Discourse on Discourse: The transition period should be long

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#2

I’m, as always, on mobile I haven’t noticed levels. As you say probably isn’t as useful for this group as we are not ‘new’ but, and I’m speculating here as I have no knowledge of discourse yet, could perhaps be used to unlock things automaticaly when new users stick around a bit or streamline getting new mods onboard? And who doesn’t love the dopamine rush of seeing the numbers go up? :slight_smile:

I think the current default interface on mobile is a bit cluttered but I’m getting used to it (tap on my gurning face to see newly replied threads) and hopefully these things can be cleaned up a little.

I think the transition should be quite quick. The core group has moved over and we are running a two tier system where we can read, but not reply to, a subset of the messages. If the interesting stuff from the regulars is all posted here for the next week/ two weeks… It’s time to move.

#3

The transition period should be long

I respectfully disagree with this. If we’re going to switch, the transition period should be brief because it’s a tremendous pain to have discussions going on in two places. If there are problems, let’s bring them up and fix them (or decide they’re insurmountable) ASAP.

This place is NOT (with the defaults) an easy place to get to grips with.

I have to say I’m surprised by all the people saying this. I’d never used Discourse before, and my experience was it looked a little complicated for the first 20 minutes or so, and after that it’s been totally fine (I haven’t even done the tutorial yet).

Now, there are definitely a lot of things I don’t understand yet. But as far as I can see, all you really need to learn to do to replicate Google Groups is browse the full list of threads on the main page and click the “reply” button – everything else is gravy you can learn to use if and when you want. Maybe tweak your email settings once or twice if you don’t like the defaults.

Perhaps Boris or someone with experience doing these kinds of migrations could put together a quick-start guide calling out the parts you have to figure out right away? Or do you have other suggestions for easing the transition for yourself and others?

All the stuff about getting MARKS for LEVELS is a load of old tosh.
YES. A differentiation between a USER & an ADMIN/MODERATOR is understandable.
The other levels don’t make sense for OUR group, which is well seasoned already.
It is also DISCRIMINATIVE in a not particularly helpful way. Those levels add nothing but OBSTACLES, as far as I can see. Correct me if I am wrong.

I’m with @Ste_W, I don’t think the levels are being used in our configuration to restrict access to anything folks would have had access to in the Google group. My understanding is that what you get at each level and what puts you in each level is totally configurable, and we plan to keep the permissions fairly open at the beginning and then lock them down if we start getting spam/other troubles later.

#4

I won’t go on and on about the disadvantages of Google Group. One of the problems I noticed recently with the Google Group is you could not browse it without being logged in. I will agree using a Discourse forum for the first time can be somewhat disorientating, but the advantage of using modern forum software is a joy.

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#5

I totally agree with Soren. Of course, it’s important to take old knowledge with you, but wanting to dance at two weddings at the same time is not a good idea for a long time.

I was a member of various phpBB forums for many years and even if some time has passed since then: Coming here was a bit like coming home for me even this is my first Discourse forum. I never really felt familiar with GG. So I can’t say I miss anything of GG.

Josiah, I can feel with you what you are saying about Users and Admins. Perhaps there is no need for so much different marks and levels. But I remember, sometimes this stuff was a little help which other user are more helpful or not.

I also remember of an migration of an old forum to a new version, while lost all thous old levels. It was a bit funny to see all at the same level we started new. But after a few weeks the picture has changed. It was almost like the old one, but not exactly the same. The difference was between the old power users, who were barely active and at last only stopped by sporadically, and the new power users, who were suddenly much more recognizable.

#6

Based on Boris’ comments, it needs to be at least a month (and I’m guessing more) to know what the actual costs involved will be. Knowing what the costs are and having a functioning plan to handle them seems paramount to the continuation of the project.

#7

There was one discussion I had where Jeremy suggested he’d just cover the costs himself, since they’re not THAT high.

I suggested we use Open Collective so that the community could look at self funding.

