When will we have a "proper" forum ?

[António Ramos]

I hate google groups because its not easy to find help so people keep asking the same question over and over again.

we should follow other ideas as Massimo said 

Ideas we had, ideas we...

This one is very good as an example.

https://forums.meteor.com

A lot easier to learn from something like this...

Regards

António

[Richard Vézina]

It seems nice, maybe build with web2py!!

:)

Richard#

--
Resources:
- http://web2py.com
- http://web2py.com/book (Documentation)
- http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code)
- https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues)
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[Anthony]

Meteor is using Discourse (self-hosted), as are a number of other open source communities, such as ReactJS, Mozilla, and ElasticSearch (also used by New Relic and How-To Geek).

I like it and even suggested it here as a possible alternative to Google Groups when the web interfaces stopped working, but I'm not sure it is really any more easily searched than Google Groups.

Anthony

[Dave S]

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 8:00:00 AM UTC-7, Ramos wrote:

I hate google groups because its not easy to find help so people keep asking the same question over and over again.

I expect any system to include people asking the same question over and over again.  Many people jump in for a one-shot question, and don't search for previous answers.  Often newcomers don't know the terms to search for even if they think to look.
 

we should follow other ideas as Massimo said 

Ideas we had, ideas we...

This one is very good as an example.

https://forums.meteor.com

A lot easier to learn from something like this...

Anything specific about that exceites your interest?

/dps
 

[Dave S]

Besides pictures instead of names being shown on the topic list?

/dps
 

[Anthony]

This one is very good as an example.

https://forums.meteor.com

A lot easier to learn from something like this...

Anything specific about that exceites your interest?

For one thing, we would own the data/content.

[Dave S]

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 10:45:22 AM UTC-7, Anthony wrote:

Meteor is using Discourse (self-hosted), as are a number of other open source communities, such as ReactJS, Mozilla, and ElasticSearch (also used by New Relic and How-To Geek).

I like it and even suggested it here as a possible alternative to Google Groups when the web interfaces stopped working, but I'm not sure it is really any more easily searched than Google Groups.

Anthony

Note that Google Groups posts can show up in a general Google search (I don't know if they will in Yahoo/Bing), without any additional work on our part.  For something self-hosted, we'd have to make sure the archive was crawled to have that coverage.

/dps
 

[Alex]

I too would be very happy if web2py got a real forum. The UI experience with google groups is very bad, I can understand that it doesn't work properly with old Opera browser, but sometimes I'm also having issues with newest Firefox. The whole UI just feels very slow because everything is loaded dynamically. The search often doesn't deliver the results I'm expecting.

And finally I think google already knows way too much about everyone on this planet. I can easily avoid google services for almost everything, except when I need web2py support - although I'm probably the only one who cares about this. You owning the data is also a strong argument for using an own forum.

Alex

[Selman Kocael]

Google Groups:

pros: 

+ email integration (quick question and quick answer mostly)

+ well known, wide usage (not necessery to sign up for another forum)

+ google power (search) (but when i search a problem, stackowerflow is first and right result)

cons:

- very (and very) bad interface

- recently unknown issues

- not enough social

- unused tag system (because of email send messages)

we should look alternatives' pros and cons to make right desicion.

--
Resources:
- http://web2py.com
- http://web2py.com/book (Documentation)
- http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code)
- https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues)
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Selman Kocael
İsabet Yayınları

[Anthony]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 10:34:54 AM UTC-4, xmarx wrote:

Google Groups:

pros: 

+ email integration (quick question and quick answer mostly)

You can post/reply via email on Discourse as well. Discourse also allows you to use Markdown in both the web UI and via email.
 

+ well known, wide usage (not necessery to sign up for another forum)

True, though Discourse has social login, allowing you to use Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or Github to sign in.
 

+ google power (search) (but when i search a problem, stackowerflow is first and right result)

Discourse appears to have pretty decent search, plus it can be indexed by Google.

