We need more discourse about Discourse ... and not just the positives ...

[TiddlyTweeter]

Following other folks enthusiasm I signed up to Discourse. 

BUT it is something of an issue  how it works.

I am a beginner there so I can only express Opinions, not a fully formed critique yet.

BUT there ARE snafus that need attention BEFORE any mass migration ...

SINCE it is looking increasingly likely we WILL migrate, it is very important that regular GG users express not just positive opinions but also any concerns they have about it soon. 

FWIW, my biggest concern with Discourse is I am not yet convinced is will be user friendly for newbies or for a user only wanting to post occasional questions.

Best wishes

Josiah

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Hi Josiah,

 There is a very nice demo and bot teach you how to use Discourse (of course basics)

 https://try.discourse.org/

 You have to sign up! For me it was really helpful!

Best wishes

Mohammad

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[strikke...@gmail.com]

I signed up a few days ago and have looked around to get to know it - and hopefully find something I liked about it. In between looking around and reading- I started up a few "comfort" tiddlywikis.

It looks rather complicated to me. Time will hopefully help.

A lot of users over quite some time discussing tiddlywiki, and not forum details will make it more interesting. But I realise that right now - it is necessary to get the forum the way it can be - and users need help. - to later be able to tell everyone else how easy it really is.

Sorry - it might be my age.

@Mohammad,

The tutorial is nice and start when signing in - I wonder why so many did not find it.

[TW Tones]

Folks,

Personally I have used many kinds of forums and conversational systems and the good ones have a number of features that you find are needed and help both with communications and adoption. Discourse has many if not all these features, and sure they may be implemented differently in different solutions, but in the long run all of these are needed. It may take a little longer to get used to the way it works, but from my experience it is about what we need in the long run not simply what we may want initially.

With my experience I have found Discourse a walk in the park, with the odd little exception.  Why, because almost everything Discourse does or permits, is in a wide range of similar solutions. What I am trying to say is much of it is industry standard and learning Discourse will be reusable skills you can use in other places.  This is not just learning about a particular product but learning about the state of the art in collaboration systems. 

Sure we can criticise any system for sure, nothing is perfect, but if helps hearing someone experienced in such things such as myself, it is all going to be worth it, its moving forward in a big step and it is largely based on standard practices. I urge you to push through the barriers to change or the new because we will all be rewarded. 

I would also add, I have tried to get us to move before now and it was like herding cats, if we have any momentum at all I think we should move to an alternative, especially since Google has let us down big time. Eg No code, no mobile, are you kidding Google!

Regards

Tones

[clutterstack]

Josiah, when you say newbies, do you mean TiddlyWiki newbies, or Discourse newbies?

If TiddlyWiki, then perhaps there are ways we can organise categories or something to make it easier to know where to post the occasional question?

If Discourse, I'm not sure...having experience reading and posting on phpBB-type forums, my first experience with Discourse (which is, I think, what fast.ai uses) was a bit disorienting to me and I still can't really put my finger on it. Busy? Opaque? However, we have to consider that the visual language used by Discourse may be what many younger people are already used to -- it may be that for most, Discourse will feel natural and Google Groups frustrating and weird.

Best,

Chris

[Mark S.]

So mostly it's the meta issues that concern me.

First, someone is paying for Discourse, right? It's not free like GG. Is that sustainable, or will we back at GG in 2 or 3 years?

Second, is the search better on Discourse? Because that was the main concern about GG -- things become lost in the mist of time (the mist of time being more than two weeks ago).

Thanks!

[clutterstack]

Mark, I do hope the search will be better -- it's hard to tell right now because there's not much on there. I hate to say "it would be hard to make it worse than GG search..." ;)

Paying for Discourse feels less sustainable somehow, but I think there's a core of contributors who are making a move to build momentum on TW, and paying for a tool to help your community communicate, support each other, and onboard new users makes a lot of sense through that lens. It's a risk, but it's a move.

With GG, I'm not 100% sure Google won't just pull the plug sometime within 2-3 years.

[strikke...@gmail.com]

Mark, we do not know if GG exist i 2 or 3 years -  we do not even know how many would be left to return to GG or go to somewhere else. If the move is a success - and everybody or most people move and like it. Success. If a lot of people are lost in the moving and too many gradually leave - not so much.