Having “someone” drum up some business focused sponsorships could cover things nicely too, as I suggested here:

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#8

That’s right: the idea is that by building up a network of OpenCollective backers we can make the community infrastructure be more resilient than if I just paid for it out of my own pocket.

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#9

I respect your desire to “get-on-with-it”. And it is certainly true that the current in-between state with GG posts being read-only is way less than ideal. However, your push is from EXPEDIENCY and, frankly, it is never over until the Fat Lady Sings–meaning we have a duty of care to ensure that in taking the “group” to a new place we take EVERYONE with us.

The long saga that has culminated in this Discourse initiative needs to be resolutely addressed. The change needs to be manageable by any user, however casual. SO, we need to PROBE Discourse for (1) Fitness for our purposes; (2) Listen closely to views of folk who have reservations; (3) And if needed, ask awkward questions to clarify the details of how it works.

BEFORE any final switch is pulled.

Best wishes
TT

#10

There’s definitely no need for expediency – GG hasn’t shut down, nor have they announced they are shutting down. Discourse echoes posts from GG, so you can pop back to GG whenever something interesting comes up.

To me, the business case hasn’t been made. Otherwise it’s like buying a camel where you can’t afford the payments, and it doesn’t really take you anywhere.

First you need to know how much the forum will actually cost. This may take several months.

Then you need to know how many people will actually sign up to buy for a slightly improved forum experience. Keep in mind, you’re not asking people to pay for TiddlyWiki, you’re asking them to pay for a forum. That’s a much harder sell.

Excitement for the new forum will never be higher than right at the beginning. If you can’t raise the funds now, you’ll have an even harder time down the road.

And also, the big complaint about GG was the search. But there’s not enough data in Discourse to do any real searches. Of course you’ll easily be able to find anything you want – there’s only two weeks worth of posts! What if searching on Discourse is no more improved than on GG? There needs to be a lot more posts to evaluate search functionality.

#11

Totally agree. We need time, especially on search (because there is so little to search right now).

I think I am right in saying a MAJOR issue on the GG was HISTORICAL SEARCHES OFTEN FAILED … leaving the user with only meaningless incantation. NB: It was never last week that was ever the issue. It was last month and before.

IF only Discourse was the Juice Of Sappho. It isn’t. "It is by will alone I set my mind in motion" - Piter De Vries - YouTube

A degree of sobriety is advised :slight_smile:

Best, TT

#12

Apologies if I didn’t sound like I thought this…all of these things are critical. I’m not saying we should rush, I’m saying that “the transition period should be long” is not the thing we should be optimizing for, but rather “concerns are adequately addressed.” It’s better to address concerns as quickly as possible because the community is weakened by having two separate forums, but still worse to make the wrong decision.

Rather than expedient, I like expeditious: no more quickly than it can be done well and no more slowly than it deserves.

Actually, not for me! I’ve almost never had trouble finding things with GG search, as long as I changed the sort from “date” to “relevance”. I mean, it wasn’t great, especially for Google, but perfectly usable and no worse than I would demand from a forum. My big complaints are:

  • They removed a bunch of basic features and broke the interface a few months ago. Can’t do code formatting. Can’t do quoting properly (?!) – the quote bar disappears if you hit the wrong keys while trying to quote someone. And I have the page itself get all messed up and lose my work at least once every week or two.
  • I have to sign in with a Google account, which then sends my notifications to an email I don’t normally use. I can’t reply from my actual email. There’s probably a way I can subscribe with a different email (maybe?) but then I end up with two separate accounts.
  • “Reply to author” usually doesn’t work.
  • I don’t believe Google services are really “free” in the long run and try to stay away from them nowadays. And I’m wary that Groups might disappear.

All this said, I’m going to be honest, I don’t really care that much (although having Google Groups lose my work is absurd). I think Discourse is a technically superior platform and would be more than willing to help pay for it, but I wouldn’t be that upset with either choice, at least for now.

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#13

I use a non-gmail account to sign in with. You just use your email and a password. You have to verify at your email account.

I think they removed “Reply to author” to prevent people from harvesting addresses.

