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Discussion Forums/Problem Statement: Difference between revisions
Discussion Forums/Problem Statement (view source)
Revision as of 13:41, 18 November 2015
, 18 November 2015Undo revision 1106196 by Maybe (talk)
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It's not at all clear that removing this requirement will make any difference. As long as we have mailing lists, we can convert them to news in various ways, including the gmane.org service (where anyone can apply to have it done, not just us). Also, the last time we did a survey, a significant proportion of current users used this access method. | It's not at all clear that removing this requirement will make any difference. As long as we have mailing lists, we can convert them to news in various ways, including the gmane.org service (where anyone can apply to have it done, not just us). Also, the last time we did a survey, a significant proportion of current users used this access method. | ||
Ditching the news requirement would allow us to just go wholly to Google Groups. We would then, at least, have everything in the hands of one organization. However, [http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ John Resig has some thoughts] about why that might not be a good idea. Our own experience of the support we receive from Google Groups is poor. They are unlikely to be any more responsive to problem reports than they are now. And they are the source of our current spam problems, which also suggests spam issues would not improve (and we would have no control). | Ditching the news requirement would allow us to just go wholly to Google Groups. Posting via Google Groups is futile, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225589#c5. We would then, at least, have everything in the hands of one organization. However, [http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ John Resig has some thoughts] about why that might not be a good idea. Our own experience of the support we receive from Google Groups is poor. They are unlikely to be any more responsive to problem reports than they are now. And they are the source of our current spam problems, which also suggests spam issues would not improve (and we would have no control). | ||
===Would removing the requirement for mailing list access simplify things and give more solution options?=== | ===Would removing the requirement for mailing list access simplify things and give more solution options?=== | ||
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===Why can't we go web-only? One thing is much easier to maintain than three.=== | ===Why can't we go web-only? One thing is much easier to maintain than three.=== | ||
The UI of the web-based discussion forums we can find, particularly with relation to threading and unread message markers, still hasn't caught up with email and news (some might add "in the minds of those who like to read information using a mail/news style interface"). It's very hard to consume a large quantity of information this way. Google Groups may be an exception to this... but that takes us back to one of the earlier questions. | The UI of the web-based discussion forums we can find, particularly with relation to threading and unread message markers, still hasn't caught up with email and news (some might add "in the minds of those who like to read information using a mail/news style interface"). It's very hard to consume a large quantity of information this way. Google Groups may be an exception to this... but that takes us back to one of the earlier questions and posts to Google Groups can be lost due to its UI, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1225589#c5. | ||
===Why don't we bring it all in-house?=== | ===Why don't we bring it all in-house?=== | ||
That's a good idea, and would certainly give us more control; the current blocking problem is a deployable web-based read/write UI (or even, for that matter, a decent read-only UI). The mailing lists part is already in-house; bringing the newsgroups in-house wouldn't solve much of the problem. | That's a good idea, and would certainly give us more control; the current blocking problem is a deployable web-based read/write UI (or even, for that matter, a decent read-only UI). The mailing lists part is already in-house; bringing the newsgroups in-house wouldn't solve much of the problem. | ||
=== Why don't we use a SaaS hosted solution?=== | |||
==Summary== | ==Summary== | ||
This page is not supposed to be "why we can't change anything", but it does set out some of the things which show why the solution is not simple. If we could find decent open-source web-based discussion forum software which we could plug mailing lists into, we'd be in a much better place. | This page is not supposed to be "why we can't change anything", but it does set out some of the things which show why the solution is not simple. If we could find decent open-source web-based discussion forum software which we could plug mailing lists into, we'd be in a much better place. | ||
==Possible Solutions== | |||
The following software has been noted as potentially helping with this problem: | |||
* [http://gmane.org/ Gmane] - mail to news/web gateway service. Web interface not awesome. | |||
* [https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed DFeed] - web interface to news server. Lightning fast and featureful. | |||
* [https://www.sympa.org/ Sympa] - mail and web, but no news support | |||
* [http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php FUDForum] - [http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php/Features#Mailing_List_and_NNTP_Integration can be used] as a web-based gateway to newsgroups or mailing lists | |||
* [http://www.jivesoftware.com/ Jive] - Collaboration suite | |||
* [http://www.discourse.org/ Discourse] - Open source discussion platform from some of the folks behind StackOverflow. May not meet all our requirements, but could be a GSoC project away from doing so. | |||
* [http://groupserver.org/ Groupserver] - mailing list manager with web interface | |||