Fight against spam on this forum

[Petar Korponaić]

Let's fight against spam on this forum together: daily brief shows mostly ORACLE or SAP ONLINE TRAINING and similar. 

Let's "report abuse" for each non-meteor related commercial posts! Agree?

[Babu Subramanian]

Petar-

You said it. Can't agree more. It's really menace.

Is there a way by which the spammers can be removed from the group? They're wasting time canvassing for Oracle & SAP training here. I wish they knew that it's a waste of their time too!

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Petar Korponaić <petar.k...@gmail.com> wrote:

Let's fight against spam on this forum together: daily brief shows mostly ORACLE or SAP ONLINE TRAINING and similar. 

Let's "report abuse" for each non-meteor related commercial posts! Agree?

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[Marin Pranjić]

Interesting read:
http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/

Has anything changed since then?

Marin

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[Aaron Cammarata]

Totally. I "Report Abuse" daily, but of course, they're back daily. I only did that because I assumed that over time the Google filtering software would start picking it up. Obviously, that's not happening. Instead, I've decided to start visiting the forum later in the day, after others have done the work. Then I felt guilty, so now I come early and Report Abuse about half the time. :-}

Still - it sucks. It really makes you want to go do some very un-buddhist things to these a-holes.

[Arunoda Susiripala]

Yes. this is a headache. 
I think only option is to approve emails before a user can post to the forum.

After his first post and approval he can submit anytime he can.

I hope there is an option for this.

So, MDG can ask few volunteers to manage new messages(from new users) and verify them.

How about that?

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[Avital Oliver]

If we were to switch away from Google Groups, what would you people think we should switch to?

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[Arunoda Susiripala]

I don't think we need to switch.
Just allow email verification first.

Let someone(or a set of people) to verify emails based on real questions?

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[Aaron Cammarata]

Wouldn't the problem from Marin's post earlier still apply - spammers would spoof our pre-approved emails, and we'd be back to square one.

If only there were something built on Meteor that could handle this... ;)

[ServerMeta]

You are right, Guys preapproving the emails will not work, it will only moderately stifle the problem, while it will very effectively drive new users away from this forum.

Google groups is dead, plain and simple. They offer a free service, but this means that we dont get enough CPU time to effectively filter spam. Using a traditional forum is also out of question, as they are a pain in the ass usability wise.

Yes we could build something with meteor, to show how much meteor is cool. And I agree that it is cool, but the most difficult part to get right with a forum is the usability, which is a problem that Meteor doesnt address directly, but delegates to front end libraries.

I propose discourse:

http://www.discourse.org/

1) It is open source

2) It can integrate very easily with meteor, wordpress, static sites, or whatever we might decide to use with discourse

3) It's the state of the art of web discussion usability

It would cost around 1000 euros per year.

600 euros to rent for a year a server with 32 gb of ram, xeon e3, SSD. I would virtualize it, so we can have multiple containers, one for the DB, one for the web front end, two reverse proxies, one MTA, etc

200 euros to setup a global CDN (optional)

200 for backup space

25 euros for domain + SSL

I think this is really peanut, compared to the dimension of this community, and I'm even willing to pay for the expenses (WHOHOOO!) if the community decide to go down this path. But I'm sure more contributors will step in and help.

I run an hosting company, but I will not use my services for this, as this would pose me in a conflict of interest. I just know where to buy the best hardware and network for the best price. And I know how to setup everything.

I would need help from a designer, as I dont know squat about photoshop, and I'm an html/css beginner.

We could set this up in less than a week, with some dummy graphic, and keep improving from there. This would give this community an edge over other projects. Discourse naturally build a wiki, that could help us organize the best content to help new and existing users.

[Sam Hatoum]

crater.io? built with Meteor

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[ServerMeta]

crater is more news-oriented, rather than discussion-oriented. 

I think usability matters a lot, and discourse is simply the best out there.

[Frank Helmschrott]

Good point,

i've already written a Mail in direction Meteor a few hours ago suggesting exactly the same thing (Discourse). I already had registered some domains in the past that would fit that need as i already wanted to jump in this direction. I just decided to wait until Meteor is past 1.0 and then ask for their plans regarding this. I think it would be good to get MDG in the boat to make this kind of the officiall discussion platform as there's one thing no one needs: just another site. Discussion is realdy split on this group, IRC, gitter.im (github chat), stackexchange. I think that could only work if it's getting kind of official support.

No matter which way: Count me in. I got already some Discourse experiences and you wouldn't even need that much hardware for it but could slowly grow - Discourse is perfect for that. Setup is easy.

There's no future in Google Groups - no sense of staying here as all the content will be lost too once they switch of the lights here.

[Jason O'Gray]

I completely agree with the the route that this is going. I tend to lurk here to stay abreast on things, and the past couple of weeks this group has really lost its value because of the spammers. 

The only caveat is I believe Meteor should be hosting whatever is needed for the community. They are VC funded, not some small open source project struggling to keep the lights on and doing it for charity. Even at $1,000 a month (Discourse's highest tiered plan), it's peanuts for them -- they probably spend more on snacks for the office than that. Really, it's in their best interest to keep and grow the community as quickly as possible.

[hplogsdon]

Last I checked, well over a year ago I will admit, Discourse had a huge disconnect with email. Maybe I'm just showing my age when I say having meteor-talk come to my my inbox where I can categorize and filter server side is why I'm subscribed.

The last list I was subscribed to that moved to Discourse, Ruby Rogues Parley, quickly became an annoyance. I don't want to have to go to some site, log in, and then see that there aren't any discussions that are interesting or replies to something I'm interested in 4 out of 5 times each day. 

On some of the Google groups that I am subscribed to, having new users be moderated cuts down spam by orders of magnitude, even if it is a slight annoyance for real humans at first. Spammers don't take the time to craft 4 or 5 well thought out replies or topics to get through the waiting periods if it's not a fire-and-forget system, it's too much work. 

My vote is to stay, with all of the warts that come with Groups, trying to make this list better the way it is.

- Howard Logsdon

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[Frank Helmschrott]

Am Dienstag, 6. Januar 2015 16:42:51 UTC+1 schrieb Jason O'Gray:

The only caveat is I believe Meteor should be hosting whatever is needed for the community. They are VC funded, not some small open source project struggling to keep the lights on and doing it for charity. Even at $1,000 a month (Discourse's highest tiered plan), it's peanuts for them -- they probably spend more on snacks for the office than that. Really, it's in their best interest to keep and grow the community as quickly as possible.

To be honest: i don't think MDG should have to pay for it just because they are VC funded. I'm receiving work from them for free and i am completely willing to give back (to them and the community from which i also receive loads of help). That's why i also try to spend money inside the community - may it be for all the great books people are writing, Screencasts they are doing or services they are offering. I totally like that the Meteor community from early days on grows into a more professionally aligned Open source community than many others. But that's drifting too far away now.

Speaking clearly: Hosting a viable Discourse forum for the current size of the Meteor community isn't costly at all and if everyone helps a bit with coding one or the other Module/Plugin (like Meteor.com-Auth ond other stuff) i think that could be an easy going thing. 

I also think Discourse is the only real alternative for such a project. Coding something from the beginning is way hard and people at Discourse (some people that formerly made Stackexchange) did a great work during the last years with that. It's slim, handy, performant and spam savy due to a great community handling approach. People not knowing Discourse yet and wanting to build a community should definitely look into that.

Frank

[Gabriel Pugliese]

Hmm Telescope is too simple?