It’s free as in “Not paying $5 a month” free. If you’re worried about tracking, use a separate Chrome profile or a Firefox container.

Groups may disappear, but you shouldn’t base decisions on hypotheticals. One would assume there will be sort of warning. They usually give a heads-up for their major projects.

#14

Folks, My two cents worth, I personally think the “The business case is a hands down a winner”, Personally I would be happy for everything to transition now. However I do understand others have different experience’s and that we need the community to come along with me/us or it will just not work.

I have posted recently that some plugin publishers link to GG discussions as how to contact them for updates and edits of their solutions and thus we should never close the forum. If someone comes back to tiddlywiki after months or years, we do not want them to have a shock, and stop them using their previous knowledge to participate.

I know that experience (Personal and Professional) and background mean little in online forums because, “how well do we know our fellow community members ?”. however I must say it, how I see it. My experience stems from playing, sometimes installing and often signing up to almost every forum, discussion and social media platform that comes on the market or open source. I was also pivotal in promoting an enterprise social network from Hundreds of participants up to over 45,000 participants in a corporate job.

Discourse or any one of the GG Alternatives meets and exceeds our needs as a community quite extensively, it goes out of its way to introduce new users and it has the vast majority if not all the features of modern community tools, we have data sovereignty and at least adequate Discourse support community as well. It is a living project, will change and improve and I expect we can even influence that. Boris and others have experience implementing this for other communities and have being prepared to launch this.

I actually set up and Open Yammer network for TiddlyWiki which does more than 90% of what discourse does and somethings much better. I know the cost and effort to build such communities and the “herding of cats” nature to implementing such change. I feel for those reluctant to move and its challenges but I am prepared to help a transition.

To torcher a metaphor “Better two birds in the bush (Discourse) than only a feather in one hand (GG)”.

In Closing my view is

  • Never Close GG, just encourage movement to Discourse
  • Any solution is better than GG now, But Discourse is at least as good as most alternatives
  • We have started to engage with it and momentum is needed for any transition, we have started sliding in that direction I suggest we start running there. Every day without such features is a day or lost productivity and diminished communications.
  • People including myself who have knowledge and experience of different solutions, and meeting the needs of diverse communities, are supportive of this choice so I feel we need the wisdom of the crowds and experience to guide us. Sufficient insight to Discourse from experts has already determined it is not a trap, even if it were not the perfect choice, it is up there.
  • Having to tackle funding is a way of developing our community further and becomes an enabler, with open collective and other possibilities opening the scope of our community.

So Finally I personally think we should move now, move at the speed the community moves and retain GG indefinitely while encouraging, all to move to discourse. If someone wishes to be a Luddite (I don’t think this is rude, its descriptive) they can, returning members will still be able to engage without moving to discourse. As a community we can help each other through this change.

Unfortunately we do not (yet) have a democratic community where people can have an equal or proportionate vote, so our only recourse is to the knowledge and experience of @jeremyruston, the most engaged participants and the use of evaluation and evidence to proceed, I think we have that.

#15

By definition, there is no business case until you have worked out how you will pay for it.

The minimum projected cost appears to be $1200 per year. And it has to be an arrangement that will work year after year.

To me, Discourse is nice, but it’s still just a forum. And it may not resolve the central issues that we had. Indeed, the central issues may not be resolvable without human curation. Curation could involve a much cheaper solution, such as a central wiki where approved editors could patch in new things. Something like links, but including text and diagrams.

#16

Mark, As I said people will have a different view and my view is its ready to go an affordable. I am already donation $5x12 towards it. I think its more than nice and easy to moderate.

I agree human curation is necessary and the best for discussions is social curation not administrative and not moderation. However I do agree a wiki with fully curated content is best and I feel discourse Wiki posts would be a start but to develop content to put in a central wiki as you propose, in some ways this is already tiddlywiki.com but we should be able to develop documentation in a separate repository.

How do you feel about media wiki?