Anthony

[Richard Vézina]

Discourse seems really nice... It represents a lot of work... But as a "proof of concept" I think we should considering to use our own tool (web2py) to create our own mailing-list... Could we "seriously" be able to manage our own list and write our own app for this? This is a big undertake and maintenance contract...

What do you think?

Richard

--

[Anthony]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 11:08:09 AM UTC-4, Richard wrote:

Discourse seems really nice... It represents a lot of work... But as a "proof of concept" I think we should considering to use our own tool (web2py) to create our own mailing-list... Could we "seriously" be able to manage our own list and write our own app for this? This is a big undertake and maintenance contract...

Although open source, Discourse is developed by a commercial enterprise (they offer hosting), and so it represents a substantial amount of development effort (though perhaps a web2py version could get a head start by using the Discourse Ember.js front end and attempting to replicate the Rails back end -- but if making a near exact copy, why bother?). For someone, perhaps developing a commercially-backed web2py-based alternative to Discourse would be worthwhile (though probably tough competition), but for the web2py core developers, I think the time might be better spent on (a) further developing web2py, (b) developing plugins and re-usable apps for web2py, and (c) web3py.

Anthony

[Derek]

I really dislike Discourse. It's a Ruby app, and it requires a ton of addons. It's bloated and slow, and since it uses virtual infinite scroll, it's very difficult to search within discussions. 

https://www.techfuel.net/pyforum/default/index

pyForum is based on web2py, though it looks like the project has been abandoned and it needs spam filtering / moderation.

there's Uforum (http://www.uforum.nl/topic/active) for which there is no source and I don't know if the authors would be willing to share.

Personally, my favorite it is a mix of python and javascript and it's called geiwiki. Of course it's not a forum, more like a tiddlywiki with discussion features added. That may be difficult to use, not recommended.

Finally, last but not least, there's http://web2pyslices.pythonanywhere.com/home. It has a 'questions' function which will allow people to post questions and get answers, but it's not prominently featured. This site is geared towards showing you how to do neat stuff, yet the questions portion is not front and center so people don't use it. Also the format of it is not quite optimized for question asking and answering (those icons right next to each question are repetitive). 

In the running is stackoverflow.com which is widely used, already has a web2py tag, and the interface is ideal for asking questions as well as answering them. It even has gaming to incentivize people to answer questions. The only issues are, this forum is not promoted on the web2py main page, and thus there are a lot of unanswered questions.

[Iuri Guilherme dos Santos Martins]

2015-07-30 11:40 GMT-03:00 Anthony <abas...@gmail.com>:

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 10:34:54 AM UTC-4, xmarx wrote:

Google Groups:

pros: 

+ email integration (quick question and quick answer mostly)

You can post/reply via email on Discourse as well. Discourse also allows you to use Markdown in both the web UI and via email.

Endorsing this. Discourse deals better with e-mail than google groups, so that's really a con on google groups.

 

 

+ well known, wide usage (not necessery to sign up for another forum)

True, though Discourse has social login, allowing you to use Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or Github to sign in.

Actually not true. The one service requiring login is actually google groups. You HAVE to have a google account, which in turn means accepting a terms of service that states explicitly that whenever google get honest and decides to sell your soul to the devil, you have granted them permission to do so when you created the account in the first place.

Discourse has OpenID, so no, you don't have to signup.

 

+ google power (search) (but when i search a problem, stackowerflow is first and right result)

Discourse appears to have pretty decent search, plus it can be indexed by Google.

I think google groups ranks worse than debian-user mailing lists.

I can't say for sure, but I expect that a software of the nature of discourse should have SEO properly implemented by now. If not, a simple issue on their tracker shall raise awareness on that.

We are getting behind Ruby, peepz!

[Anthony]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 12:26:40 PM UTC-4, Derek wrote:

I really dislike Discourse. It's a Ruby app, and it requires a ton of addons. It's bloated and slow

None of the Discourse based forums I've seen appear to be slow. Who cares if it's written in Ruby?
 

, and since it uses virtual infinite scroll, it's very difficult to search within discussions.

