Is Confluence helping or hurting the FileMaker Standards community?

[dansmith65]

I think attempting to use Cofluence with the 10 user license limit is doing more harm than good for the community. Going back a few years to when I first joined the community: comments were open to the public and all was good. Then came the comment spam: after battling with the spammers for a bit, Matt disabled public comments and all was good again. Next came the "how can I contribute" question: to solve this issue, we started using this google group for discussion so anyone who wanted to join the discussion could do so, and all was good again...  or was it?

We started with a high-powered enterprise-level wiki to manage our standards and provide a place for open discussion, but now we cant use it for discussions. So, when looking at a page in the wiki, there is no way of knowing if there is more to the discussion than what you're seeing because someone may have started a thread on the topic in the Google Group. In some cases, a link was provided to the google group discussion: http://filemakerstandards.org/display/props/Logging, but I doubt that it was done consistently.

Now, with the addition of the Disqus plugin for comments, we have yet another potential thread of conversation, which is separate from our prior two methods (Confluence comments and google group topics). Yesterday I commented on a page using the Confluence comments (I'm one of the lucky 10 who has an active account at the moment). Corn Walker replied via Disqus, but his reply doesn't show up as a reply to mine, it's in a separate section at the bottom of the screen (screenshot below). Then Jeremy and Arnold replied via Google Groups (last screenshot below). So we basically have three separate conversation threads going on a single topic. I'm not really sure if Jeremy or Arnold have even seen Corn Walkers comment, or not.

Because of all this disconnect, my conclusion is that Confluence is not actually doing the community any favors. I suggest we move everything to a single platform where anyone who wants to can join the discussion. I'm not set on any particular platform, as long as everyone can participate. If we got an open-source license from Confluence, that would be great, but Matt say's that's not likely to happen. To get the conversation on alternate platforms started, I'll suggest http://www.dokuwiki.org. Does anyone have other suggestions?

Does anyone agree with me?

  

[Ian Jempson]

What's wrong with a good old fashioned email list?

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[Jeremy Bante]

On Friday, January 23, 2015 at 11:37:32 AM UTC-8, Ian wrote:

What's wrong with a good old fashioned email list?

Email is soooo 20th-century.

Joking aside, the content of FileMakerStandards.org is not a good fit for an email list. There's a mix of a living document that is the standards themselves and the conversation threads over time negotiating how and why the living document evolves. Past content for an email list is more likely to be lost to the river of time.

I agree with Dan that enabling public discussions about the standards has been awkward with Confluence. I don't have suggestions for other software. I would like to remind folks that Matt's opinion will matter more than anyone else's — he's hosting it for us, after all.

[Corn Walker]

On Jan 23, 2015, at 4:08 PM, Jeremy Bante <jeremy...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I agree with Dan that enabling public discussions about the standards has been awkward with Confluence. I don't have suggestions for other software. I would like to remind folks that Matt's opinion will matter more than anyone else's — he's hosting it for us, after all.

I have it on record that his opinion can be purchased. :)

We use Confluence internally and have found that it works well as a repository of knowledge, but does a poor job at facilitating discussion. We also use Basecamp which is great for discussion, but poorly suited to an effort like FileMaker Standards.

The goal, I think, is to minimize active management of the site (i.e. dealing with spam) while encouraging participation in the discussion of the standards. I, too, am at a loss regarding other software that might help facilitate this. I believe Todd Geist is hosting mFM on Wordpress which seems to be working well for that purpose; perhaps it or another WP theme could be adapted to suit the standards project.

[alec gregory]

I think you're right. It's not simple or clear for people who want to either contribute to the discussion or keep track of past discussion to do so in the current set up, which is distributed across confluence existing comments, confluence Disqus and this group.

But more important than this, I think the excellent work produced by the FileMaker Standards community could and should be presented better. I think this would lead to better standards and better discussion in the long run.

A few ideas about how this could be done:

• Single domain: drop the google group, access everything through filemakerstandards.org
• Have a public facing area of the site and a more technical area where standards are discussed and proposals put forward. Wordpress would be my recommendation for a framework that could achieve that. It's free, easy to deploy and manages multiple users and multiple levels of users really well. It's also easy to customize and easy to find developers for if you need something a bit hard. http://foundation.zurb.com/. It would also need to be much easier for people to access the latest versions of the relevant files for using the standards.
• Make the public facing / main page of the site more inviting and geared towards encouraging people to use the standards and contribute towards making them better. Something along the lines of Zurb's Foundation site (http://foundation.zurb.com/) is the sort of design I'm thinking about, large text, nice layout, modern.
• Ability to donate towards the running costs of the FileMaker standards: hosting and development of the site, development of the standards themselves through get togethers or funded projects.

I've got some PHP / MySQL ability and WordPress experience, and have worked on copywriting and content strategy. I'd be happy to contribute to any migration or web project that was decided on.

[Matt Petrowsky]

I'll reserve any comment on being "purchased" for when I have
something to sell. ;)

Here's what we currently have going on.

# The Software

The bulk of the content is obviously in Confluence. It's a very
powerful platform for editing and composing digital documents. It was
formerly running off mysql and my server was updated to use mariadb.
Confluence doesn't official support mariadb and I couldn't update for
a long time.

