Where is everyone? AKA have we failed our spam fight?

[Serkan Durusoy]

I know, I know.

There is supposed to be a main thread on this topic (which is effectively dead as of Jan 26) and then the short-lived thread back a week ago which Alice Yu kindly chipped in and reminded of the main thread (then already dead) but well, oh well.

This past couple of days, the number of spam messages increased while the number of actual discussions decreased, almost to a full stop.

Meteor has been, and still is a fast moving platform with a community as fast moving and obviously open and eager to try new things and leave old ones behind. It has now been more than a month that the spam issue has become annoying without any "official" move neither within this platform nor towards a new one.

The community spoke up about the issue, and it seems, silently decided to just dump this group to a miserable death. I guess this is what happened to this group, although too silently.

So I am frankly asking, where is everyone?

• Gitter is kind of silent.
  
• IRC is the same.
  
• Crater.io does not hold much discussion, except for announcements.
  
• Stackoverflow is what it is, with some steady increase in traffic.

But overall, there seems to be less community "discussion and sharing" compared to the past.

Or is there some other meeting place that I'm not yet aware of?

Is there a secret pact that I'm not allowed in? Do I have too much facial hair? Stinking feet? What?

Cheers ;)

Serkan

[Jan Hendrik Mangold]

Thanks for bringing it up again. I was wondering about this myself this morning, when I tried to figure out if there is a way to block panzersolutions on a more global level ...

I am with you, I do not understand the inaction. At least make it a bit harder to post to this list. Right now it's just a free for all ... for spammers that is.

Jan

[Avital Oliver]

Thanks for asking. We want to solve this problem, but don't want to rush to the wrong answer. I'm point on making a decision on this, and plan to spend a day very soon to learn more about Discourse. Switching to Discourse may turn out to be the right answer but I don't think we should do it before understanding the exact implications. Maybe all of you do but we at MDG don't yet!

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[Serkan Durusoy]

Avital, it is great to hear such reassuring information from you. Be it
discourse or anything else you see fit, it is an official course (no pun
intended) of action that I've been worrying about the lack of.

So, thanks!

[Dustin Wehr]

I spent an hour and a half carefully writing my first message to this group (to any programming-related group actually, as I'm coming from many years in grad school). I come back later in the day and see 

"This topic has been hidden because it was flagged for abuse."

with no explanation. 

Left me wondering if the spammers need any help. 

Kidding.. I have better things to do. Actually I see that message under several other very normal sounding topic titles. Hopefully that means it's just a problem with automated spam detection. 

[Simon Mansfield]

I for one would be very much in favour of a Discourse site dedicated to Meteor discussion. Google groups has become infested with spammers and IRC is only any good if the people who know the answers are there the moment you ask your question. Stack Overflow is, as always a decent place to go, but it doesn't allow "discussion" just Q&A.

[Aaron Judd]

Yes, the spam war has been lost.   I can barely look at the google group anymore.  Although I sometime try, the various chat rooms are ineffective, mainly because as much as I'd like to help - I've got my own problems to solve.  Re: the solution, my advice is that some action is better than no action. Implications won't be understood until you do it.

[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

As far as I remember there was somebody who offered installing and running a discourse instance who I think also said that he has some experience running it. Maybe some arrangements could be made and the expertise could be leveraged.

Also I think it'd be great if there'd be a few community organizers / moderators who could help in refining the structure of the forums and the discussion on an ongoing basis.

Also: Monthly AMA's with the Dev Team... :D

Ok ok, I'll show myself out!

Best wishes

Daniel

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 4:25 PM, Aaron Judd <aa...@ongoworks.com> wrote:

Yes, the spam war has been lost.   I can barely look at the google group anymore.  Although I sometime try, the various chat rooms are ineffective, mainly because as much as I'd like to help - I've got my own problems to solve.  Re: the solution, my advice is that some action is better than no action. Implications won't be understood until you do it.

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[Eric Dobbertin]

The other part of your question is "where is everyone"? For me, and I think many others, the answer is that as Meteor hit 1.0 and became more popular, we became extremely busy working on Meteor projects. :) Also, since Meteor is more mature, there are fewer things needing discussion (though still a lot). For those reasons, and also partially because of your stinky feet, we let the spammers take over.

[Serkan Durusoy]

Eric, it is nice to imagine everyone busy working on projects, hadn't looked at it that way, but yeah! But again, I'd be willing to wash my feet twice a day if it would mean more messages here :)

[Aaron Judd]

Eric might be right! We're all busy building with 1.x.  I would like to see the google group recover from the spam though - for that very reason - it's nice to get a daily archive delivered, rather than trying to filter through chats in a real time basis.  It's just that every time I see spam recruiting SAP developers, I reminded that is what I once did.  I'd rather wash twice a day than go back to that.