The built-in forum search has a "search within topic" option. But if you do prefer to use the browser's within-page search, in the topic progress bar in the lower right, you can click to jump to the bottom, which loads everything -- then you can search the page. This is actually superior to Google Groups, which doesn't enable searching an entire discussion unless you manually expand each post. Forums that paginate posts also don't enable you to search the entire discussion within the page (because the entire discussion cannot be loaded in a single page).

Anthony

[Anthony]

In the running is stackoverflow.com which is widely used, already has a web2py tag, and the interface is ideal for asking questions as well as answering them. It even has gaming to incentivize people to answer questions. The only issues are, this forum is not promoted on the web2py main page, and thus there are a lot of unanswered questions.

I think Stack Overflow is a great place for Q&A, but we still need a separate forum for the types of discussions and questions that don't fit the SO format.

Anthony

[Anthony]

+ well known, wide usage (not necessery to sign up for another forum)

True, though Discourse has social login, allowing you to use Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or Github to sign in.

Actually not true. The one service requiring login is actually google groups. You HAVE to have a google account,

Actually, not not true. Technically, you don't need a Google account if you interact with the group via email only. Anyway, I think the real point was that if you already have a Google account, which many people have for other reasons (and especially if you are already using Google Groups for other communities), you don't have to sign up for yet another independent forum account.

Anthony

[Michele Comitini]

The choice is about maintaining the infrastructure to run a forum or not.

If we choose to maintain it, I am in favor of a self hosted web2py solution.

It takes resources, but it is not a waste of resources, since it is a real world testbed for web2py and would generate contributions for stability and speed, so it would have a positive impact on web2py engineering.

The critical point could be development of new components (specifically web3py), since much resources would work on the stable version having to deliver a good service...

Following the same reasoning, I am against having to use resources to maintain something that requires tinkering with another framework.  In that case we must rely on a 3rd party service as we do now with google, where we do not have to maintain their (falling apart? I don't know since I tend to use the e-mail channel) framework for discussion groups.

 

--

[Richard Vézina]

+1 Michele, you resumed my thought... I am thinking too that having to maintain our own mailing-list and use our own tool to do so, will make us improve web2py...

At the same time if web3py is coming, I guess as Anthony mention ressources being scarce we may have to choose...

I also, use mail, so I don't understand exactly what the issue with google group...

Richard

[Alex Glaros]

Discourse lacks at least two important search features

• "-" dash, exclude 
  
• exact strings containing multiple words
  

critical for finding help when similar words appear in irrelevant posts

Alex Glaros

[Dave S]

On Thursday, July 30, 2015 at 7:34:54 AM UTC-7, xmarx wrote:

Google Groups:

pros: 

+ email integration (quick question and quick answer mostly)

+ well known, wide usage (not necessery to sign up for another forum)

+ google power (search) (but when i search a problem, stackowerflow is first and right result)

cons:

- very (and very) bad interface

I guess I'm atypical, but I don't find the GG interface to be bad (even after the change 2 years ago).  I "grew up" in the Usenet environment, with readnews, rn, and the emacs interfaces to same (both Gosling and GNU) and still use a variety of newsreaders for the small number of groups I'm still active in. And I still use GG as the backup reader for those Usenet groups.

I've also used a variety of web forums (see the one for Beyond Compare at scootersotware.com, frex,which used vBulletin)  and I've use a couple of  web archive interfaces to help with mailing lists (Mercurial and Mercurial Developers in particular).

I AM VERY COMFORTABLE USING GOOGLE GROUPS.

On the other hand, my opinion is probably worthless because I don't hate Windows 8.x or even Windows Vista.  I'm still using an old Fedora, so I might not be up to date on rants about Linux UX horrors.  I have yet to set up my Mint machine.

 

- recently unknown issues

- not enough social

- unused tag system (because of email send messages)

It appears that the original poster is the only one who can set tags.  Ok, maybe the moderators can play Deus Ex Machina with tags, but the rest of us can't add a tag ex post facto.
 

we should look alternatives' pros and cons to make right desicion.

