[wildfly-dev] WildFly Community Space Replacement

[James Perkins]

First of all thank you very much Jaikiran for the in depth comments and
opinions.

On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 8:16 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. 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.
>
I definitely agree with this and find myself doing this in the comments
sometimes which is definitely discouraged.

> 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).
>
> 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.
>

Okay I think this makes sense and is a good argument for using Google
Groups as essentially the replacement for the forums. Stack Overflow is
used by some it seems so we can just continue using it the way it is now.
Maybe with the announcement we just have a mention to use the wildfly tag.

Also the only reason I used both forums and Q&A was more because on the
sunset announcement it had them listed separately :)


>
>
> 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.
>
Yeah I haven't seen much either.

>
> 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.
>

Yeah. It's allowing the community to contribute which seems like the
biggest issue. I'm not sure how much they would want to or not, but I
suppose we could always figure that out when it comes up.


> 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.
>

That's a good idea. I will do it there as well which makes sense. For some
reason the ML was the place that came to mind :)


> -Jaikiran
>


-- 
James R. Perkins
JBoss by Red Hat
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