I recently migrated the database to postgresql and that seems to be
working fine. Confluence has native support for it - although they
will only be supporting > 9.2 in the next release. My server is more
than capable of handling the load (6 cores, 8GB ram < 30% CPU
utilization average), although keeping up with security updates (there
was just one a few days ago) is time/effort I have to expend. Overall,
it's not that much time to keep it running. My box does not run Apache
and instead is using nginx. Of course, Confluence is java based and
runs under its own jre.

# The GoogleGroup

This was setup for the purpose of notifications from the site or
github repo. It wasn't really meant for discourse. Although, because
it does use email, people will reply to stuff - just like I am now. :)
The Google Group is pretty much hidden unless those who read the site
seek it out. The stuff in the group could be integrated into the site
via frames though - I would assume.

# Disqus

I was only recently told about this by Micah Woods and it looks like
it's a good solution to the 10 user limit on Confluence. I had
contacted Atlassian about an open source license, but they pointed me
to their requirements doc and we can't meet the specs. I could try
again, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

Disqus seems like a nice option. It allows individual control of your
comment notifications, but pretty much everything you do through it is
completely public. You can click on a users's profile and see all
their comments through the Disqus system. Plus, the Confluence plug-in
is $50. Plus, the content is then under the control of a third party.

# Moving forward

I'm guessing that getting content out of Confluence and into something
else will be pretty painful (read time-consuming). Not impossible, but
will require more effort than I personally have. If the integrity of
what we have can be preserved, then I can simply offer up the db if
someone wants to parse - or knows of a converter. You'll need to be
familiar/comfortable with postgres to pull the data out - unless you
simply site scrapped filemakerstandards.org with something like wget.
Maintaining cross-links would be a bit of a pain since internally
confluence does not use absolute urls.

Hosting is also an issue. My server is pretty much locked down tight
within ssh key based access only through a non root account.
Confluence is sitting behind a proxy because my other services are
using standard ports. If someone else does want to host and it seems
reasonable, then I can certainly help admin. I could also setup a host
somewhere and we move the site off my business box. This would require
someone else with sysadmin skills. Does anyone else want to volunteer?
Have good shell skills? It would also be an additional cost. Is this
something the community will bear?

We could easily say all comments should now go through Disqus and that
seems reasonable to me - aside from the downsides of not being under
our control. In fact, the comments weren't flowing at all until I
installed the add-on. Now we're having this discussion. :)

It seems like this is a bit more of a 'policy' issue than one of
technical detriment. Confluence is good at what it does. We just need
to outline how we want to handle things. The feedback I've heard from
people using the standards say they go to the site and print off pdfs
and provide them to their developers. I've heard this from a few
companies.

I've also been told that they like the fact that there are a few
'moderators' who curate the content.

Overall, I'm flexible in that it would be good to share the
responsibility/time/costs/efforts with others. The big question is
does the time/effort/requirements warrant the investment?

[Matt Petrowsky]

Also of note. If look & feel is a big enough issue, there are $10
themes available for confluence. Very few, but some.

Here is one of them.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.refinedwiki.confluence.plugins.theme.original

[dansmith65]

This reply was emailed to me:

by pure coincidence I stumbled upon the post in the google group. Since I'm not a member I can't post but maybe you want to add my comment? Or think about ? ;o)
As you may know (do you?), I own a community licence of Confluence and JIRA, valid for Unlimited participants. This is running under the FileMaker Mentoring umbrella but I don't want to spend the expensive hosting costs anymore. Before I give this license back we can think about merging or joining both?!
What are your thoughts on that?
And what about switching to an other platform at all? I always try to stay away from paid services or stuff I can't easily host by myself.
While TikiWiki might not be as elegant as Confluence it might be worth to think about.
dotfmp.com is running TikiWiki.

P.S: I seriously dislike disqus. They just have to shut down their service and ALL comments are gone! Bad idea, IMHO

[Matt Petrowsky]

Yes, I got his email in my inbox and I’ll be replying to him regarding
this. I didn’t know he had an unlimited license and that would
certainly be the best option as we would control the data.

I’ll see what he wants to do. If he’s ok with just giving me the
license number then I could put it on the site. The bigger issue that
opens up is the potential number of spam accounts.

I would likely still make it so people had to request accounts and an
admin would set them up.

But, at least people would be able to comment. I will also need to
install an SSL cert on the site have the login go through it so we
didn’t get any plain text snooping for site access.

Matt

On 7 Mar 2015, at 14:39, dansmith65 wrote:

> This reply was emailed to me by Egbert Friedrich:

>
> by pure coincidence I stumbled upon the post in the google group.
> Since I'm
>> not a member I can't post but maybe you want to add my comment? Or
>> think
>> about ? ;o)
>> As you may know (do you?), I own a community licence of Confluence
>> and
>> JIRA, valid for Unlimited participants. This is running under the
>> FileMaker
>> Mentoring umbrella but I don't want to spend the expensive hosting
>> costs
>> anymore. Before I give this license back we can think about merging
>> or
>> joining both?!
>> What are your thoughts on that?
>> And what about switching to an other platform at all? I always try to
>> stay
>> away from paid services or stuff I can't easily host by myself.
>> While TikiWiki might not be as elegant as Confluence it might be
>> worth to
>> think about.
>> dotfmp.com is running TikiWiki.
>>
>
>

>> I'm looking forward hearing from you!
>> Egbert

>>
>> P.S: I seriously dislike disqus. They just have to shut down their
>> service
>> and ALL comments are gone! Bad idea, IMHO
>