[Bug 451571] Deprecate and remove Forums
| Bugzilla Link | 451571 |
| Status | NEW |
| Importance | P3 normal |
| Reported | Nov 14, 2014 11:02 EDT |
| Modified | Dec 14, 2021 15:18 EDT |
| Depends on | 348464, 398767, 437064 |
| Blocks | 577150 |
| See also | 528168 |
Description
Container bug to discuss modernizing user discussions.
Based on feedback, today's Forums + NNTP seem to be inadequate for most.
Some potential solutions:
-
Discourse (bug 437064)
-
Leveraging the existing community and tools on Stack Overflow
-
Without NNTP (bug 348464), we can investigate a more modern forum solution
I'm open to ideas.
Designs
Blocks
Relates to
Activity
Apart for the moderating crap which has pretty much destroyed Stack Overflow, I think such a forum engine would work great for Eclipse. Great usability and being able to vote on replies makes it quite powerful. It is also geared towards posting a problem and finding a solution, which I think is what most Eclipse forum users want. I had a look at Discourse, but it does not seem to fit the bill. Oh, and the UI :-(
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #0)
- Leveraging the existing community and tools on Stack Overflow
--> This is likely bug 398767
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #0)
I'm open to ideas.
There is more stuff here:
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/stack-exchange-clonesBy Stephan Druskat
What I still think would be great is a logical split between tech-Q&A-focused interface and discussion-focused interface:
Tech-Q&A-focused UI: +1 what Torkild says about the Stack Overflow engine. \
- OS\
- IP options should adhere to what the Foundation needs\
- Should be 'standalone', not a sub-community of an existing site (SO) for reasons of visibility and maintaining a high profile (but perhaps PR folk would know better?)\
- Why not keep NNTP if it's possible\
- Could be one of the SO clones Gunnar linked to, but may also well not exist (yet)
Discussion-focused UI: Would be nice to have a more modern UI such as the one Discourse offers, but if the community would rather keep NNTP I'm for keeping the Forums for this.
Alternatively, I guess a sensible way to "leverage SO" would be to close the sub-forums attracting tech Q&A and send users to the respective SO tags (perhaps with a frontpage such as http://spring.io/questions).
By John Arthorne
Based on feedback, today's Forums + NNTP seem to be inadequate for most
Do you have metrics available on the current activity level in the forums and NNTP? I.e., number of questions/replies/views per day. My perception is that it is declining but there are still a significant number of active users there. We need to make decisions based on feedback from more than a handful of people that have been on these bugzilla discussions.
(In reply to John Arthorne from comment #5)
Do you have metrics available on the current activity level in the forums
and NNTP? I.e., number of questions/replies/views per day. My perception is
that it is declining but there are still a significant number of active
users there. We need to make decisions based on feedback from more than a
handful of people that have been on these bugzilla discussions.It would be nice to have those numbers, but what could we understand from them? It could be that people are staying away from NNTP because they simply do not know about it (and that it's old-fashioned). And that they are staying away from the HTTP forums because they are not good enough.
Do you have metrics available on the current activity level in the forums
and NNTP?I'd have to work on it. There's a high level of activity in our forums+newsgroups, but the trend has been downward since 2008 (8000-9000 posts/month to today's 3200 posts/month). We have had some pretty bad issues with the forums for a long time, the most critical having been fixed in the last 6 months.
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #7)
posts/month to today's 3200 posts/month). We have had some pretty bad
issues with the forums for a long time, the most critical having been fixed
in the last 6 months.Which is a plausible cause for the decline.
FWIW I completely agree with Stephen in comment #3. We should probably have a split between Q&A and discussion forums.
By Eric Rizzo
This Meta SO topic is of interest here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277810/ie-web-development-support-moving-to-stack-overflow?cb=1
Basically, it's about the Internet Explorer Web Development Q&A officially moving to SO, and the ramifications of doing so. Seems to closely resemble our discussions here.
I wonder if it might be better to have a new dedicated network site for this in the long run.
