Recent issues posting

[Andrew Helwer]

Expecting this to not actually succeed in being posted but oh well.

 

Both emails and posts through the web interface are failing to post. Discussion here: https://github.com/tlaplus/tlaplus/issues/796

 

I wrote a blog post about it here: https://ahelwer.ca/post/2023-03-08-google-groups/

 

Issue tracked here: https://support.google.com/groups/thread/205048267/all-groups-messages-are-getting-automatically-deleted-as-soon-as-posted?hl=en

 

Regardless of whether this is fixed I believe we should look at switching away from google groups. My blog post surveys what other formal methods projects are using. I'll present a longer overview of this topic at the community meeting next week but I think the basic contours should look like:

1. Mailing list hosted by Linux Foundation
2. Bulletin board web interface for the mailing list (so we have a better interface than this)
3. Zulip chat for lower-stakes pseudo-realtime discussion

 

I don't think we should use closed-source vendor-locked group chat software like Slack or Discord. Of the main FOSS groupchat software (matrix, mattermost, zulip) people seem to most enjoy zulip and it is used by the Coq, Lean, and Isabelle communities.

 

Andrew

[Andrew Helwer]

Gave presentation at community meeting, see the slides here.

We came up with some requirements in the call:

• Main discussion board should have email interface
• Main discussion board should also have good web interface
• Soft-real-time chat should be searchable without an account, indexed by search engines, and allow deep linking

So Linux Foundation mailing list with some web front-end (TBD) + zulip seems like a good candidate. I asked on the Lean zulip instance about their hosting setup (link) and apparently the zulip organization is hosting them for free as an open-source community project. Perhaps we could get a similar setup, because otherwise pricing is somewhat prohibitive.

Murat was also a fan of Discourse, which is currently the most popular forum software in use. You can see the Alloy Discourse site here. Discourse has an email interface, forum interface, chat, and also a stackoverflow-like Q&A plugin all-in-one. Unclear on how well its chat feature works and whether it has the features we want.

Please suggest any alternatives in this thread and at the next community meeting perhaps we will put this to a vote.

Andrew

[Jon M]

Hey Andrew, I briefly met you grabbing a coffee at the hotel waiting for the Software Should Work conference to start.

Do you know if there is any significant interest from the broader TLA community in transitioning to something like Discourse?

If so, who ultimately makes the final call to do so?

A number of open source projects use a mix of Discourse/Matrix to keep their discussions organized/lively, and I think this community would benefit from such a combo in getting newcomers such as myself started.