[wildfly-dev] WildFly Community Space Replacement

Mon Feb 3 20:41:41 EST 2020

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 1:06 PM Tomaž Cerar <tomaz.cerar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Jaikiran,
>
> I agree in whole what you said.
> Stackoverflow is not replacement for forums as they are now.
> There is set of discussions / questions that fit perfectly to the SO
> paradigm but definitely not all of them.
>

It does seem we need to create a Google group. Seems to be the best place
as you can post directly or via email.

>
> So maybe having both, SO questions and google group mailing list? That
> could work.
> As for wiki pages, why now utilize github wiki pages?
>

That is the plan for the wiki's if we need them.

>
> Whatever end decision is, keep in mind that it doesn't really matter what
> stack / software / platform that is chosen,
> it is important that it is active.
> As having almost no participation from dev team and veteran community
> users will surely kill it no mater where it is.
>
> --
> tomaz
>
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2020 at 5:16 AM 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>> 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
>
>

-- 
James R. Perkins
JBoss by Red Hat
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