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[ServerMeta]

Telescope doesnt cover the use case. I stress that is usability what matters the most.

[ServerMeta]

You dont have to log in a discourse forum to read it, and you can do it with one click now (single sign on).

[Frank Helmschrott]

Am Dienstag, 6. Januar 2015 17:24:31 UTC+1 schrieb Gabriel Pugliese:

Hmm Telescope is too simple?

Telescope is amazing for what it is, but it is no software for discussions.

[Vianney Lecroart]

+1 for discourse

Vianney Lecroart

Website | Blog | LinkedIn | Facebook | @acemtp

PS: I welcome VSRE emails!

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[dcsan]

there was a discussion about this on crater awhile back. 

http://crater.io/posts/qHzZmGLbDGWuzfgnQ

i've used discourse for some game forums before and it's pretty good. 

it would be great to dogfood and if crater.io (telescope) was more active, maybe any missing features could get developed. it's perfectly fine for threaded discussion ala google groups, although not up to par with all that discourse offers.

personally i mostly use the webUI for groups, not email, since i don't like tons of GG postings by email. 

what are the main features telescope (crater) doesn't have that discourse does?

also concerned about splitting the community again, so it would need to be broadly agreed...

there's also /r/meteor

there's a difference between features and users. with GG or reddit, there's more drive-by traffic. with a standalone forum we'd need to make some effort to focus that as the "official" destination.

[dcsan]

btw

https://www.discoursehosting.com/pricing/

$40/month for 500K PV.

/dc

[Avital Oliver]

(To clarify, MDG would definitely pay for whatever solution we think is the best for the community)

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[Dan Dascalescu]

I manage a forum powered by MyBB (Quantified Self) and MyBB is a pain in the ass, but runs great on low-end hosting.

I'd vote for Discourse too, as it's developed by the StackOverflow people.

The only other contender I'd recommend is Vanilla Forums. Both open source and hosted.

On the other hand, spam will be a problem anywhere because these days spammers are paid and CAPTCHAS or Report Forum Spam can't combat them effectively.. Not sure that moving this from Google groups to some other forum would solve it.

Other features may be more compelling: voting (the stars on Google Groups don't do much), better search, automatic suggestion of similar topics

[Arunoda Susiripala]

Seems like discourse has a Akismet plugin too: https://github.com/verdi327/akismet

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[Petar Korponaić]

I think it's best to stay here. Google talk is best indexed by google search (of course) and works great. Question is why "report abuse" doesn't work? If multiple people report abuse, that messages should be deleted and user banned. Is that too hard for google developers to implement?

[Petar Korponaić]

or... maybe we are just too lazy to regularly report spam - and that's why spam filter doesn't work (?)

[Angel Java Lopez]

+10 for googlegroups, it's good, simple, "intravenous" info (read simple checking the email), good search, etc... I subscribed to other googlegroups and this group is the most notorious with spam. First email manually approved should be a good strategy to avoid such spam.

Angel "Java" Lopez

@ajlopez

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[Frank Helmschrott]

> On the other hand, spam will be a problem anywhere because these days spammers are paid and CAPTCHAS or Report Forum Spam can't combat them effectively.. Not sure that moving this from Google groups to some other forum would solve it.

You could read about how Discourse handles manual spam. It's one of the main reasons i love Discourse so much. Quickly said: There's a trust system that is mainly controlled by trusted users. With this system of course you can't completely avoid new spam but you can at least avoid it to be publicly present so much and you quickly get it away with the help of your regular users. And if it not works one time the Discourse team is keen to hear the reason and works on helping to get rid of that problem.

Discourse in many points is clearly not comparible to "other webforums" as they chose  a completely different approach when starting to develop it.

[Frank Helmschrott]

as i can't edit posts here i have to post this one below. Here's a post by codinghorror (the ex-stackoverflow man and founder of Discourse) about how Discourse fights manual Spam. Good read. https://meta.discourse.org/t/some-ideas-for-spam-control/10393/2 

[Frank Helmschrott]

Am Dienstag, 6. Januar 2015 17:12:48 UTC+1 schrieb H.P. Logsdon:

Last I checked, well over a year ago I will admit, Discourse had a huge disconnect with email. Maybe I'm just showing my age when I say having meteor-talk come to my my inbox where I can categorize and filter server side is why I'm subscribed.

I see your concerns if you are more used to Mailing Lists. That is a discussion that disconnects people ever since but i think Discourse isn't a bad way for a halfway house as it offers Reply-by-email and a per-category option to start threads by email. This is optional though and Admins need to set it up correctly but i would gladly help here to make life easier for people focussed more on email after a switch. 

[ServerMeta]

MDG is the meteor developer group? and I see you are part of the meteor core group, so I think this is the official stance on the matter?

It's very good to know, as avoiding any third party commercial interest is very good for the meteor community.

[ServerMeta]

40$ for 500k PV is a theft. We can buy 1 billion (10^9) pageviews for 150$ a month. They make it pay it so much, because they are selling hosting AND management. If I have to buy a managed discourse hosting, I would buy it from the official guys, or not buy it at all. Why buy management on a new software which is still a mistery for most of the technicians? I think it's much better to buy plain, non managed hosting, and then setup ourselves as per the official discourse How To.

And pageviews are not the most crucial parameter to consider. The Meteor community is subject to HUGE traffic spikes, as the meteor blog documented before. Are you willing to have the discussion board offline on Meteor Day, exactly when we need it the most?

The only thing I disagree with @Frank, is that meteor doesnt require much resources. In my opinion it is still under heavy development, and they had not spent enough time yet on code refactoring to make discourse efficient. It heavily use a database, and is not suited for high loads in the default configuration.

Making absolute assumption like "discourse is heavy on resources" or not, is not very clever. We should take AT least a comparison parameter. Discourse is much much heavier than wordpress, or than the average Meteor App. It is heavier to start up and run empty, and it uses more resources per user to scale, always compared to a wordpress blog or an average meteor app.

[Frank Helmschrott]

The only thing I disagree with @Frank, is that meteor doesnt require much resources. In my opinion it is still under heavy development, and they had not spent enough time yet on code refactoring to make discourse efficient. It heavily use a database, and is not suited for high loads in the default configuration.

Well i don't say you're right and of course it's always a question of comparison but i have quite some experiences with old-style php and perl based web discussion systems and now a few with discourse and discourse in that is comparibly quite resource friendly.  You still have to admire that the posting frequency here and on other platforms around Meteors is still at a very low level where you won't have any problems. Thats why i think we don't need to investigate too deep prior to starting out. Let's not make this more complicated as required.

I think we have two options:

1. MDG does a statement of paying for the expenses (i don't know how official this post above was but i haven't heard back on my email to them so far). In this case most probably a solution with hosting at Discourse officially would be a great solution also because they would probably be handy with a deal having another good open source community in their portfolio.

2. WE (you, I, whoever) do it ourselves, then from my POV starting out with a 4Gig RAM VM is totally good as a starter. If its on one of our existing machines (i'd have one for that) you can always expand a bit until you really have the need to move it to different or exclusive hardware but i don't see that coming so quickly.

Of course you always need to have resources left but i'd not vote for going to big just because "something could eventually happen in the future somehow". Growing hardware wise isn't too hard these days.

But one thing for sure: Going with official discourse hosting would most probably be the most flexible and professionally supported way.

Frank

[Stephan Hochhaus]

I'd rather leave Google Groups sooner than later.