/dps
 

[Anthony]

In addition to its built-in search (which includes a number of forum-specific advanced search operators not available when searching Google Groups), Discourse also includes a "Search with Google" feature, allowing you to execute any search using Google (taking advantage of all of Google's advanced search operators).

Anthony

[Anthony]

I guess I'm atypical, but I don't find the GG interface to be bad (even after the change 2 years ago).

I agree -- in general, Google Groups is fairly good, especially given that it is free (and has no ads). It's also nice that so many other communities use it, which makes it easy to follow and interact with multiple groups from a single interface.

Some discussion about possibly moving originally arose when last week Google introduced a bug that rendered web2py-users unusable via the web interface. There is also more general concern with not owning the data and the risk that Google might shut down Google Groups (just as it shut down Google Code and many other former products).

Anthony

[Dan Hett]

As a newcomer, I agree. For instance, I asked a question about where I could find examples of the online videos. The key word that I needed to know was "appliances", searching Github.
But, I did not know the right term. Searching the forum, I found several have asked this same question.

I like the layout of the Meteor fourum. If perhaps there was a newbie category, people like me would find answers there.

[Massimo Di Pierro]

Why metor and not simply use stackoverflow?

[Anthony]

On Sunday, August 2, 2015 at 7:56:02 PM UTC-4, Massimo Di Pierro wrote:

Why metor and not simply use stackoverflow?

Note, the forum is not built with Meteor -- they are using the open source Discourse, which is a Rails/Ember.js app.

Stack Overflow works well, but it is limited to well-defined questions only, not more general discussions.
 

[Massimo Di Pierro]

Before we take bold actions... what are the problems with this forum that we want to solve? For me the only real issue is poor search capability but I have no reason to believe that Discourse would be better on a forum of this size.

[Anthony]

On Sunday, August 2, 2015 at 8:57:49 PM UTC-4, Massimo Di Pierro wrote:

Before we take bold actions... what are the problems with this forum that we want to solve? For me the only real issue is poor search capability but I have no reason to believe that Discourse would be better on a forum of this size.

I don't think there are any big problems with this forum (unless Google introduces another bug that prevents us from using it). See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/web2py/xizBEBATE3Q/zSg_Z_rPDrYJ.

Anthony

[Mirek Zvolský]

Some WORKING place for addon software (like plugins) would be much more useful.

Why we cannot have a list of addons at the web2py.com directly ? Linked from one button at the Download page ? And maybe with warning that it is "unmaintained"?

[Selman Kocael]

Why we cannot have a list of addons at the web2py.com directly ? Linked from one button at the Download page ?

i don't think web2py's idea is build web from scratch. if there is good example (open source), it can be used. 

2015-08-03 15:12 GMT+03:00 Mirek Zvolský <zvo...@seznam.cz>:

Some WORKING place for addon software (like plugins) would be much more useful.

Why we cannot have a list of addons at the web2py.com directly ? Linked from one button at the Download page ? And maybe with warning that it is "unmaintained"?

--
Resources:
- http://web2py.com
- http://web2py.com/book (Documentation)
- http://github.com/web2py/web2py (Source code)
- https://code.google.com/p/web2py/issues/list (Report Issues)
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Selman Kocael
İsabet Yayınları

[Anthony]

On Monday, August 3, 2015 at 8:12:14 AM UTC-4, Mirek Zvolský wrote:

Some WORKING place for addon software (like plugins) would be much more useful.

Why we cannot have a list of addons at the web2py.com directly ? Linked from one button at the Download page ? And maybe with warning that it is "unmaintained"?

http://www.web2pyslices.com/home?content_type=Package

[António Ramos]

Another one using the same thing

http://community.appgyver.com/

[Paolo Amboni]

One problem of google groups is the lack of categories.

What about a g+ comunity?

Il giorno mercoledì 29 luglio 2015 17:00:00 UTC+2, Ramos ha scritto:

I hate google groups because its not easy to find help so people keep asking the same question over and over again.

we should follow other ideas as Massimo said 

Ideas we had, ideas we...

This one is very good as an example.

https://forums.meteor.com

A lot easier to learn from something like this...

