Forums vs mailing list? Here's a short 2-question voting survey.

[Michael DeHaan]

Hi all,

I'm really thankful for the huge amount of users here, but I'm also noticing that a disproportionately smaller amount of users joins the mailing list, and because it's a mailing list, repeated questions sometimes are a bit of a thing sometimes.  While I might have pushed back when we are smaller, I was wondering if a forum might be better and get more users interested.

The best way to figure it out is really to ask.  I know this audience is all on the list and might therefore *prefer* a list, but if you could choose between a forum and mailing list, what would you choose?  Here is a very quick 2-question survey for voting purposes.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QNM8GPM 

Not saying anything would switch over soon, and there would be a trial period, but if we decide to do it, we'd definitely be going all forum eventually -- as I still think we wouldn't want to split discussion and necessitate answering things in two places.

Though this might make things easier, as we could have lots of *categories* for discussion, which might make it quite awesome and easier to group related things.   "Help me write a module" could even be a forum, so it wouldn't be just like we'd have only 3 categories of places to put topics. 

Please weigh in above and let me know your thoughts!

Thanks!

--

Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansibleworks.com>
CTO, AnsibleWorks, Inc.
http://www.ansibleworks.com/

[Drew Northup]

On Thursday, January 9, 2014 9:57:27 PM UTC-5, Michael DeHaan wrote:

... 

The best way to figure it out is really to ask.  I know this audience is all on the list and might therefore *prefer* a list, but if you could choose between a forum and mailing list, what would you choose?  Here is a very quick 2-question survey for voting purposes.

...

Just to make sure I understand correctly, does the IRC sub-question refer just to the channel on FreeNode? (I've been on FreeNode since before it was what it was before that...and have been in #ansible a few times.)

[Michael DeHaan]

Basically #ansible, but feel free to interpret how you like.

Just there so I can categorize responses based on where people hang out now.

Thanks!

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[Michael DeHaan]

Thanks everyone for responses!  This survey is now complete.

First off -- don't panic, we're not changing anything right now.

The results were pretty interesting though -- the like for the mailing list is not very strong.  70% of the respondants were already on the mailing list, but only about 50% of the respondents wanted to keep the mailing list.   This implies strongly (since the mailing list is not all that huge) that switching away from the mailing list would be a potentially positive thing.

It also showed that about 50% of the respondents were on IRC, so the numbers may self-select a bit towards people inclined towards old-school ways to interact with projects.

There were some writeins -- Other writeins wanted a move to mailman, and some people suggested future software that was not yet available (like HyperKitty), which are ruled out.   Someone (jokingly?) suggested usenet.  IRC conversations suggested gopher :)   Some other writeins were actually about switching to forums.   There were concerns about searchability that actually proved unwarranted as Google indexing turned out to be actually pretty good for other options and things like Discourse have not only great search, but a great "suggested topics" feature.

Upon some review of things like discourse, I found they were *almost* what I wanted, but that the "tags" based organization rather than having explicit categories would result in the tags feature being underused, and I found the UI was a bit cluttered -- one of the main features I wanted was the ability to force a conscious choice of where to start a post and really have 10 or so open categories.  Still, it was pretty nice and I like where they are going.  

However, discourse still being in active development and having to monitor for security vulnerabilities and maintain infrastructure on-site, combined with the still somewhat positive support for the mailing list lends me to believe we keep the lists at this time.   The fact that it was a Ruby app (see also security vulnerability track record in Rails, recently) did not encourage me.   This is to not say there's anything wrong with developing Rails apps, but that if you are not doing it as a core part of your business, it's a bit of an extra thing to keep up with.  Frankly, you all keep us so busy, we don't have time :)

One of the problems showcased in discourse that I didn't really like was that the "reply" to any given threaded post was ghosted, so it would be easy to skim over replies.  This meant something that someone really cared to write wouldn't show up, and it would be hard to correct incorrect information (which I'm guilty of wanting to do -- I can't sleep -- someone is wrong on the internet! </xkcd>)

Getting more people to join the list is still desirable, I don't think we're going to change anything at this time -- not right now .

I really want to, but not do anything until there is a suitable cloud-hosted solution that I like.

It looks like Discourse may be offering something in the next year or so, but even then, that design will be based on how configurable it ends up being.

As I strongly believe a good product shouldn't *require* joining a list or forum to get to use it in many cases, one of the best things we can do is make sure we encourage people to help contribute to the documentation (which is open source and editable in github, switch to the docsite directory) as well as continue to extend it with things like we are doing it with the "guides" examples.

Recent examples like the annotated guide to the Lamp/HaProxy example are going in that direction.

I also see a lot of more interaction direct with GitHub -- which I don't really care for -- because the bug tracker isn't a forum and it doesn't allow for much group discussion -- *BUT* it's a sign that it's the default way a lot of people interact with the project.  It's likely that I'll continue to drive some GitHub traffic towards the mailing list, and may consider some retooling of the README information to make sure people know about it.

It is evident few read CONTRIBUTING.md and more prominent linkage of information about the list on every page may help people find this forum, which may be part of it.

[rektide]

> only about 50% of the respondents wanted to keep the mailing list. This implies strongly that switching away from the mailing list would be a potentially positive thing.

Ugggggg. I really don't look forward to some crappy forum software being the interface of choice. Every single person is going to find some way the systems sucks egg for them, and that they don't like it.

Mailing lists are great. They speak a common protocol, allow threaded discussions, and we can use whatever client we want to manage the system.

I really really would despise giving up a standard, protocol based means of communication for some shitware prepack garbage that is going to cruft it all up with it's own stupid notions of "you LOVE our way"

[Jan-Piet Mens]

+1 for each paragraph == +4.

-JP

[Guillaume Subiron]

Le 14/01/11 09:20, rektide claviotta :

> > only about 50% of the respondents wanted to keep the mailing list. This
> implies strongly that switching away from the mailing list would be a
> potentially positive thing.
>
> Ugggggg. I really don't look forward to some crappy forum software being
> the interface of choice. Every single person is going to find some way the
> systems sucks egg for them, and that they don't like it.
>
> Mailing lists are great. They speak a common protocol, allow threaded
> discussions, and we can use whatever client we want to manage the system.
>

On a famous french mailing list, FRnOG, we have solved the problem by
separating the list into several, like categories on a forum. Users
can subscribe to only a few "sub-list", or to a "meta-list" that
regroups all of the sublists.

Now, every user is free to configure his email client to have all the
threads in the same folder, or to have one folder by "category".

I think they use Mailman, but Sympa also allows to do this.

> I really really would despise giving up a standard, protocol based
> means of communication for some shitware prepack garbage that is
> going to cruft it all up with it's own stupid notions of "you LOVE
> our way"

Personally, I can't even think of following a project on a forum. And
it would make me very sad, because I really love this mailing list.

--
Guillaume Subiron
Mail - mae...@subiron.org
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Jabber - mae...@im.subiron.org
IRC - maethor@(freenode|geeknode)

[Vincent Van der Kussen]

+1(000000)

[Giorgio Valoti]

Michael DeHaan <mic...@ansibleworks.com> writes:

>
> There were some writeins -- Other writeins wanted a move to mailman, and
> some people suggested future software that was not yet available (like
> HyperKitty), which are ruled out. Someone (jokingly?) suggested usenet.

Well, I haven’t suggested usenet but I read this list through gmane.org
so I can then use emacs/gnus. Very old school, very efficient for me.

Sorry for the late (I’m trying to catch up...) and pretty much
content-free response. :)

--
Giorgio Valoti