[Mark S.]

Why are you assuming that GG won't be here in 2 or 3 years? 

Are you willing to pay $5 per month just to have a different forum, that may not actually be significantly better than what we have now?

I have a forum with groups.io. After the initial transfer fee it has been free. It includes mail services. It works just like you would expect a forum to work. I can't help but feel that people jumped on Discourse because it's the shiny software of the day.

Maybe we should have a pledge drive thread. People can promise to pay $5 a month for a year to sustain Discourse. I would guess that you need at least 25 enlistees  because there's going to be people who lose interest after a few months when they realize that a forum is just a forum.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Is there a good central thread for discussing the move to Discourse that I've missed out on?  I did a quick search, and it seems to come up in different threads, but I didn't see a pinned topic or thread that serves as a hub for the conversation.

Mark S. asked a couple of good questions:

 

> First, someone is paying for Discourse, right? It's not free like GG. 

> Is that sustainable, or will we back at GG in 2 or 3 years?

Is that the case?  I'd thought Discourse was a free, open-source platform — though someone is surely paying to host TiddlyWiki.org, where it's running.  That domain's been around a long time, and I always suspected it was Jeremy's, but maybe not.  Do we know the identity of our benefactor on that domain?  That may go a long way toward reassuring people of the platform's long-term availability and stability.

> Second, is the search better on Discourse? Because that was 

> the main concern about GG -- things become lost in the mist of 

> time (the mist of time being more than two weeks ago).

Despite hearing people complain about the search on Google Groups, I've never noticed problems with it myself.

Maybe that's just a function of not knowing what search results you aren't getting back.  (For example, it would be a real laugh if there's a thread called "Discussing a Move to Discourse" that I completely missed when searched just now.)

Not to be too much of a naysayer on Google Groups, I think strikke...@gmail.com is right to bring up the concern:

> we do not know if GG exist i 2 or 3 years

Despite its long life, Groups bears a lot of similarity to other marginal offerings by Google that have been popular with their users (think Reader, Wave, or G+) but proved less than stellar at the data-mining Google relies on them for.  I've always found it to be an unstable platform for long-term continuity.  One exciting thing about Discourse (from what I've read in the last hour) is this notion of being able to archive our Groups-based content over there so that the history of this community could be preserved moving forward.  There are tons of great resources in this group and the dev group I'd hate to see lost to the winds of time.

[PMario]

On Saturday, August 21, 2021 at 11:13:18 PM UTC+2 Mark S. wrote:

I have a forum with groups.io. After the initial transfer fee it has been free. It includes mail services. It works just like you would expect a forum to work. I can't help but feel that people jumped on Discourse because it's the shiny software of the day.

That's a pure e-mail list, that can't be compared to Google Groups or any other web based discussion forum. ... The free tier is for 100 members. The 20$ per month tier is for 500 members and the enterprise tier for 1000 members goes up to 200$/month + 0.20$ per additional user

This Group here has more than 1000 users and the goal of the new platform is to increase the number of users. ... So please compare apples with apples!

The pricing page: https://groups.io/static/pricing

just my thought.

-mario

[strikke...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, August 21, 2021 at 11:43:15 PM UTC+2 PMario wrote:

This Group here has more than 1000 users and the goal of the new platform is to increase the number of users. ... So please compare apples with apples!

Hoping that no user of GG will be lost and a lot of more users will be interested in Tiddlywiki due to the change of forum is a hope we can all share, but it is hardly an exact number.

[Mark S.]

No, it's not a pure email. It has a web forum with all the services you expect -- file attachments, photos, wikis, calendars.

But you're right about the price. It obviously wasn't like that when I signed up. At the time there was no user-count limit for the basic group. Hopefully they won't rescind that policy.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Answering some of my own questions:

Is there a good central thread for discussing the move to Discourse that I've missed out on?  I did a quick search, and it seems to come up in different threads, but I didn't see a pinned topic or thread that serves as a hub for the conversation.

