The future of stan-users

[Jonah]

We’ve talked a bit recently about converting stan-users to more of a forum / message board than the current mailing list format. I think this is inevitable at some point (if the user base keeps growing then we’re going to outgrow the mailing list format), but I’d like to propose that we consider making the switch sooner rather than later (especially with the rstanarm package soon to make a public appearance but also because I think stan-users is not a particularly user-friendly or dev-friendly experience).

The advantages of the message board are many, but I think the biggest gain would be the ability to have forums for each interface, one for Stan language/syntax, one for more theoretical questions, etc. This would be more organized, easier for users to navigate (and find answers to their question so they don’t post duplicates), and I think also easier for us to navigate and find the questions we're each best suited to answer.

The only downside I can think of is that Google’s version of the message board / forum would not allow us to interact with it exclusively via email. (Daniel, am I remembering that correctly?) For some of you I assume this is a big downside.

I'm not sure if it's worth moving away from Google, but I think we're already starting to outgrow the mailing list and we should seriously consider some alternatives sooner rather than later.

Thoughts?

[Bob Carpenter]

What do you mean by "forum / message board"?

Is there an example of one you like and if so, do you know how
it's hosted?

And what set of lists do you propose:

{math, stan, rstan, pystan, ... } x { user, dev }

and then there's

{ rstanarm, shinystan }

The main downside will be community fragmentation and mainteance.
The RStan users will write about models to the RStan list, Python users
to the Python list (which will look small compared to the RStan list),
and so on. Yes, we'll tell them not to, but I have to believe they'll
stay on the list that matches the name of the software they're using.

Then what happens when someone sends their model to our modeling
list but it's all R? Yes, we ask them not to, but to within epsilon,
nobody reads our "submitting a question" page. I suppose we could set
up some kind of form that makes them fill in the info we want.

The upside is that the deluge of install questions can be
quarantined from our main modeling list.

- Bob

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[Jonah Sol Gabry]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Bob Carpenter <ca...@alias-i.com> wrote:

What do you mean by "forum / message board"?

Is there an example of one you like and if so, do you know how
it's hosted?

Sorry, should have linked to an example. Here's an example of a forum for math help (I don't know this forum, just found it searching for an example). In addition to having separate places to post questions depending on the topic, it also has a sidebar on the home page with the most recent posts (which includes posts from all the individual message boards). 

 

The main downside will be community fragmentation and mainteance.
The RStan users will write about models to the RStan list, Python users
to the Python list (which will look small compared to the RStan list),
and so on.  Yes, we'll tell them not to, but I have to believe they'll
stay on the list that matches the name of the software they're using.

I think the most frequent and most knowledgeable posters (two different groups with considerable overlap) will adjust quickly. But this will certainly be an issue for new users, and we might have to manually move questions, e.g. from the RStan list to the Stan list if the question isn't RStan specific but the user just happens to be working with RStan. If it's not hard for us to move posts between the lists/forums (I'm not sure) then it would be pretty similar to going through and tagging the stan-users posts with topics (which some of us are doing already to some extent).

 

Then what happens when someone sends their model to our modeling
list but it's all R?  Yes, we ask them not to, but to within epsilon,
nobody reads our "submitting a question" page.  I suppose we could set
up some kind of form that makes them fill in the info we want.

Yeah I think having that kind of form would be a big help. 

[Bob Carpenter]

That one looks very early '00s. It's powered by

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/portal.php

I'd be happy to try one of these if someone wants to set it up.

- Bob

[Allen B. Riddell]

I think discourse is the forum software to beat these days:
https://discourse.org/, example: https://internals.rust-lang.org/

I think you can interact with it via email too:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/using-discourse-as-a-mailing-lists/4595

[Michael Betancourt]

Discourse looks great.

Remember that we don’t have any hosting outside of GitHub right now,
so we’d have to get that again if we wanted to host a forum.

To avoid crossing forums I suggest we have something like

{interfaces} x {dev, installation}

then

fitting problems (or something more eloquent)

and

modeling techniques

Having a boiler plate that automatically populates each
new posting would be great, especially if we could customize
it to each topic.

[Jeffrey Arnold]

I was also going to suggest discourse. 

[Jonah Sol Gabry]

Yeah discourse does look nice. I wonder if there's a way to migrate a lot of the content from Google groups or if we'd have to start fresh. I can look into that. 

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[Andrew Gelman]

Then maybe just 2 lists:

stan-users

and

stan-install

?

[Allen B. Riddell]

Maybe it would make sense to dogfood it with stan-dev first?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food)

I've setup a discourse forum before. It's not that bad; the instructions
are clear. Renting a VM suitable for hosting the thing (it's a monster
Ruby app) costs something like $10-$20 a month.

[Bob Carpenter]

I think it's the kind of thing we could support out of the Sloan
grant. The question is whether we want to tack on another maintenance
issue. They add up.

- Bob