I don't think this would be a good idea. The forum we are closing is the Web Development in Internet Explorer forum. The types of questions asked in there are already being asked on Stack Overflow. By closing the MSDN forum we reduce the redundancy on the web, and encourage a community of very talented engineers to contribute to an even superior platform - Stack Overflow.
^^ This illustrates exactly what we're experiencing here at Eclipse.
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #10)
I wonder if it might be better to have a new dedicated network site for this
in the long run.I think we must move on. While I prefer NNTP it is clear that it's problems are not going to be resolved. I don't like the forum. Let's have something new and soonish. ? The StackOverflow technology.
We are currently investigating removing forums. Forums served a purpose long ago, but now, there are alternatives:
- *-users mailing lists\
- Google Groups\
- Stack Overflow
We will begin the plan to deprecate user forums. In fact, new projects will no longer have a forum, as we will ask them if they want a *-users mailing list.
In our plan, we want to consider:
- archiving the 940,000 posts we have\
- proposing alternate channels for projects\
- deadlines
-
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #13)
- archiving the 940,000 posts we have
Many of these represent a significant investment. They need to be migrated to the new channels so that a search finds them.
Archiving will not do, since too often archive is indistinguishable from delete as far as usability is concerned.
By Eric Rizzo
Can the exiting forums simple be set into read-only mode with a large, garish, header on every page pointing to some endorsed alternative (StackOverflow, perhaps)? I agree with Ed that there is too much value in the existing content to simply archive it away where nobody can discover or use it.
I don't know how feasible (or beneficial) it is to put the forums in a read-only mode. But I've started a Wiki doc to capture user discussion alternatives:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/User_discussion_channels
As of right now, webmasters are no longer provisioning Forums for new projects.
By Axel Guckelsberger
Did you consider using Slack for support?
Symfony does this ( http://symfony.com/ ) and it is better than one may think first. People get direct feedback and can discuss daily questions with ease.
By Zorawar B
The Elixir forum looks quite nice.
https://elixirforum.com/\ https://elixirforum.com/categories\ https://elixirforum.com/t/features-benefits-of-this-forum/131The site looks very friendly and welcoming to newbies or developers looking for answers. Something along similar lines or better would help to increase participation and adoption of Eclipse projects. It is based on Discourse.
It would also be nice to have features like formatted snippets of code within posts, the ability to link to github or eclipse.org accounts and twitter.
I'm in favour of a solution that meets the users where they hang out. I like the idea of using something like Stack Overflow which already has a very active community of Eclipse IDE users. Meeting the user community where they already hang out gives us a great opportunity to leverage that broader community to grow awareness of our projects. And, frankly, it just seems wrong to be trying to force our user community into any sort of one-size-fits-all solution (especially if that solution effectively isolates a fraction of the community).
Stack Overflow is just an option. Again, I don't think that we should be thinking of a one-size-fits-all solution. If Elixir Forum, Google Groups, or user mailing lists works for community outreach, then I'm inclined to tell project teams to add an appropriate link into their "getting started" documentation and go for it.
For completeness, we'll need project teams to keep using -dev lists for the foreseeable future as having a consistent means for our infrastructure to connect with the project teams is critical (we don't have the bandwidth to adapt our infrastructure to connect to arbitrary communication channels).
Stack Overflow is great, and I monitor it all the time for eclipse-cdt. However SO has some serious limitations as a complete replacement for forums.
-
It is not a good forum for new users. The SO community does not react positively to questions which are just "simple" user error or the more "how do I get started".
-
SO is good for a single question, so it is not a great place for any kind of conversation.
SO has some pages on using them as support channel. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/product-support key part is:
Types of questions and where to ask:
How do I? -- Stack Overflow (tell them what tags to use -- your product and language at minimum)
I got this error, why? -- Stack Overflow
I got this error and I'm sure it's a bug -- file an issue (on your own site)
I have an idea/request -- file an issue (on your own site)
Why do you? -- your own community (developer forum etc)
When will you? -- your own community-
By Jens Von Pilgrim
-1
I strongly disagree with deprecating and removing the forums.