[dcsan]

actually there's a nice community going on at Crater.io with a very high signal-noise ratio, threaded discussions, thumbnails, link sharing.... 

I think people should try coming over there to discuss things.

of course there are many features missing from crater (telescope) compared to discourse, but those could be added over time. if it still doesn't work out then maybe we can consider setting up Discourse. In either way it would be good to give telescope more of a work out. If we can put energy into improving telescope, that would be fantastic for the meteor community. Much more effective than whining about it endlessly over here.

for those that are 100% in the discourse camp, what are the main short comings of telescope right now? For me it's a general UI clunkiness, but that's nothing that Sacha would not be able to fix if there were more people committed to working on the project.

Come on and try it  www.Crater.io  :)

/dc

[dcsan]

haha, oops

http://crater.io

www isn't configured :)

[3even soft]

When visiting your link I get:

"Welcome to nginx!

If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required.

For online documentation and support please refer to nginx.org.

Commercial support is available at nginx.com.

Thank you for using nginx."

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[dcsan]

On Thursday, February 12, 2015 at 10:29:43 AM UTC-8, 3evensoft wrote:

When visiting your link I get:

yep, see my reply

http://crater.io

[Simon Mansfield]

My issue with Crater.io is that I don't see it being designed as a discussion board. It's a news-feed with discussion elements and as that, it's very good.

A discourse server would give us a place to focus all discussion, whether it be related to news, bugs, queries, upcoming features or just general bouncing ideas chatter. It's also got the tools it needs to keep it's users informed; notifications when a thread you are involved in is updated, email digests, desktop notification support, etc.

[Daler Karimov]

Just to be fair and FYI, I must note that Crater.io (Telescope) does have many of the mentioned features:

+ Notifications

+ Subscriptions (you can choose to click the big button at the bottom of every thread to get updates in that topic. I believe that "Subscribe..." button should be somewhere at the top though).

+ Email digests (perhaps not very flexible though)

+ Categories & Tags (Telescope package)

I agree that design/implementation feels quite clunky, but this can and will be improved.

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[Simon Mansfield]

It does, agreed. But the whole concept of Crater.io isn't healthy for discussions on anything other than the linked articles.

A discussion board should be ordered, (as discourse and all BB systems are) from newest activity to oldest. There should be clear "read" markers to indicate what has changed since your last visit. There shouldn't be any need for "voting" on posts, as the interesting discussions will naturally rise to the top. There should be the ability to "pin" announcements to the top. The discussion is the most important thing on Discourse or a BB, links are just embedded into posts, not the other way around, comments feel tagged-on to the news articles linked on Crater.io.

Telescope / Crater.io doesn't do that, and that's not it's fault. I see it as Reddit for Meteor news, and as that, it's perfect.

This (Google Groups) is the equivalent of a Discourse / BB system, and comparatively, while it's still better than Crater.io, it sucks.

[Simon Mansfield]

If anyone is interested in seeing an example Discourse board that has a lot of activity and that's pretty well managed: https://talk.turtlerockstudios.com/

[David Collier]

I also agree that crater doesn't feel as natural as discourse for discussion, but think it's more UI than the points below.

My thought would be that it's worth putting effort into telescope. even if we only get 80% of discourse but this pushes meteor and have a great opensource meteor forum solution, that could be embedded in all other apps, would be a huge benefit. many apps now have a community at the core, so a more robust telescope would help a lot of other projects.

A discussion board should be ordered, (as discourse and all BB systems are) from newest activity to oldest. There should be clear "read"

really? most of these boards have a more sophisticated algorithm for "interesting" that includes recency as a factor. checkout the HN algo here

 

markers to indicate what has changed since your last visit.

crater does have notifications for replies, and read indicator (greyed out or not) for what's new.

 

There shouldn't be any need for "voting" on posts, as the interesting discussions will naturally rise to the top.

how? purely by what's active? how is that different from an active x points x recency algorithm?

 

There should be the ability to "pin" announcements to the top.

telescope has that.

 

The discussion is the most important thing on Discourse or a BB, links are just embedded into posts, not the other way around, comments feel tagged-on to the news articles linked on Crater.io.

that maybe a design issue, since crater does lead with icons for the linked discussion. you can also submit new stories without adding a link. the "new topic" thread in that case is a bit more daunting tho as there are all those extra fields. design issue, again.

so there are features discourse has ( @mentions, a very slick mobile app, related topics... ) but nothing hugely different, mostly polish, IMHO.

I'm keen to hear if i'm missing something though, as there is some kind of "je ne sais quoi" that makes discourse feel a lot more natural as a forum.