First, I hate e-mail, already I am overwhelmed by it, so it is not a big advantage to receive new discussions I am not taking part in. Spam lowers my acceptance and it does not seem that we can get a grip on spammers on this forum without some Google activity involved.

Second, design and usability suck for discussions. To quote Frank from another message on this thread: "as i can't edit posts here i have to post this one below". This results in so many new emails, not really adding much to a conversation. Groups is an e-mail archiving system, not a means to promote discussions. Email is just a crutch many of us got used to when no better means of asynchronous communication were available. Please let it die in peace.

I agree Crater.io is not useful as a replacement, as it focuses on priority discussions. Being completely new to Discourse I love that it behaves like a forum but adds the ability to like contributions, indicating how valuable a certain contribution could be. Overall it looks to promote interaction whereas Google Groups is for librarians and historians who look for old stuff.

As intriguing as indexing groups content is, I am against aiming to use it as a resource to educate people about how to solve common problems. As Dan suggested somewhere previously (cannot find it anymore), StackOverflow is a much better place for answers, meteor-talk is actually that, a discussion forum. Just consider how much outdated information is in these archives already (simplest example is people suggestion Deps instead of Tracker). That is hardly beneficial for wisdom-seekers coming in from Google's index.

TL;DR

Please let us find a good platform to foster discussion and seize the opportunity to escape the Spammers and move to an alternative that is not archaic in nature. Discourse seems fine, but I am not in a position to judge whether it is a good choice. I'll leave that to others.

[Dirk Porsche]

Actually I'm not bothered by the Spam here, at all.

But I have only subscribed for daily summaries of all the activities here. Than it's easy to filter out the spam. For actual discussions I'm taking part in I set the "E-Mail-Updates an mich" flag and get immediate updates on relevant topics.

But I would switch over to whatever platform you propose (unless it's Facebook). 

Regards.

Dirk

[Aaron Cammarata]

Wow,. Given the amount of energy expended on this thread, I wonder if maybe we should just pool our sheckels and see if we can hire Anonymous to go after them.

Anyone else read "Daemon" and "Freedom(tm)", by Daniel Suarez? God, that scene where they went after the spammers felt good!

[ServerMeta]

any news on this matter? Maybe me and frank could setup a github repo.

Any designer available to help us?

[David Collier]

who are the actual admins here? 

maybe if we can switch to "first post has to be moderated" that would cut a lot of the spam. those guys seem to be using the same account to post day after day. not sure if that will just escalate things but it's worth a try?

we could have a few admins, so the delay for a new user joining wouldn't be very long?

/dc

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[Frank Helmschrott]

Am 11.01.2015 01:08 schrieb "ServerMeta" <alberto...@gmail.com>:
>
> any news on this matter? Maybe me and frank could setup a github repo.
>
> Any designer available to help us?

I'm not sure but if we're going to go with discourse, the least important would be a designer for the beginning. Discourse is pretty enough out of the box to start with that.

The more important thing is responsibility. A gut hub repo is a nice thing but someone has got to run this thing,  pay for it and so on.  Probably better if one single person is in this role. Others still can support then but you always need someone to be responsible.

I could take this role but I'm not trying to queue-jump if others do so.

Until now MDG didn't answer my email so I'm not sure what their opinion on this is. 

Frank

[Walter Lee Davis]

This is how the Prototype mailing list works; I'm an admin there.

Walter

[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

What I think would be grand, if there'd be something like discourse, if meteor projects could get their own categories there too, eg. for iron-router related q&a or for autoform/collection2 etc.

Also it'd might be good to separate questions into categories, eg. "Beginner Questions", "Working with Meteor", "Package Development" etc.

Best wishes

Daniel

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

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[3even soft]

It took me all but 60 seconds to flag all the spam messages in gmail. I have yet to see any of them reach my inbox in over a week.

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[David Collier]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 10:17 AM, 3even soft <3eve...@gmail.com> wrote:

It took me all but 60 seconds to flag all the spam messages in gmail. I have yet to see any of them reach my inbox in over a week.

so you're reading all forum email via gmail client, not forum software, and relying on gmails filters? maybe that works better...

/dc

[Paul Dowman]

Requiring the first post to be moderated works well. I've used it before.

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[hplogsdon]

I'm in agreement. Why are we searching for a solution that will most certainly not be a magic bullet when we haven't bothered seeing if the current one can work with minor adjustments? 

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[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

@Everybody: I think the issue might be that there's another "want" below the spam problem: The problem of the signal to noise ration for actual discussion is getting worse, and it's hard to keep track of interesting discussions.

Further on the actual communication between the Meteor Team and the community can feel sparse at times, and maybe the hope is that it could be easier to have more content-focused discussions in a different communication system.

Also some of the bigger packages could also profit from a nice discussion area.

Between Github Code Repositories and Github Issues there is hardly a common place for having shared discussions. Stack Overflow explicitely *isn't* about bantering and discussing possible implementation details, much less for structuring a community.

So the "bigger guys" who spend a lot of time on Meteor Packages and the Ecosystem probably found ways to communicate with one another and possibly to stay in touch with the Meteor core team via Meetups etc along the East Coast of the US, but the rest of us has to keep up and follow all the different trails by ourselves... 

So maybe some Community Building / Focussing may be in order?

Or am I the only one that feels this way?

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

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[Frank Helmschrott]

just wanted to keep you in the loop: I got feedback from MDG yesterday. They're following the discussion and discussing internally what's the right way to go for them. Chances are that they will take action themselves. I will wait for the result before i invest any time here and decide afterwards.

[Stephan Hochhaus]

Thanks, Frank.

I am glad this issue is discussed at MDG as well. I know they have dedicated people for community management and they know about the value a thriving community gives. That said I am confident that we will see some improvements in the future. Even though I keep my fingers crossed that we will get rid of an e-mail based system soon I don't get my hopes up yet ;)

Cheers!

Stephan

Am 13.01.2015 um 09:35 schrieb Frank Helmschrott <fhelms...@gmail.com>:

just wanted to keep you in the loop: I got feedback from MDG yesterday. They're following the discussion and discussing internally what's the right way to go for them. Chances are that they will take action themselves. I will wait for the result before i invest any time here and decide afterwards.

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[ServerMeta]

I would like to underline that discourse is not only about spam, but also about usability.

Google groups are very bad for searching, organizing and involving a broader audience. 

It's 2015. Please stop using a tool invented more than 20 years ago.

[Denis Gorbachev]

A discussion system with subtopics, where package authors and volunteers could subscribe for questions, would be great. Does Discourse support subtopics + subscriptions on them?

[ServerMeta]

Yes. And much much more. 

[Denis Gorbachev]

Great, then it should be worth a try. Do you know any other discussion systems, just to make sure we're making a balanced decision?

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[Angel Java Lopez]

The main current problem is spam.

Then

- Modify this list to manual approve the first email of a user

Any other problem:

- Create a new system (or many ones)

- See what is the better system (meteor-talk, discourse, etc...)

As usual in open source, "fork and see" ;-)

Angel "Java" Lopez

@ajlopez

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[Stephan Hochhaus]

Angel,

I disagree that the main problem is spam. I think the main problem is user engagement. Spam is one factor that decreases people's motivation to actually take part in discussions on meteor-talk.

So for me the question is how can we use technology to facilitate communication. There is a vocal group of people (no idea how big it actually is) that considers mailing lists to be a poor solution. Some have experience with discourse and suggest it as a better means to foster an active discussion around everything Meteor. Unless we try it we won't know for sure if it helps, but I am still not so sure that a majority of the people on this list feel like me. Then again, if we plan to open up the Meteor community it should include some informed input on why people are not taking part in meteor-talk as those may be pulled into discourse perhaps...