IMHO mailing lists are not an option: The mailing list archives are not very comfortable to search and use, and as a user I do not want to subscribe to a mailing list if I have just a single question. m2e and tycho have these user mailing lists, and (when I worked with these projects) it was quite uncomfortable. E.g., I had to use the archive to see if a question has already been asked, and my mail client to ask a question.
Stackoverflow -- why not replace that with "Google". Yes, when I have a problem, I use Google to search for answers, and often I find Stackoverflow discussions. Or the Eclipse forum. Or blogs. Or other sources. Usually when I have a problem with an Eclipse project, my first choice is the forum though.
The nice thing about the Eclipse forum is that it is a known place for Eclipse specific things. I expect projects to monitor their forum, and in most cases I have the impression that this works quite well. As an Eclipse user, I expect a forum for a given project, they are all at one place, very convenient to find.
I concur with Jens. I also agree with Wayne in being careful to not force a one-size-fits-all solution on projects. If forums serve the needs of user community of a project well, it should still be a viable option for the project. If a project and its user community are no longer making any significant use of the project's forums, which means they effectively migrated to some other communication channel(s), the project could request deprecating and removing its forums. The point is that it should not be a forced decision for a project. Let's not forget also, as others have indicated, that existing forums represent significant investment in terms of both content and user community.
-1
Stackoverflow is good for a certain type of questions only. it is bad for new users and for longer threads or discussions. the moderation culture is rather strict. you have to be very precise in your questions.
Mailing lists are bad for threading and discoverability/search
having the community split up on different platforms is bad
+1 for retirement of forums.
They're not very active relatively to the user community, there is already a lot of user support for Stack Overflow happening, the vast majority of questions on forums would fit very well either on StackOverflow or on developer mailing-list.
Also, in term of community management (which is vital for every project), I think it's now established that the infrastructure should follow the community, and not the other way round. If we consider the user community, with 24 threads this days on StackOverflow, it seems as popular as the forums.It is not a good forum for new users. The SO community does not react positively to questions which are just "simple" user error or the more "how do I get started".
What do you call "the SO community" exactly? If you're going to answer those questions, then you're the SO community, and you can react positively. There is no "they" when it comes to community, it's only about "we".
(In reply to Christian Dietrich from comment #25)
Stackoverflow is good for a certain type of questions only. it is bad for
new users and for longer threads or discussions. the moderation culture is
rather strict. you have to be very precise in your questions.I see all that as advantages. Note that people actively participating on stackoverflow can very quickly get moderation priviledges for some tags.
Mailing lists are bad for threading and discoverability/search
I think it's all the opposite. When I do searches on the web, I more easily reach mailing-list archives than forums (for Eclipse.org or any site I use actually). Mailing-list allow threaded discussions, which usually result in better structured discussions than forums or whatever flat channel.
having the community split up on different platforms is bad
We already have a part of the community of SO, hence why it can be a good idea to reduce the splitting by dropping the forums ;)
(In reply to Jens von Pilgrim from comment #23)
IMHO mailing lists are not an option: The mailing list archives are not very
comfortable to search and useThat's arguable.
tycho have these user mailing lists
Tycho also have a decent popularity on stack overflow, and several Tycho users/contributors answer there to.
And the user mailing-list of Tycho is actually way more active than many forums at Eclipse.org. So it can as well be used as a counter-example of how project can be productive without forums.The nice thing about the Eclipse forum is that it is a known place for
Eclipse specific things."a known place" is an overstatement IMO. Out of the millions of Eclipse IDE users, how many are aware of Eclipse forums? How many are likely to create an Eclipse.org account on the Eclipse.org forums for a minor usage question.
Maybe this move away from forums should be made more progressive: projects that prefer StackOverflow and don't want forums should simply be provided a way to opt-out easily from their PMI, and we'll see in 6 months who's still there.
-
Moderation: incredible.
While we certainly have some idiot users, I don't see them as a sufficient problem to justify moderation. IMHO in practice SPAM is all that should be moderated. (I don't recall a posting that was so offensive as to merit moderation. Occasionally an Eclipse-XXX-is-rubbish posting comes close.)
