same questions over and over anyway, irrespective
of where they ask them. As for categories and tags - that relies on
people actually using them correctly, and you have no way of ensuring
that the wider community does. I've been on your end of this situation
myself and we provided forums but in general technical people hated them
and wouldn't use them, so they died. And the Discuss developers have
already said they think email lists are an abomination and won't improve
Discuss's support for them so the half-hearted and useless support for
them that's there is not going to get better either.

It will probably reduce your workload but not for the reason you are
hoping for - if the volume of interaction plummets then sure yes, your
problem will have gone :-/

> In addition to that we also see synergies in bringing the Lagom and Play
> communities closer, this may be a bigger gain for those projects as they
> are to some extent built on top of Akka but it also brings benefits to the
> Akka community in growing it, hopefully leading to more people being able
> to help out and answer questions, that may previously have been lurking in
> the other two project mailing lists only.

I think you are going to be disappointed - if people don't contribute to
email lists they are even less likely to do so for forums because it
takes so much more time to use a clunky web UI to do so.

> I don't think this will change your mind, but felt that the picture you
> painted was a bit unfair and I wanted to clarify that this was a move
> driven by us engineers.

It won't, and as I said I don't expect you'll change your collective
decision either because you are way too far down the line to do so.
However I think it's a huge misstep - I've seen no traffic on the
mailing list demanding you close it down and replace it with Discuss
(https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/akka-user/discuss$20%7Csort:date
- oh look, a searchable archive!) but you've done so anyway. The lack of
discussion (pun intended) doesn't exactly send a positive message to
your community.

--
Alan Burlison
--

[Eric Swenson]

Konrad,

Will new topics continue to be pushed to the mailing list as they are published on the discuss.akka.io web site?  I have avidly followed the mailing list and use it to learn of new developments and read up on topics of interest to me. I relied on the "push" nature of the mailing list to let me know topics of interest. Having to check a web site (and remembering to do so) means, for me, that I would no longer be able to keep up-to-date with akka developments. It just requires too much effort to "follow" changes in a web site. 

If the mailing list will remain as a means of pushing notifications of all the threads on discuss.akka.io, and the only change is that we cannot reply to the mailing list, I'm perfectly happy with that. As long as I can click on a link on a mailing list digest entry and end up at the right place on discuss.akka.io so that I can contribute and/or read the whole discussion, that's great.

Thanks. -- Eric

[Patrik Nordwall]

Hi Eric,

You can setup email notifications as described in https://discuss.lightbend.com/t/how-to-use-the-discuss-forum-as-a-mailing-list/61

/Patrik

--
*****************************************************************************************************
** New discussion forum: https://discuss.akka.io/ replacing akka-user google-group soon.
** This group will soon be put into read-only mode, and replaced by discuss.akka.io
** More details: https://akka.io/blog/news/2018/03/13/discuss.akka.io-announced
*****************************************************************************************************
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Read the docs: http://akka.io/docs/
>>>>>>>>>> Check the FAQ: http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/current/additional/faq.html
>>>>>>>>>> Search the archives: https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Akka User List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to akka-user+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to akka...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Eric Swenson]

Thanks, Patrick. Exactly what I needed. -- Eric

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "Akka User List" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/akka-user/lgOoHc6jE2A/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to akka-user+...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to

akka...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/akka-user.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Alan Burlison]

On 16/03/18 21:56, Patrik Nordwall wrote:

> You can setup email notifications as described in
> https://discuss.lightbend.com/t/how-to-use-the-discuss-forum-as-a-mailing-list/61

If I'm understanding the warning at the bottom of that page, you'll get
emails for *all* categories in Discourse, not just Akka, is that correct?

As I read it, the advice on that page is "Don't use the mailing list
functionality" so I'm a bit surprised to see it being recommended here.

--
Alan Burlison
--

[Justin du coeur]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 7:17 AM, Johan Andrén <johan....@typesafe.com> wrote:

Sorry to hear that you dislike Discuss so much you won't be coming along there Alan.

I gotta say -- Alan's not alone in these concerns.  I'm pretty active on both Scala-Contributors and Scala-Users, and while I put up with the mailing list mode for them, I hate it with a burning passion.  On the one hand, it's necessary (I've demonstrated experimentally that I don't actually follow what's going on without it), but it's such an uncritical firehose as to be borderline disease-worse-than-the-cure.

As a result, I'm on the fence about getting involved with the new Akka and Play forums.  I may go for it -- if the volume remains at the level of the mailing lists, it won't be too bad.  But I'd be a lot less reluctant (possibly eager, even) if Discourse would fix the damned mailing list mode to respect the other settings.  I'm surprised and disappointed that they haven't prioritized this...

[Alan Burlison]

On 17/03/18 00:10, Justin du coeur wrote:

> As a result, I'm on the fence about getting involved with the new Akka and
> Play forums. I may go for it -- if the volume remains at the level of the
> mailing lists, it won't be too bad. But I'd be a lot less reluctant
> (possibly eager, even) if Discourse would fix the damned mailing list mode
> to respect the other settings. I'm surprised and disappointed that they
> haven't prioritized this...

I think you don't have to look any further than Jeff Atwood's opinion of
email and the people that use it to figure why it's still so broken
despite all the requests over the years:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/is-email-efail/

I don't know if they have fixed it, but it always used to be the case
that you couldn't start new "topics" via email and you had to log in to
the Discourse BUI in order to do so, so the email functionality was
basically useless and you were forced to use the BUI.

--
Alan Burlison
--