I wonder whether Robert or Alice have any plans for 2015 already.

Cheers!

Stephan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAMs%2BDq%2BZxGc7uZegwY9kmpJiYUCAXX%3Ds2O%3DKf1%3Dtcj7kf80B8A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Alice Yu]

No plans yet, but we're well aware of this thread. :-) For now, we've been watching w/o commenting so as not to skew the conversation too much, but when we have the bandwidth, we'll sit down and take a fresh look at whether we should use google groups, Discourse, or some other solution. In the meantime, I definitely encourage feedback and thoughts from anyone who has a preference, even if it's a very mild one, and even if your preference is for the status quo. Sometimes in discussions like this, people abstain from saying e.g. "I'm actually fine w/ how things are" out of politeness to the people proposing changes, or because they think a +1 for status quo doesn't add to the discussion. But in this case, I definitely want to hear from any and all viewpoints.

Alice

[Bryan Koen]

I would say +1 for Discourse.

It's a great system.

--Bryan

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAPcU91KKh%2BpWugu5BP4c8_%3Dr7Extn8R5uxQM8LR-vf%3DYz7Xi8g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Petar Korponaić]

I started this thread :) My idea was just fight against spam: report spam and ban bad users (if that's possible). 

This group already have large number of users, large number of posts and is well indexed by google. Moving this forum is like moving your profitable store to another location just because you have few bad customers. You are in risk to lost good/everyday customers. :)

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/54B81E34.7050205%40gmail.com.

[Angel Java Lopez]

+1 for googlegroups with first email manually approved

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/54B81E34.7050205%40gmail.com.

[James Wilson]

+1 for googlegroups with first email manually approved

James Wilson

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAMs%2BDqLvHm8-ZddS34BF8PN3%2Bh5AXZaPNxvRBW3s3hDfFMGjrg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sam Hatoum]

Discourse. Having an official point is more likely to get people to flock. There's a lot of fragmentation right now between talk, github community, gitter and now slack! 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAPLk92_2nvX%2BfGhVVeeUK7u2uiNAiPZ5h21qk%3D2DcS15LHFPJw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Stephan Hochhaus]

+1 for discourse.

I agree with Sam we saw several attempts to create community places already, even kickstarter campaigns. There is definitely a need for a go-to-place.

If we are to attract people that build a new web using Meteor an antiquated email list as the main means of communication feels incompatible.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CANQB4mnPGP%2BTF2zJpn4wjYjgKtEnxDpo5_m5DexH6C_2fN4WEA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Dan Dascalescu]

ᐧ

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 2:09 PM, Sam Hatoum <hat...@gmail.com> wrote:

Discourse. Having an official point is more likely to get people to flock. There's a lot of fragmentation right now between talk, github community, gitter and now slack! 

Slack? What Slack?

I had no idea about a Meteor discussion on Slack, and I'm a pretty involved community member. Likewise with Gitter - I only learned about it rather randomly a month ago or so. Then there's IRC.

And yes, GitHub community discussions at https://github.com/MeteorCommunity/discussions - a perverted use of GitHub issues.

Fragmentation is terrible. I can see a need for instant chat (Gitter/IRC/Slack) vs. a forum (meteor-talk and meteor-core) vs. technical QA vs. meta-QA (Quora) vs. roadmap discussion (Trello, GitHub Meteor Community), but I think one of each should be enough.

1. Forum - as an admin of a forum with ~5000 users, I would suggest Discourse or Vanilla Forums.

2. Instant chat - Gitter. IRC has no search capabilities. Slack is nice, but given that I haven't heard of Meteor discussions over Slack, I suppose the user mass there is the easiest to migrate elsewhere.

3. QA - StackOverflow, though there are several OCD moderators that have closed legitimate Meteor questions. That can be addressed by  a group of five Meteor users on SO with reputation over 3000 reopening the good ones. Unfortunately Quora questions are no longer a fit for the restrictive culture and guidelines on StackOverflow, so we'll need both.

4. Roadmap - I'd much prefer an active, engaged discussion on GitHub a-la-Meteor Community rather than the unidirectional Trello roadmap, but I understand if the core devs don't have the resources to get more involved than they already do on Trello.

[ServerMeta]

Peter, as stated multiple times in this thread, google groups PENALIZE google ranking. You can see it from the fact that many many problems searched on google show stackoverflow as first reply, and the google groups many pages behind. 

+1 for discourse, as it's hard to take seriously a framework which claims to be modern, but use as official discussion platform a tool invented 20 years ago.

Alice, putting online discourse would take lesst than 1 week, with some exceptional home made graphic. You could put it online, and see how users will swarm there. 

People think they are fine, until they are forced to use something better. 

[Frank Helmschrott]

Alice,

thanks for your feedback here. I'm happy you are in the loop even though i thought you were already discussing that issue and anywhere near to a result. I think discussion on that topic has happened enough - we've seen that there are several valid arguments in different direction.

What is definitely clear is the fact that the discussion aiming for a change longly isn't about spam only - i think even not primarily. Lots of people are just unhappy with the situation and so am i. I have never been happy to use Google Groups before as i'm not a fan of mailing lists and the webfrontend simply isn't something you really want to use. It is cluttered and full of overhead. As a non-english user they additionally show you highlighted translation bars everywhere - annoying. I think that fact that this is the only officially linked discussion base and people aren't happy with that is the primary reason why community is so cluttered. There just isn't any real "home" for the community that fits the spirit of Meteor so everyone chooses what fits them best. Some are here, some prefer Stack Overflow, other feel at home in Github issues. The same goes for chat. IRC seems to be the obvious solution for every open source project but the rising activity on Gitter and the Meteorjs-Slack-Channel show at least a fragment of people don't always prefer the old, obvious things but rather user something more modern solution.

What i'm definitely not sure about: Is it better to have such a discussion forums run "officially" or better community organized. At the end of course it needs to be supported by MDG but i tend to think it would be better if it was community organized.

[Arunoda Susiripala]

Alice, 

What do you mean by bandwidth?

If you need a vote, let's do it :)

There is no way of carrying this discussion like this.

It's unstructured.

So, currently we've two main options.

1) Use Discourse

2) googlegroups with first email manually approved

There is one thing we need to think.

Every day we get tons of spams. (I use email client to watch and respond)

So everyday, I am thinking this issue will get fixed tomorrow.

If I was managing this group, I simply do a vote. (post here, send it to crater.io, tweet it)

Then took a decision within a day :D 

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[Dirk Porsche]

3) keep it, as it is.

Async daily updates are easily skimmed for interesting topics and spam. 

[Frank Helmschrott]

2015-01-16 11:59 GMT+01:00 Dirk Porsche <dirkpo...@googlemail.com>:

3) keep it, as it is.

Async daily updates are easily skimmed for interesting topics and spam. 

This is a feature nearly every web forum software offers for years and Discourse does so, too (apart from that spam part). You can choose to get daily or weekly digests or instant emails. Even replying by email (not with digests of course) and starting new topics by email is possible. 

[Daler Karimov]

Hey Guys,

I understand and share the previously stated concerns, however I believe that Telescope ( http://Telesc.pe ) is a very good option to look at and here is why:

Yes, Discourse is kinda cool, free and kinda ready, however if we (the Meteor community) want to have a platform for discussion which is *perfect for our tastes and needs* then we should probably try to build it ourselves and make it as good as we can, despite the odds. :)

And using Telescope as a base can make things easier, because:

1) it is a Meteor-based app, well supported, and has many features available for discussion needs (comments, replies, notifications, avatars, votes & karma vs. old-school "me too +1" :)) ;

2) it is free and open source software that we can use and learn from;

3) we can improve the design and extend its functionality however we like - and along the way create some packages that can be used by other Meteor apps!