Regards

António

[Mirek Zvolský]

Definitely not working and not usable at all.

Just try register (and offer to others) a new plugin. You will not be happy!

Dne pondělí 3. srpna 2015 14:45:41 UTC+2 Anthony napsal(a):

[Richard Vézina]

G+ is dead... It will be renamed Streams... It may be good for news, but surely not for a forum...

Richard

[Anthony]

On Tuesday, August 4, 2015 at 3:07:43 AM UTC-4, Paolo Amboni wrote:

One problem of google groups is the lack of categories.

It does have tags: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!tags/web2py

[xmarx]

It does have tags: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!tags/web2py

but unfortunatelyit doesn't using effectively. because i think. most messages send and replied vie e-mail.


it would be nice to have the following features in 'new forum' or whatever.
1. transfer or copy all google groups messages to new forum.
2. auto-tagging or tag-suggesting system.

[JorgeH]

I have been using this forum for years, and NEVER EVER have used email. 

I visit the web forum:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/web2py

And in the settings I chosed not to get emails:

[Richard Vézina]

I like receive all email from the list in a dedicated mail box (gmail), I can then easily search in the question and answer...

:)

Richard

[António Ramos]

That is tooo archaic...

I can have proposals in my email but a CRM is best suited right ?

From a noobie point of view, using a dedicated app he could easily see hot topics that he didn't new existed. and this is a big advantage for me.

We can see the big picture ahead.

i´m not limited to my limited knowledge because i can only find what i´m looking for using only emails.

There will be a lot of good info that i will never see.

[Richard Vézina]

I am not pretending that it is the way to go... But, I can much more easily recall something that I read because it search much better then google can even when you search in the group with google groups... which sometimes can't even find the exact post that I can in a snap with gmail...

Richard

[Dave S]

On Wednesday, August 5, 2015 at 10:35:42 AM UTC-7, Richard wrote:

I am not pretending that it is the way to go... But, I can much more easily recall something that I read because it search much better then google can even when you search in the group with google groups... which sometimes can't even find the exact post that I can in a snap with gmail...

If you're searching in GG, you often get better results if you use the tick mark in the search box, rather than the search box itself.   Hovering over the tick mark gives the tool tip "Show search options", and clicking on it gives you the advanced search form, which my experience says is more reliable.  Of course, with a little experience, you can enter the search URL yourself without bother with boxes or forms.

/dps

[Anthony]

Screenshot:
 

 

[Limedrop]

I hesitate to comment on this as it's one of those topics were there's not "one obvious way to do it" (obviously I'm not Dutch). Essentially, I think google groups does an okay job and the benefits of any change are likely to be outweighed by the heavy cost of that change.

Having said that, I've always thought that we're missing a trick by not integrating forum questions with the web2py book. Imagine having medium.com-style side comments with the book, making it more of a living document. Questions and answers would be right next to the relevant section of the book, providing further explanation and reducing RTFM answers. I guess you'd also add a better search facility, a stack-overflow style 'homepage' and possibly a slight re-structure of the book sections. Ask a question and it gets tagged to a book section.  The book is already built with auth.wiki() - so we would be adding to functionality/infrastructure that has to be maintained anyway.

We can always dream ;-)

[Massimo Di Pierro]

I very much agree with this. How do you propose we do it?

[Iuri Guilherme dos Santos Martins]

The only proper way to use googlegroups with e-mail is to check the webmail of gmail.

Because of the top posting and the "just reply with all the old junk" behaviour, googlegroups via e-mail is rendered useless (in the sense that it is too bloated to be worth the effort) to use with anything but a gmail account.

[Limedrop]

The first step would be to add it to the web2py roadmap :-)  I don't know enough about the code-base to comment on the implementation specifics.  Would you see "comment" functionality being added to directly to the auth.wiki() code or developed as a separate app/plugin?

[Richard Vézina]

+1 Limedrop

Do you think to something like the Mercurial book? http://hgbook.red-bean.com/read/how-did-we-get-here.html

I saw side comments after...

Richard