(In reply to Ed Willink from comment #30)
Moderation: incredible.
While we certainly have some idiot users, I don't see them as a sufficient
problem to justify moderation. IMHO in practice SPAM is all that should be
moderated. (I don't recall a posting that was so offensive as to merit
moderation. Occasionally an Eclipse-XXX-is-rubbish posting comes close.)Eclipse projects are no different from other projects. Keep in mind that many projects and many developers do use SO as main entry-point for user support and they're very successful with it.
Moderation at SO is not that strong, IIRC there is almost never a-priori moderation, everything happens a-posteriori so there is no reason to see this as a blocker.
By the way, I think there is not much lesson to give to StackOverflow in term of community management: their meritocracy model works great as it's relatively easy for a serious contributor to gain many moderation privileges and a high reputation within a few weeks.(In reply to Felix Dorner from comment #34)
I fear that many questions that are asked on the Eclipse Forums would be
closed as 'not a programming question' on stackoverflow. For example,
questions related to tool-usage, wouldn't these be just deflected?Nothing to fear here. Questions about tools a pretty common on SO. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/eclipse for examples of questions about usage of the Eclipse IDE. There are similar kinds of questions for all editors/ides/command-line developer tools...
What are real arguments against the forum? Or do we just want to change
something in order to change something...- It is old and needs work, upgrades\
- It is getting slow and looks very dated\
- Webmasters have very little resources to maintain it\
- We are not looking at changing it or replacing it with something else -- we're looking at closing it to focus on other parts of our infra
(In reply to Alexander Nyßen from comment #36)
What are real arguments against the forum? Or do we just want to change
something in order to change something...The forum software is quite old and is missing features we have come to expect when using other software (e.g. live preview, markdown formatting)
Also, the forum is very slow, especially when submitting a post. See Bug 508567
(In reply to Alexander Nyßen from comment #36)
What are real arguments against the forum? Or do we just want to change
something in order to change something...Please have a look at comment #0:
Based on feedback, today's Forums + NNTP seem to be inadequate for most.
The choice for the existing forum software was driven by its feature to synchronize with NNTP. NNTP is gone.
FWIW, here are my 2 cents:
I agree with the statement that today's Eclipse.org Forums are inadequate for me. I find myself answering questions on SO and never on the Forums. However, I have to admit that my feedback is biased - I was far more productive with NNTP. With the Forums my motivation drained to a point I completely stopped reading/following topics not related to projects I'm directly working on. However, this also applies to SO in my case to some extend.By Henning Riedel
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #37)
What are real arguments against the forum? Or do we just want to change
something in order to change something...
\- It is old and needs work, upgrades\
- It is getting slow and looks very dated\
- Webmasters have very little resources to maintain it\
- We are not looking at changing it or replacing it with something else --
we're looking at closing it to focus on other parts of our infra
From a user point of view, maybe you should state the "better alternatives" in the forum, instead of just adding this "we are thinking about archiving the forums".
So what are the alternatives, the developers and committer/contributor of the eclipse plugins are all checking for questions? Where do I get my questions answered, instead of getting inexpirienced maybes and blah discussions?
I doubt, you want to move the discussions from the forum to the bugzilla.
By Matthias Wienand
(In reply to Gunnar Wagenknecht from comment #39)
(In reply to Alexander Nyßen from comment #36)\
What are real arguments against the forum? Or do we just want to change
something in order to change something...
Please have a look at comment #0:
Based on feedback, today's Forums + NNTP seem to be inadequate for most.
The choice for the existing forum software was driven by its feature to
synchronize with NNTP. NNTP is gone.
FWIW, here are my 2 cents:
I agree with the statement that today's Eclipse.org Forums are inadequate
for me. I find myself answering questions on SO and never on the Forums.
However, I have to admit that my feedback is biased - I was far more
productive with NNTP. With the Forums my motivation drained to a point I
completely stopped reading/following topics not related to projects I'm
directly working on. However, this also applies to SO in my case to some
extend.I am answering questions on SO, as well as having discussions on the forums. The content on SO is restricted to a question/answer format that does not encourage discussions. A thread is done when the "best answer" is selected, then discussion and improvement usually halts. Interesting questions are often closed due to being subjective, open-ended, or too broad. That platform simply cannot replace the forums, as others have stated, too, already.
