[wildfly-dev] WildFly Community Space Replacement

[Brian Stansberry]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 10:17 PM Jaikiran Pai <jai.forums2013 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello James,
> On 01/02/20 1:56 am, James Perkins wrote:
>
> Hello All,
> We are in a position where we need to change the community space for
> WildFly, currently located at https://developer.jboss.org/en/wildfly/. On
> 2020-03-1 this community space will become read-only.
>
> We've got 3 areas we need to move.
>
>    1. Forums/Q&A
>    2. Wiki/FAQ
>    3. Articles
>
>
> 1. Forums/Q&A
> My preference here is we would use Stack Overflow, specifically the wildfly
> tag <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wildfly>. It seems the
> forums is really more Q&A than anything.
>
> If we want to keep the forum and Q&A separate we could use Stack Overflow
> for the Q&A and Google Groups for the forum. Though I don't really see much
> difference between the forum and Q&A.
>
> The JBoss AS (and now) WildFly forums have over the years seen a steady
> decline in the number of posts and the quality of posts. Unfortunately,
> even release announcements which used to happen in the forums previously
> are no longer made there.
>
Since I started doing these a year ago I never even thought about this.
That's something I can correct; thanks for pointing it out!

> Participation in terms of answers or helping out with issues has reduced
> too (as compared to like maybe a decade ago). The new forum software
> (Jive), IMO has contributed a lot towards this - its editor was and still
> is a major hassle, plus the rules around posting (from what I remember new
> users weren't allowed to post more than a few posts within a few minutes of
> each other and had to wait hours to post next). Plus, repeated complaints
> from regular users about this, never ended up seeing any results. Regular
> contributors who used to answer or help out on issues are no longer around.
>
> Having said that, from what I see, WildFly forum as compared to other
> forums still sees good amount of traffic in terms of questions. I think
> JBoss AS and WildFly forums are probably the most active ones right (they
> used to compete with RichFaces and to some extent HornetQ forum in terms of
> traffic, but ever since they were sunset, the application server forums are
> the more frequented ones).
>
> I don't have any concerns on moving away from the current location of
> these forums. However, I personally don't like them being moved to
> StackOverflow. I have tried to be a user at StackOverflow a few times,
> during the past decade. But every time, I have disliked it. If you look at
> the JBoss AS/WildFly forums, you will notice that a lot of these
> discussions/questions span multiple posts where the original poster and the
> volunteer helpers go back and forth asking details and trying to narrow
> down what the issue is - more like a debug session spread across multiple
> posts. This kind of interactive discussion hasn't ever been encouraged at
> StackOverflow and neither does the software nor the people involved seem to
> encourage it there. That has always made me stay away from StackOverflow.
>
Google groups on the other hand I think are a better place. I don't use its
> web interface, but given that it integrates right into your email client, I
> have found it gives the same level of interactive nature that you typically
> want in discussions. Quarkus project has been using google groups for its
> user + dev discussions and so far I have really liked it. So I think maybe
> hosting the forums as a google group mailing list might be a good idea. In
> fact, I have a feeling that it might bring in more participation, both from
> the users as well as volunteers contributors (but that's just a guess).
>
Thanks, Jaikiran. This is good input. And you are a quite active person on
the forums; your opinion counts a lot with me.

> By the way, I don't fully understand the difference between Q&A and
> forums. To me they sound the same and unless I'm missing something. Asking
> users to post in 2 different places (one for Q&A and one for forums) might
> not be a good idea.
>

I'm not sure either but I think your point about SO matches my guess as to
what it's about. The SO style is Q&A while the 'debugging conversation'
type thing is more forums.

>
>
> 2. Wiki/FAQ
> For this we could use GitHub Wiki here. For details see
> https://help.github.com/en/github/building-a-strong-community/about-wikis.
>
> I don't think anyone uses Wiki/FAQ anymore these days (I miss the days
> where I used to wait for wikis from Scott Stark. The classloading one is
> still one of my favourite ones). Neither have I seen too many new wikis/FAQ
> being created nor have I seen them being referred to in the forums (unlike
> the good old Adrian days ;)). So I don't have much of an opinion on whether
> or not to have a new place for them.
>
>
> 3. Articles
> I don't know how often articles get created, but it doesn't look like
> often. My suggestion would be that we just use wildfly.org for this.
> These seem to be akin to blog posts.
>
> Articles these days have mainly been from the WildFly dev team
> before/after a release about new features (which is a good thing). Again I
> haven't liked the software that hosts these articles (again the editor and
> other hassles around it), but at least there have been some new articles
> every now and then. I think wilfly.org for articles sounds fine. Maybe it
> should optionally have the ability to aggregate any good community users'
> articles every now and then.
>
> Having said all this, I think it's best to post this announcement and ask
> for suggestions in the WildFly forums itself, since those are the users we
> should be looking inputs from.
>
> -Jaikiran
> _______________________________________________
> wildfly-dev mailing list
> wildfly-dev at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/wildfly-dev



-- 
Brian Stansberry
Manager, Senior Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/wildfly-dev/attachments/20200203/3621fa97/attachment-0001.html