4) we can extend Telescope to support external services like Github and StackOverflow, and others (to get feeds, file issues, make cross-posts etc.)

5) perhaps we can build a chat-solution to integrate with Telescope and allow kinda "Cross-chatting" i.e. visitors to Talk.meteor.com (a proposed place for "Meteor-Talk" discussions) can chat with folks on IRC or Gitter etc. (maybe using something like https://ConverseJS.org )

6) we could integrate or build some spam-fighting mechanisms or services into it, couldn't we?

Don't get me wrong, it just seems to me that with any language/framework the "makers" will face the time when they need to eat some "own dogfood", sooner or later :)))

So, to get us started let's share some ideas here: http://meta.telesc.pe/posts/4bwnj5p7crkKRjCKe

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAJzNrTGBcmOunWm-M1fKud2-MixnvObq74EJdGk2-9HfdGQJmQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sacha Greif]

Discourse is amazing, but I think Telescope can hold its own as well. As far as feature go, the main missing feature is the ability to reply to threads by email, but that can be implemented (it's on the roadmap anyway). 

I also think the fact that Telescope is a Meteor app is worth considering. It will make it much easier for the community itself to contribute to improving and maintaining its own community app. As we've recently seen with projects like Fastosphere, people are more than willing to pitch in when they get a chance. And who knows, some nice packages or patterns might come out of all those efforts, and benefit the whole Meteor community. Which won't happen if we spend that time hacking on Discourse instead. 

Of course, I'm not exactly impartial in all this, so I'm not the best person to plead Telescope's cause. But if the community does decide to use Telescope, I'll definitely be very happy and I'll do my best to help!

[Frank Helmschrott]

First of all: I’m a big fan of Telescope in special and Sachas work in general and i try to support him whenever possible.

With that said i don’t think Telescope would be the right direction for a meteor discussion community now. Discourse is not “kinda cool” but it is a well developed community platform that is much deeper and impressive behind the scenes as it looks on first sight. If you’ve had admin access to a Discourse installation and looked around for a while you know what i’m talking about. If not: to decide do yourself a favor and install the docker image - with a little knowledge it’s up and running on a VM in 15 minutes.

I see the points you are listing and i basically agree with most of them but the problem is there’s lots of “can” and “could” and not so much beeing done. I think the Meteor community would need a solid and attractive discussion platform now. Telescope could probably be that platform in the future but i think it is far away from that now and as i understood Sacha in the past he isn’t aiming to have a discussion platform with Telescope and i would agree if he still thinks it’s the better way to keep developing it in the current direction.

Having a meteor based discussion platform sounds appealing but as i said above Discourse is already beeing developed for quite some time now. Such a thing really takes lots of time and i doubt you’ll find enough developers doing a serious job on such a project to be at the same level in 2 years as Discourse has reached in the last 2 years. And then again it would be in 2 years, not now.

Discourse not only has nice features but is also relatively spam proof, performant, solid and has a drastically growing community behind it. Additionally it can of course be extended too (not with Javascript only in all cases unfortunately). Some of the features you named (like a meteor based chat) can easily be coupled with Discourse as it offers loads of APIs for Single-SignOn (which could also be the case with meteor.com Accounts) and allows to integrate into other functions. I think a Meteor SSO module even already exists.

Frank

[Dan Evans]

+1 For status quo until a Meteor based solution emerges. Perhaps one that allows importing existing threads from Google Groups?

[Daler Karimov]

Good points, Frank - it is always good to have an experience-supported advice, thanks!

Though, I believe that:
1) it is not about Spam-fighting only (here we agree). More on that here: http://meta.telesc.pe/posts/4bwnj5p7crkKRjCKe

2) a great Admin-backend/tools is probably not the main key to a great UX for end-users. But thanks for highlighting its importance!

3) we love Meteor for the fact it helps us build things faster and enjoy the process, so all the lacks of Telescope are not *years away to fix* if we help Sacha (guilty, I have "0" contributions made ;))

4) Sacha has expressed willingness to support such endeavor :)

Also, there are some superheros in our community (I'm calling for your powers :)) and yet one more thing:

the future might never happen if it doesn't have to happen.
So, let's make it inevitable :)

Daler.

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[Roderick Silva]

+1 for Telescope

I also believe that a Meteor discussion board should be built with Meteor. Will it be as good as Discourse fresh out of the box? No, but are we going to use all of the bells and whistles out of the box? Can we make it better than Google Groups? Yes.

Let's just build out the features we need as we need them. It may be a lightweight version of Discourse but it will be what we need.

1. We get the platform we need.
2. We build out a kick-arse Meteor app that shows off the power of Meteor (Dog food thing)
3. We build ourselves a super Telescope that we can all use in our apps when we need one.

If we go with Discourse we:
1. Get the platform we need
2. We show the community that we still haven't built a production ready forum.
3. We leave Telescope crew to fend for themselves and wait for them to give us something good.

Maybe I'm being a little dramatic but I say we build out Telescope. It is what a community should do.

** I say "we" but I really mean you superheros because I'm still working my way through the Leaderboard app.

[Abigail Watson]

It's important to remember that different communication channels facilitate different types of communication.  

To discuss offline community discussion...  we're noticing at the NY Meetups that we're averaging 100+ registrations at each event, and there's enough people that we're needing to hold multiple meetups each month.  As that change has been happening, we've been seeing a need for beginner's classes and 'advanced classes'.  Some meetups need space where people can hangout for devshop; while others need preinstalled audio/video equipment for recording and broadcasting.  Different community requirements for different types of activities.  

Similarly, there's a case to be made that there are multiple communication channels that need to be put into place, to help increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

- a news source

- an official community jobs board (with discussion area?)

- a codepen for code-review 
- a place for structured core community discussions 

- a cookbook for community best practices (biased, I know)

- a bulletin board system (another biased suggestion, but the only dogfood BBS solution I know of)

There are some initial attempts at all of these efforts.  But, again, MDG is a venture capital funded organization.  It's great to crowd-source efforts.  But at some point, MDG needs to ask if it's willing to devote resources to projects in the community and help amplify those efforts.  

Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense for Telescope to become a sponsored example app.  'meteor create --example telescope' makes a lot of sense to me.  Personally, I hope a version of GroupThink (a Meteor BBS solution) gets there someday as well.  

Crater.io, MeteorPen, and WeWorkMeteor are also all solutions that could benefit from receiving a bit of official MDG support.

The trick to doing this, however, is making sure things are cross-compatible.  Do Crater.io and MeteorPen and WeWorkMeteor support Meteor Developer accounts?  If not, how can we add that support?  How can we contribute the necessary polish to make them official community tools? How can we cross-link and embed their functionality in other apps and tools?  How can we standardize look and feel?  (Do we need to do that?)

[Luca Mussi (@splendido)]

+1 for a Telescope based solution!

Perhaps it is not ready yet, but we could end up integrating every needed feature.

...And in the end it would be a great example about how a community can grow and feed itself around the Meteor platform.

[Maxim Filimonov]

My 2 cents:

Telescope based solution would be great if we can make sure that it's not gonna stale. You might have heard of those enterprises writing they own CMSes and never finishing them due to lost of interest. 

