Github Discussions

[da-woods]

Hi all,

Quick survey (with absolutely no promise to act on the results):

We occasionally get requests to enable Github Discussions (a forum-like
feature on Github) from people who find this mailing list difficult to
use. I think there's two main complaints:

* google groups isn't accessible from everywhere in the world (China maybe?)
* because it's impossible to delete spam from a mailing list after the
fact, the mailing list needs to be pre-moderated, which gives notable
lags for messages to appear.

The downsides of Github Discussions as I see it:

* Adding another support forum increases the number of places that
people have to follow, so might decrease the chance of getting answers.
* E-mail/mailing list is fairly flexible in how you use it - you can use
email clients, web interface, it doesn't require an account - so you can
set it up to suit your preferred workflow. A gated forum has one way to
access it.
* It ties us to Github, so if we ever want to move away from Github we
potentially lose the discussion archives. The question there is: how
often are the old mailing list archives a useful thing to search?

Any thoughts/opinions? (I realise there's massive selection bias asking
this on the mailing list of course...)

David

[Oscar Benjamin]

Have you considered discourse?

I think discourse is more like a modern version of Google groups and
can be used like a mailing list.

GitHub discussions are something different I think. I don't see them
being used like a mailing list. They are useful for users to talk to
maintainers especially for projects that are small and don't have a
dedicated mailing list.

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[da-woods]

On 04/05/2024 16:35, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> Have you considered discourse?

I hadn't really, but maybe I should. It's adding another service into
the mix so it's a bit harder to set up. I also don't think Stefan's the
biggest fan of it (w.r.t. moving the Python-dev discussions there), but
I don't want to put words into his mouth here.

> I think discourse is more like a modern version of Google groups and
> can be used like a mailing list.
>
> GitHub discussions are something different I think. I don't see them
> being used like a mailing list. They are useful for users to talk to
> maintainers especially for projects that are small and don't have a
> dedicated mailing list.

I guess the question here is "what is a mailing list?" and "is it what
we want?".

We use the Cython-users list for occasional announcements, but mostly
it's to try to keep user support off the issue tracker. I don't think
that necessarily needs a mailing list format.

As a maintainer I'd like something that's
* low enough hassle to users that people use it where appropriate
(accepting that sometimes it's unclear if something is a bug or a
support question...)
* relatively easy to monitor,
* hopefully somewhere that other users will check occasionally and help
each other out (this might be where the mailing list format is better?)


Anyway, thanks for the suggestion - will definitely bear it in mind as
an option.

David

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Sat, May 4, 2024 at 4:35 PM Oscar Benjamin
<oscar.j....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Have you considered discourse?
>
> I think discourse is more like a modern version of Google groups and
> can be used like a mailing list.
>
> GitHub discussions are something different I think. I don't see them
> being used like a mailing list. They are useful for users to talk to
> maintainers especially for projects that are small and don't have a
> dedicated mailing list.

Just to say - as someone who likes email as a format - Discourse is an
excellent compromise. You can set it up in mailing-list mode, as a
user, and you basically get the mailing list experience, but you also
have a web interface that allows you to edit posts, read in threads,
write stuff in Markdown and so on.

I'm sure that the Scientific Python people -
https://scientific-python.org/about - can set you up with a Discourse
instance quickly - they just did that for Scipy, for example.

Cheers,

Matthew

[Oscar Benjamin]

On Sat, 4 May 2024 at 19:09, da-woods <dw-...@d-woods.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 04/05/2024 16:35, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
> > Have you considered discourse?
>

> > GitHub discussions are something different I think. I don't see them
> > being used like a mailing list. They are useful for users to talk to
> > maintainers especially for projects that are small and don't have a
> > dedicated mailing list.
>
> I guess the question here is "what is a mailing list?" and "is it what
> we want?".
>
> We use the Cython-users list for occasional announcements, but mostly
> it's to try to keep user support off the issue tracker. I don't think
> that necessarily needs a mailing list format.
>
> As a maintainer I'd like something that's
> * low enough hassle to users that people use it where appropriate
> (accepting that sometimes it's unclear if something is a bug or a
> support question...)

One point in favour of GitHub discussions is the fact that you can
convert an issue into a discussion rather than just closing it.
(Personally I consider this the only advantage though.)

> * relatively easy to monitor,
> * hopefully somewhere that other users will check occasionally and help
> each other out (this might be where the mailing list format is better?)

This is where the mailing list format is better. SymPy currently has
both a google groups mailing list and also GitHub Discussions enabled.
If someone asks a question on the mailing list then there are people
who will answer those questions who are not SymPy maintainers. When
someone asks a question on GitHub Discussions only maintainers will
ever answer.

In principle it does not need to be like this but my experience is
that if you use GitHub Discussions then you commit that maintainers
will provide all user support. The benefit of separating the issue
tracker from the discussions is lost because it is the same people
sifting through both.

--
Oscar

[da-woods]

Thanks for the extra comments Oscar and Matthew,

Looking at the Scientific Python discourse board, it seems like the
"Contributor and development" category is used quite a bit, but the
"User Discussion" one less so.

For the moment I'm leaning to "don't change anything" but it's always
something we can re-evaluate later.

David