Jeremy did offer this comment on the aims/intentions of Talk.TW.org I initially missed:

> The new Discourse forum at https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/ is an experiment

> at this stage. At the moment, there's two way sync with Google Groups, 

> but if people like the new system then we will migrate fully over to it.

 

> First, someone is paying for Discourse, right? It's not free like GG. 

 

Is that the case?  I'd thought Discourse was a free, open-source platform — though someone is surely paying to host TiddlyWiki.org, where it's running.  That domain's been around a long time, and I always suspected it was Jeremy's, but maybe not.  Do we know the identity of our benefactor on that domain?  That may go a long way toward reassuring people of the platform's long-term availability and stability.

Boris is Hero of the Beach on this front, and there's a whole thread about the costs and his estimates for the future here:

https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/t/paying-for-discourse/

[PMario]

On Sunday, August 22, 2021 at 12:53:40 AM UTC+2 Mark S. wrote:

No, it's not a pure email. It has a web forum with all the services you expect -- file attachments, photos, wikis, calendars.

ah. ok

 

But you're right about the price. It obviously wasn't like that when I signed up. At the time there was no user-count limit for the basic group. Hopefully they won't rescind that policy.

Yea, you have probably been an early adopter. That sometimes happens. ... So you shouldn't give up that account ;)

-mario

[Mark S.]

So it turns out you don't need Enterprise to have 1000 members. You can get premium, and then pay the 4c per user additional fee. So that makes the yearly cost $440. Not that I'm promoting it, necessarily.

My main point is that most of the prior conversations assumed zero cost forum solutions. There wasn't a whole lot of exploration of low-cost solutions. 

Discourse seems nice, though we can't really test it's ability to dumpster-dive yet. But I'm not sure it's $5/month nicer than GG. At the end of the day, it's just a forum. I suspect that after a few months, and it doesn't seem so shiny any more, that others will feel the same way.

[JWHoneycutt]

Completely unfamiliar with Discourse. I did sign up. I am unable to find any of you on there, and i am sure i am not the only one who does not know how to navigate on Discourse yet.

BTW, I assume it is not the same thing as Discord - right?

JWH

[JWHoneycutt]

Looks like there’s a Google Group. Perhaps you could ask there if they have set up a Discourse instance (this is not it) and it’s address.

https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki

[strikke...@gmail.com]

Some you will find here at GG as usual and some have moved to https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/

[JWHoneycutt]

Answers (I think) for true forum newbies...

Sign up for Discourse

Then use this link - which apparently is on Discourse (but can't be found from Discourse): https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/

"https://talk.X.org" is a Discourse link - maybe they all are? I apologize for the super basic stuff I failed to follow. I just need to avoid posting until I have struggled longer...

JWH

[strikke...@gmail.com]

It is far easier. Follow the link to https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/ that is where you are to sign up. When signing up, you will be asked some questions - answer them it is a kind of tutorial . Take you time looking around and get to know the new forum. You are absolutely not the only forum newbie.

[Scott Simmons (Secret-HQ)]

Hi, JWH —

I think the confusion is that there are two types of Discourse boards:

1. those hosted on Discourse.com, where someone pays to maintain an account and use their server's shared resources
2. those hosted privately on your own server/domain name, where the webmaster or dev team install and maintain the Discourse software

This community's Discourse instance is one of the second type.  It's installed and hosted on https://talk.tiddlywiki.org.  That's why it doesn't show up in the search over at Discourse.com.

One of the things I love about the TiddlyWiki community (whether on Google Groups or Discourse or in the real world) is that there's lots of room for learning in public.  I spent 30 minutes yesterday typing up a request for help on a pretty basic TW function only to discover, through my own grasping for the best words to describe what I wanted to do, that I was trying to ask a question about filter operators.  I was then able to search "filter operators" on TiddlyWiki.com and voilà — there was my answer (and a whole new world of possibilities for the project I'm working on).

[Mark S.]

Here's something that is very concerning.

Look at this thread on Discourse. At least two of the posts marked as coming from me (_Mark_S_via_TiddlyWi) are actually from JWH . 

That's a pretty frustrating bug.

[strikke...@gmail.com]

I think it is due to you writing just before the post from JWH. Something seems to happen in the transfer. Now we really need a bug emoji added to the selection over therel