As Telescope is not anyones primary product contributions will be limited to active meteor community members. Meanwhile, OSS projects with wider audience like Discourse reach beyond one language/framework community -> better support due to more contributors.

As user of both discourse and user groups based communities I would prefer Discourse every time. 

+1 for Discourse

[hplogsdon]

Wait, what? Stop using groups because it's based on NNTP? It's basically just email now, but we should stop because it's more than 20 years old? Should we stop using HTTP 1.1 as well? It's 15 years old. Hell, TCP/IP is older than all of them, let's just get rid of it. /rant

I'm in agreement with Peter on this. The title of this thread is about SPAM. If we want to deal with the issue of SPAM, let's moderate new users. If we want to move away from Google groups then start a new thread. 

On Jan 15, 2015, at 4:00 AM, ServerMeta <alberto...@gmail.com> wrote:

I would like to underline that discourse is not only about spam, but also about usability.

Google groups are very bad for searching, organizing and involving a broader audience. 

It's 2015. Please stop using a tool invented more than 20 years ago.

On Monday, January 5, 2015 at 2:35:40 PM UTC+1, Petar Korponaić wrote:

Let's fight against spam on this forum together: daily brief shows mostly ORACLE or SAP ONLINE TRAINING and similar. 

Let's "report abuse" for each non-meteor related commercial posts! Agree?

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[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

Hello,

great contributions from many commentators, that tells us that google groups is definitely working at least in *some ways*. :)

But I also feel that it's not working well enough anymore.

+1 for Discourse from me too.

Why Discourse:

---

I feel that Mailing lists can be great for some projects, but for meteor the volume of mail has gotten too large. I am not interested in skimming dozens of mails after a weekend to see which may be of general interest / interest to me.

The point is that every mail sent, either a new mail or one in reply to a thread, bumps this mail or thread to the top of my newsreader (ok, Google Mail). But that doesn't give me a lot of insight into which discussions are interesting or current for the greater community.

I like the Idea of building on Telescope, but Discourse is *MUCH* more than a sum of its parts. It builds on a lot of experience and is focussed on community-building and maintenance in a way that a new project simply can't and won't, if it's not the well funded main project of some *crazy* experienced people: http://blog.discourse.org/2014/08/introducing-discourse-1-0/

- It's from the same guy(s?) who built up Stack Overflow. And if you heard them talk about that, the technical side was maybe 20% of the effort, the other 80% has been tweaking the interactions, the scoring, and the (very strict) rules on Stack Overflow to retain a high Quality in answers and searchable results. And how to create other "Stack" - Pages, but only for big enough communities which werde hand picked to be ready to take advantage of the Stack family of products.

I feel like we'd have to work on two issues at once then: How to shape the discussion / debate *inside* the system, while still in the beginning of building up the same system. While at the same time wanting to use it as a center for the entire Meteor Community. I feel like that's a few too many interdependencies at once.

So rather start with something already well-tested for scale with many features which arrived through trial-and-error and lots of feedback already. The question to me is: What business are we in? I feel we're in the "Let's create an awesome community and ecosystem for Meteor" - business, not in the "Let's build the best Community Platform" business.

That doesn't mean that Telescope isn't awesome of course.

@Abigail: A Question: 

---

I like your breakdown of different communication platforms for different issues:

- a news source
- an official community jobs board (with discussion area?)
- a codepen for code-review 
- a place for structured core community discussions 
- a cookbook for community best practices (biased, I know)
- a bulletin board system (another biased suggestion, but the only dogfood BBS solution I know of)

- The only one thing I thought: Why did you list the BBS and the "Place for Community Discussions" separately?

I feel that this could / should be handled in the same general place / page, in a separate category probably.

It could ferment in the forum and as soon as something is ready to be spun off into an issue / github ticket somewhere, then it can go there.

Community Building

---

Also - part three of me throwing unicode bytes into the wishing well:

- I feel that there's a pretty high fenced wall between the community and meteor internal discussions. I know that you, @Abigail, are appearing here regularly, and other Meteor Core Devs too, but I don't get the entire picture of who's talking to whom in which discussion.

I feel like it would be great to have a stronger cohesion / interaction between the community and the Meteor Team, at least in some cases, when there are bigger questions to be discussed, like with this ticket about how the meteor community could be structured and which Ideas and needs the different participants have.

This could also work well for plugins, extensions, what to develop as an external package etc., organizing code sprints, planning / coordinating events etc.

----

So, please, I'd love a central place for community discussion as well as more interaction between the different parties!

Best wishes

Daniel

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/EE4FB766-EE6F-4B22-81D6-C0F63F9CE40F%40gmail.com.

[Abigail Watson]

Hi Daniel,

I think that list started off as a list of communication channel goals, and morphed half-way through into a list of community resources. I mostly tossed that last item in the list simply to point out that there's been at least one attempt to create a traditional BBS app in Meteor, and while it's less polished than Telescope, it's UI pattern is perhaps closer to a traditional help forum.   

As for who's talking to who, I'm with everybody else outside the fence wall.  I've simply been subscribed to the [meteor] repository and have read pretty much every issue for the past... oh, I dunno... 3000 issues?  (It's blown up my mailbox by 8000+ emails over the past 2 years, probably?.)   And I've got my ear close to the ground with what's going on in the Meteor Meetups in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.  But nothing official with the core dev team.
Abigail

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[Avital Oliver]

For the specific question about spam on the mailing list, I think our efforts at clicking on "Report Spam" are actually working:

------- 1 of 4  -------
Subject: DATASTAGE ONLINE TRAINING
From: Anusha S <anush...@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 16 10:51PM -0800

BIGINFOSYS offering DATASTAGE Online Training with real time experienced
faculties. Our DATASTAGE Online Training is regarded as the one of the best
Online Training in India. Our DATASTAGE Online Training will give you in
depth knowledge about

Approve: http://groups.google.com/group/meteor-talk/pendmsg?view=full&pending_id=540616032783947155

------- 2 of 4  -------
Subject: DATASTAGE ONLINE TRAINING
From: Anusha S <anush...@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 16 10:52PM -0800

BIGINFOSYS offering DATASTAGE Online Training with real time experienced
faculties. Our DATASTAGE Online Training is regarded as the one of the best
Online Training in India. Our DATASTAGE Online Training will give you in
depth knowledge about

Approve: http://groups.google.com/group/meteor-talk/pendmsg?view=full&pending_id=8243751109899841705

------- 4 of 4  -------
Subject: SAP HANA ONLINE TRAINING in INDIA
From: Anusha S <anush...@gmail.com>
Date: Jan 19 12:58AM -0800

SAP HANA Online Training at TEKSON IT SERVICES. We are providing SAP HANA
Online Training in a unique way to all the Candidates who have desire to
seek SAP HANA course. The development of this course was the meeting point
of all these SAP HANA

Approve: http://groups.google.com/group/meteor-talk/pendmsg?view=full&pending_id=1021027682910905755


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[Arunoda Susiripala]

That's a great news. I'll report as I see a one.

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[Petar Korponaić]

Thanks. And... that's what I said at the beginning of this long thread. :)

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[ServerMeta]

it works because spam gets posted when you are asleep, and every morning me and others wake up and report it. Now I can see multiple new spam thread, which haven't been rmeoved yet.

I cant understand why people could be satisfied with such a system.

Moreover on friday I started writing a long reply.... then webcl crashed my browser and it got lost. Another reason not to use the archaic google groups.