/dc

 

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[Simon Mansfield]

A discussion board should be ordered, (as discourse and all BB systems are) from newest activity to oldest. There should be clear "read"

really? most of these boards have a more sophisticated algorithm for "interesting" that includes recency as a factor. checkout the HN algo here

My point precisely; Hacker News isn't a discussion board, it's a link-driven news site with comments. I'd say less than 5% of the posts on Hacker News are plain text, with no headline link. If you look at real discussion boards; phpBB, Discourse, NodeBB, myBB, etc. they all have the discussions with the most recent activity at the top.

 

markers to indicate what has changed since your last visit.

crater does have notifications for replies, and read indicator (greyed out or not) for what's new.

Not like Discourse does, spend any length of time on the link I posted and you'll get a notification at the top telling you that "X topics have been updated" and that you can see them if you like. On top of that, each post has "badges" that tell you how many posts have been added since you last looked at it, and in reply to any posts you might have made.

 

There shouldn't be any need for "voting" on posts, as the interesting discussions will naturally rise to the top.

how? purely by what's active? how is that different from an active x points x recency algorithm?

Purely by what has activity, yes. If it's a discussion on a topic I want, all I care about is what people have to say on the matter... If I post a topic called "Meteor crashes with 'somerandomerrorhere' and then dies", do I care if anyone upvotes it? No. Do I care if someone replies? Yes. Do I care if 50 people vote it up or down? No. Do I care if loads of people reply and the issue suddenly seems to be much more prolific than I first thought? Yes.

 

There should be the ability to "pin" announcements to the top.

telescope has that.

But Crater.io doesn't use it, because it's predominantly news / articles, and people don't want the same news pinned to the top for months.

  

The discussion is the most important thing on Discourse or a BB, links are just embedded into posts, not the other way around, comments feel tagged-on to the news articles linked on Crater.io.

that maybe a design issue, since crater does lead with icons for the linked discussion. you can also submit new stories without adding a link. the "new topic" thread in that case is a bit more daunting tho as there are all those extra fields. design issue, again.

so there are features discourse has ( @mentions, a very slick mobile app, related topics... ) but nothing hugely different, mostly polish, IMHO.

I'm keen to hear if i'm missing something though, as there is some kind of "je ne sais quoi" that makes discourse feel a lot more natural as a forum.

/dc

I agree entirely that almost all of these issues can be solved by changing telescope to work better with this "model" of usage. But then I feel that it wouldn't be the "Reddit-like clone" that it currently is, and it does that exceedingly well.

[ServerMeta]

here's a tentative discourse based Meteor discussion board:

http://board.meteor-talk.net/

I paid 500 euros, to buy a dedicated server for 6 months, domain and ssl. We can play with it for a while, and either elect it as our favourite platform, or throw it away.

[ServerMeta]

p.s.: I need your help, please register and make it live. The native reputation system will automatically elect the best users as staff.

[David Collier]

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 9:33 AM, ServerMeta <alberto...@gmail.com> wrote:

I paid 500 euros, to buy a dedicated server for 6 months, domain and ssl. We can play with it for a while, and either elect it as our favourite platform, or throw it away.

thanks for taking the initiative. You must really hate google groups :)

This is a big deal, you should make a new thread!

[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

Awesome!!! Looking forward to having a comfy Meteor Talk experience!

I hope it's gonna catch on and will bring us lots of happiness :)

Let's spread the word, sisters and brothers.

Best wishes

Daniel

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

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[Daniel Dornhardt - Daniel Dornhardt Development]

Alright, I just read http://board.meteor-talk.net/t/mdg-official-stance/44/2 - so let's see whether we'll get something official soon-ish or if we're gonna have ourselves a big un-official launch party!

MDG, please get in touch with the party people!

Daniel Dornhardt, Daniel Dornhardt Development

dan...@dornhardt.com

+49 152 - 56 17 22 61

[Simon Mansfield]

Agreed, MDG need to get this up and running quick-ish if that's what they are going to do... No point in getting everyone to sign up for "unofficial" boards, if there's an official one right around the corner.

[ServerMeta]

Is there? I really hope so. I'm just afraid that in one month we will find ourselves still without a platform. Please MDG, hurry up!

[Avital Oliver]

We are setting up an official Discourse forum.

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[Simon Mansfield]

Glad to hear it! :)

[Arunoda Susiripala]

That's nice to hear Avital. Awesome.

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[matt debergalis]

The new Discourse forums are live, at https://forums.meteor.com/ !

Thanks for your patience on this, everyone.

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meteor-talk/CAJzNrTG8GW6P%2Brh_R0N34ySzSykEo3WJT1tBNAYsyPaYYngtjg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Arve Knudsen]

Yay!

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