(In reply to Denis Roy from comment #37)
- It is old and needs work, upgrades\
- It is getting slow and looks very dated\
- Webmasters have very little resources to maintain it\
- We are not looking at changing it or replacing it with something else -- we're looking at closing it to focus on other parts of our infra
I can understand these very valid reasons for change, but we need a platform for communication and discussions. That need has to be addressed if the forums are closed. IMHO, SO is only suited as a partial replacement for the forums, which also holds true for the other communication channels of the current infrastructure.
Could these problems not be addressed differently? I can imagine that administration and moderation tasks could potentially be performed by committers who want to maintain the forums to take work off your shoulders.
(In reply to Matthias Wienand from comment #41)
Could these problems not be addressed differently? I can imagine that
administration and moderation tasks could potentially be performed by
committers who want to maintain the forums to take work off your shoulders.That proposal sounds indeed like a good trade-off.
It would reduce the workload on the Foundation shoulders but still provide a common place for the community.
Note that if we go down that road, it means that the community should basically expect almost no support from the Foundation IP team. The Foundation IP team would basically provide a nice eclipse.org URL, maybe a VM, and give some (restricted) admin rights to elected committers.
Bootstrapping a "community IT" group/project would be a great step forward for such services the Foundation staff cannot commit on maintaining.@Denis, Wayne: would it make sense for you? Would you see any issues with this trade-off?
For those who still want forums but don't want to do the maintenance by themselves, I'd like to remind (with my Board member hat on) that the Foundation would still welcome more and bigger membership dues to be able to maintain more stuff for the common goodness ;)
By Hauke Fuhrmann
I stumbled over a link to the Mattermost chatplatform that seems to be hosted on Eclipse.
https://mattermost.eclipse.org
The RedDeer folks have a link to it on their project page: https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/technology.reddeer/contact
It has already channels for many Eclipse projects.
It seems to have a focus on chatting, but also supports discussion threads, so there are overlaps with the forum's use case.
Is that already officially encouraged to use by projects? Or are developers "voting by feet" to use such alternatives to the forums? Or is it in some experimental phase and not encouraged to use at all?Unfortunately it uses an older Mattermost version which seems to be incompatible to the Mattermost app for mobile devices. At least my iPhone app states so.
(In reply to Hauke Fuhrmann from comment #45)
I stumbled over a link to the Mattermost chatplatform that seems to be
hosted on Eclipse.
https://mattermost.eclipse.orgMattermost is a chat system and not indexed by search engines. Mattermost uses a forum to discuss questions and issues in public too (it's from discourse.org, I don't have any experience with it).
I think attaching a link to this bug on every forum is a bit like leaving a burning bag of doggy doo on every doorstep. What do we expect a forum user to do about this? Slam the door closed? Jump onto the burning bag? CC themselves on this Bugzilla to comment how useless (or incredibly helpful) the forums are too them?
I personally I don't see the point of this notice on each and every forum other than to create a bad smell and a bad impression for every current forum visitor.
If you actually shut down the forums, then you'll need the flaming bag of doo like this, but until then, perhaps we can try not to look so much like a squabbling family with no sense of direction actively driving forum users away in our own navel-gazing, self-fulling, lemming-like drive toward antiquated uselessness.
BTW, did this notice replace the sticky notes? I'm certainly sick of explaining on various forums why Eclipse doesn't run with Java 9 and what the user needs to do to fix it.
By Eric Rizzo
(In reply to Ed Merks from comment #47)
BTW, did this notice replace the sticky notes? I'm certainly sick of
explaining on various forums why Eclipse doesn't run with Java 9 and what
the user needs to do to fix it.See Bug 488482 for that (annoying) topic.
I'm certainly sick of
explaining on various forums why Eclipse doesn't run with Java 9 and what
the user needs to do to fix it.