[Angel Java Lopez]

I'm suscribed to many googlegroups, and spam is under control: administrators take care, using "first email approved" or other strategies (there are messages that are marked as spam by Google itself, AFAIR).

I don't know why the same strategies are not adopted here, at least as a "baby step" to reduce the amount of spam.

Angel "Java" Lopez

@ajlopez

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[ServerMeta]

if you check past in the discussion we already talked about this.

My humble opinion is that it would be very bad usability wise.

[dcsan]

spam seems to be increasing if anything. i check late at night PDT before most of the US, and there are five spam threads atm.

but as others have said, aside from spam, google groups is pretty barebones community.

do we need to wait for MDG to decide on discourse to even try it out? if someone is motivated we could setup a test community there and see how people like it? 

there is the risk of splitting the community again but discourse would seem to be a much better place to congregate. it wasn't a vote but there were a lot of +1s above for trying discourse.

crater.io is also decent to use, and good for announcement based threads, but it doesn't seem to have caught critical mass as a plain discussion forum - still more traffic here. whereas lots of other projects seem to have very fluid discourse forums.

/dc

[Stephan Hochhaus]

Despite the subject of this meteor-talk thread the spam situation should be regarded as an incentive to deal with the frustration of many community members. I guess it's time to change the subject line :)

If we are to try out Discourse I have two questions:

1) Can we try Discourse for free?

2) Is there a way to CC discourse threads on the Google Groups so we could ease the initial testing phase by avoiding further fragmentation?

We already have a massive fragmentation of a (relatively small) community. There is no easy way for many to determine whether they should send an e-mail to meteor-core, meteor-talk, velocity-core (the google groups) or join the Meteor Community on Github (https://github.com/MeteorCommunity/discussions/issues) or open a Stack Overflow question. Then there are various Telescope instances like crater.io and hub.kadira.io.

As we can see with the github MeteorCommunity discussions there is a massive need for better discussion platforms. I am not convinced that Discourse is the panacea, but we probably won't know until we try it out.

Cheers!

Stephan

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[Maxim Filimonov]

1) Almost free - If we go for trial with smallest digital ocean machine(which meets sys req) - 1Gb it will only be 10$ per month. I'm ready to sponsor it.

2) Not sure about that. Discourse allows to download backup of the db which is essentially a dump of Postgres. We can then potentially script it to send emails to this group to restore conversations from discourse. 

That's way better then Google groups by the way. There is no way to export information from here without using some archaic format like mbox.

[Frank Helmschrott]

Am Donnerstag, 22. Januar 2015 09:33:21 UTC+1 schrieb Stephan Hochhaus:

Despite the subject of this meteor-talk thread the spam situation should be regarded as an incentive to deal with the frustration of many community members. I guess it's time to change the subject line :)

Well changing the subject line actually isn't possible here but i guess that's what you were trying to make clear :-)

 

If we are to try out Discourse I have two questions:

1) Can we try Discourse for free?

2) Is there a way to CC discourse threads on the Google Groups so we could ease the initial testing phase by avoiding further fragmentation?

I think there's no way to "try" anything. I can't imagine a good way to double up discussion platforms like this. In my personal opinion Discourse is so much better than the actual situation that there's no doubt it will last. There's also ne real free option that is interesting for Discourse forum but as previously stated some of us (including me) will probably have server space left where Discourse could easily run for a longer while without generating extra cost.

The only problem is how MDG decides. Of course we do not have to wait for them but personally i agreed to Alice to wait for their decision where to go. Looks like they need a few more days. Personally I also think it would be time to take action now and not let the discussion run forever. You are right about what you said regarding the fragmentation but actually it's a community. It's probably nothing you can change that people try to go different ways and basically i think that's not too bad at all.

Following the discussion and input about creating a discussion platform based on Meteor is very interesting but my personal opinion is that it won't turn out so smart as some people may think. I definitely see the problem to run on a platform missing features for quite some while and then most probably the problem of missing participation when it comes to extending these features and make it a solid discussion platform.

I'd still go with Discourse and i'm still happy to donate some server space, installation time and administration time but before taking action i'll definitely wait a few more days for the feedback from MDG as it doesn't make so much sense to start something new without MDG now and then have them start something on their own a few days later. All your work will be for nothing then.

Frank

[Sacha Greif]

By the way, sorry for hijacking the thread but I also wanted to point out that even if we end up picking Discourse for this community, I'll still be working on Telescope with the goal of building a great open-source Meteor-powered community app. 

Telescope is actually growing pretty fast and is starting to attract a lot of interest. For example, Justin Kan (of justin.tv and twitch.tv fame) recently used Telescope to launch http://thedrop.club/ 

So this is a really exciting phase for Telescope, and any help would be extremely welcome! If you'd like to contribute just email me (info at sachagreif.com) or tweet at me (@SachaGreif) to let me know :)

[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

Hey, thedrop.club is pretty cool! :D

I also wanted to another two cents of mine: The wish I have isn't only to have this or that forum - I'd like to have some kind of structure to the community and the discussion it entails.

That means that I'd like to have an official "community / participate" - area, ideally on meteor.com, where new and old users both would be able to find the discussion relevant to their interests.

That means, there should be an overview page with explicit links and guides to different sub-areas, and there could be fruitful discussions around the different features and areas of meteor development. Maybe the community could even start to participate more in the development of meteor itself this way.

The organization and arrangement of the different Subforums and Knowledge Silos like the Wiki, Stack Overflow etc. should be discussed and made transparent by either the meteor team, a group of interested and motivated Meteor-Users or, what I think would be best, by a combination of both.

Interesting information should be stored in the meteor wiki; feature requests and bugs should be stored as github issues of course; But the discussion of what goes where and what would be the best way to reach some goal should be in the discussion forums.

I could imagine these broad categories:

Developing with Meteor

  \ Beginner Questions

  \ Medium / Advanced Questions

  \ Package Development

  \ Hosting / Dev-Ops

  \ Show your Projects & get Feedback

  \ Integration with other Frameworks & Libs

  \ ...

Developing Meteor (and its ecosystem)

  \ Core Development

  \ ...

Meteor Meta & Meetups

  \ Community Discussion - What goes where

  \ Show your blog / post your Articles

  \ Job Board (if no external Job Board gets endorsed as "The" Meteor Job Board)

Whatever.

I need to get back to my client project, but I'd love to have some centralized hub, showing me how to find the different parts of the community.

Also I'd volunteer for a few hours a month to work with on a team organizing and prioritizing the community hub, if there ever should be such a thing.

Best wishes

Daniel

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

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[Marin Pranjić]

If we are to move away from google groups, I wouldn't ever look back.

Discourse or Telescope, both would work for me.
Discourse is great, but I would be even more excited about using Telescope.
Also, since it's a Meteor app, I would like to see how it scales :)

Marin

[Steve Ross]

You’ve already read all the other comments. Since you asked for opinions that aren’t +1 style, here are mine:

Google Groups works for Ruby Talk, RubyMotion, Rails Talk, and many others. But as each of these has gained momentum two things have happened. The signal to noise ratio has gone down. It’s really hard to focus on anything significant when there are 447 new messages since the last time I looked, yet I still want to keep up to date. Aggregating messages kind of defeats the purpose. So, Google Groups is pretty much ideal for starting out, but at a certain point, it becomes saturated with unanswered questions and unread announcements.

Google Groups are *not* well indexed on Google. They should be but SO almost always ranks higher in Google search. But why is this even a metric?

Conversations on Google Groups can get out of hand or disjoint to the point where the thread diverges and the real answer is obscured.

Spam filtering on Google Groups is pretty pathetic. C’mon. This is Google. If they can’t filter spam, who can? Well, WordPress (Akismet), for one. So there is reason the believe the battle can be fought better. Besides, Google Groups are an obvious target. Maybe a Discourse forum would be less appealing to spammers. Who knows?

Buy versus build: There is merit to both arguments. Discourse is here now and Telescope is not proven to be mature enough. That’s a hard call to make. Probably a good technology investment to add to Telescope, but would require some major commitments if it were to replace the functionality of Google Groups right now.

i8n is a really nice feature to have as is mobile-friendly or mobile app.

I’ve come to the conclusion over the past year or so of poking and prodding at Meteor, Angular, Ember, etc. that Meteor is a completely different thing from the request/response cycling models (duh). It might be possible that the community needs a different tool to communicate with. Could be that Discourse is just fine. Could be the Telescope-on-steroids is a perfect match.

All told, I tend to get really behind on the Google Groups stuff and start to lose interest when I hit spam or recruiting email.

Just my USD.02 worth.


> On Jan 21, 2015, at 3:36 AM, ServerMeta <alberto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>

[Stephan Hochhaus]

Avital,

I hate to disagree, but 4 days later fighting spam appears to be not working at all. 

I am subscribed to the daily digest. Today 13 out of the 22 topics are spam. I will not bother to check the digest any more. Whenever I feel like it I may visit the google group. Or not. But the current signal-to-noise ratio is hardly acceptable.

Even if you manage to clean up the groups, digests (which most people prefer over individual mails) will still flood subscribers with spam messages creating the image of a spammy mailing list.

[Serkan Durusoy]

I just marked 11 messages as spam.

Also, I did mark one as spam on the meteor-core group yesterday. Spam is creeping in there as well.

I'm fairly certain by experience when I say that once spammers get a hold of your email/group address, there's really not much you can do unless you got some kickass antispam automation, and even then the false positives become a problem, alienating some people out for reasons they cannot understand.

On the other topic, I'm using the web interface exclusively. That's because I like reading through discussions in context. Email is an archaic technology, one very successful in destroying context. After all, after 20 some years, email clients are fighting over each other trying to innovate in ways to bring back the context.

But as the number of messages increase, whether by spam or not, I'm losing the context in the web interface as well. It was fairly easy until few months back when my morning routine included a quick sift of the group discussions, and a few other meteor dailies. But now as both the number of resources increase and the group itself becoming convoluted, I believe we need some more slicing and dicing of content.

In that regard, I am all in favor of a more resilient solution. I wish it could be Telescope, but that's a HN paradigm. Until it is not, discourse seems to be the way to go.

[Chris Cortese]

It has struck me as kind of odd to discuss a bleeding edge technology on a long-since-bled-technology like Google Groups.

[Chris Cortese]

$1000 / month to discuss open source technology?  Even though Meteor has some money, and it doesn't cost me anything today, that just strikes me as kind of antithetical, disappointing even.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2015 at 8:12:48 AM UTC-8, H.P. Logsdon wrote:

Last I checked, well over a year ago I will admit, Discourse had a huge disconnect with email. Maybe I'm just showing my age when I say having meteor-talk come to my my inbox where I can categorize and filter server side is why I'm subscribed.

The last list I was subscribed to that moved to Discourse, Ruby Rogues Parley, quickly became an annoyance. I don't want to have to go to some site, log in, and then see that there aren't any discussions that are interesting or replies to something I'm interested in 4 out of 5 times each day. 

On some of the Google groups that I am subscribed to, having new users be moderated cuts down spam by orders of magnitude, even if it is a slight annoyance for real humans at first. Spammers don't take the time to craft 4 or 5 well thought out replies or topics to get through the waiting periods if it's not a fire-and-forget system, it's too much work. 

My vote is to stay, with all of the warts that come with Groups, trying to make this list better the way it is.

- Howard Logsdon

On Jan 6, 2015, at 8:42 AM, Jason O'Gray <jason.a...@gmail.com> wrote:

I completely agree with the the route that this is going. I tend to lurk here to stay abreast on things, and the past couple of weeks this group has really lost its value because of the spammers. 

The only caveat is I believe Meteor should be hosting whatever is needed for the community. They are VC funded, not some small open source project struggling to keep the lights on and doing it for charity. Even at $1,000 a month (Discourse's highest tiered plan), it's peanuts for them -- they probably spend more on snacks for the office than that. Really, it's in their best interest to keep and grow the community as quickly as possible.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2015 8:47:37 AM UTC-5, Frank Helmschrott wrote:

Good point,

i've already written a Mail in direction Meteor a few hours ago suggesting exactly the same thing (Discourse). I already had registered some domains in the past that would fit that need as i already wanted to jump in this direction. I just decided to wait until Meteor is past 1.0 and then ask for their plans regarding this. I think it would be good to get MDG in the boat to make this kind of the officiall discussion platform as there's one thing no one needs: just another site. Discussion is realdy split on this group, IRC, gitter.im (github chat), stackexchange. I think that could only work if it's getting kind of official support.

No matter which way: Count me in. I got already some Discourse experiences and you wouldn't even need that much hardware for it but could slowly grow - Discourse is perfect for that. Setup is easy.

There's no future in Google Groups - no sense of staying here as all the content will be lost too once they switch of the lights here.

Am Dienstag, 6. Januar 2015 11:31:09 UTC+1 schrieb ServerMeta:

You are right, Guys preapproving the emails will not work, it will only moderately stifle the problem, while it will very effectively drive new users away from this forum.

Google groups is dead, plain and simple. They offer a free service, but this means that we dont get enough CPU time to effectively filter spam. Using a traditional forum is also out of question, as they are a pain in the ass usability wise.

Yes we could build something with meteor, to show how much meteor is cool. And I agree that it is cool, but the most difficult part to get right with a forum is the usability, which is a problem that Meteor doesnt address directly, but delegates to front end libraries.

I propose discourse:

http://www.discourse.org/

1) It is open source

2) It can integrate very easily with meteor, wordpress, static sites, or whatever we might decide to use with discourse

3) It's the state of the art of web discussion usability

It would cost around 1000 euros per year.

600 euros to rent for a year a server with 32 gb of ram, xeon e3, SSD. I would virtualize it, so we can have multiple containers, one for the DB, one for the web front end, two reverse proxies, one MTA, etc

200 euros to setup a global CDN (optional)

200 for backup space

25 euros for domain + SSL

I think this is really peanut, compared to the dimension of this community, and I'm even willing to pay for the expenses (WHOHOOO!) if the community decide to go down this path. But I'm sure more contributors will step in and help.

I run an hosting company, but I will not use my services for this, as this would pose me in a conflict of interest. I just know where to buy the best hardware and network for the best price. And I know how to setup everything.

I would need help from a designer, as I dont know squat about photoshop, and I'm an html/css beginner.

We could set this up in less than a week, with some dummy graphic, and keep improving from there. This would give this community an edge over other projects. Discourse naturally build a wiki, that could help us organize the best content to help new and existing users.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2015 7:01:01 AM UTC+1, Aaron Cammarata wrote:

Wouldn't the problem from Marin's post earlier still apply - spammers would spoof our pre-approved emails, and we'd be back to square one.

If only there were something built on Meteor that could handle this... ;)

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[ServerMeta]

a year

[Jason O'Gray]

The spam has gotten to be too much. I've unsubscribed from the daily summary email I was attempting to use to keep up with the community. It's a shame really.