From my perspective however I would prefer to build a custom community resource where there would be registered user based curation an Idea I prototyped here http://www.colabteam.net/tiddlywiki/ with some people to back me I could design this WordPress site to understand TiddlyWiki objects so people could post plugins, wiki, macros etc… along with editions and subject blogs.

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#17

Maybe now is a decent time to open this up a bit more?

Mark S. made an interesting observation that I think holds truth …

IMO, I think seeking funding to support The TiddlyWiki PROJECT (who’s yearly budget could include Discourse costs) might be better and more effective?

I know from experience that the COSTS (mainly time) administering fund-raising is a bit of a funk-dump where the aim is too narrow. Frankly it is easier to raise $12,000 than $1,200 (from an admin/book-keeper perspective) as the defrayed costs of running it get more manageable at scale.

My pointer here is only that the “TW Project” is one. Very real. SO, supporting that “project” might be more inviting than paying for a single service alone (Discourse)?

Just thoughts.
TT

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#18

Yes, that’s the goal. The Open Collective at https://opencollective.com/tiddlywikidotorg is the home base for fundraising for the project as a whole.

The community infrastructure goal is listed as a start, along with the “legacy” Fission backer items that started the experiment.

It can be used for specific projects, by people in the community, like File Uploads. We could list @sobjornstad’s Grok there, too. He has his own donate page already, but as an example, the TW community backers might choose to say thank you to Soren with a collective donation.

The community, as a whole, has the opportunity to a) band together to fund specific needs, like plugins or larger core code initiatives and b) decide where to allocate collected funds.

The book keeping is part of the Open Collective platform, so it’s not particularly onerous. But I agree, looking for interested companies or others who might want to sponsor larger amounts is one path.

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#19

This has been my biggest issue as well, though I tend to lose work more frequently and have also recently been encountering frequent issues where posts seem to be posted but in fact never turn up on the group. As a result I had already been close to giving up on participating in the community outside of Github (or perhaps Reddit). Other annoyances I can live with but losing my work makes it more trouble than it is worth, and GG has only been getting worse in that regard.

I would also add the frustration with not being able to edit posts.

So for myself personally the benefit with Discourse is not a slightly better forum experience, but the difference between one that is utterly unusable and one that is easy to use. The decision however needs to be based on more than just the preferences on a single individual, just as we should keep in mind that not everyone agrees that with Discourse all we get is a “slightly improved forum experience”.

I also believe that Discourse offers a richer environment to foster community interactions and create community resources than what we have had so far, and the benefits would thus go beyond simply the experience of browsing or reading the forum. However, I will readily admit that there are no guarantees in this regard. Others could easily argue to the contrary and at the end of the day we wont know for sure unless we try it.

Despite a number of users stating that there are workarounds, they don’t seem to work for everyone. This is a common complaint I hear outside of GG (on Reddit, Discord etc) where a lot of current or prospective users of TiddlyWiki feel locked out and unable to participate in conversations around TiddlyWiki since they do not wish to sign up for a Google account or use a Google service.

As always it is difficult to quantify such things and determine how many current or prospective users are left out in the cold, or how many share my frustrations with GG versus those that find Discourse unappealing. However, it is important that both sides of the coin are taken into consideration, and we also keep in mind those users that don’t have a voice in the community because they have been locked out of it for years by our choice of platform. Even with the existence of this Discourse forum it would take time for them integrate into the community and make themselves known.

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#20

If you’re losing work with one of the largest web companies in the world, what makes you think you won’t lose it with a home-grown and maintained forum facility?

This is the new-browser syndrome. People say “I just installed the Acme Browser, and boy is it ever fast!” But of course it’s fast. There’s only one tab open, the caches are empty, there’s no bookmarks or extensions.

Right now Discourse is pretty much unladen. So it’s going to be a few months before we know how it deals with hundreds of threads and with actual demand on the server. Which, I believe really is singular – there’s no backbone of servers dispersing the load.

I haven’t lost work on GG for a long time. There was a time when I was having problems, so I installed a clipboard manager so I could have a backup copy. These days I usually do any actual work in a TW instance, so I still have a copy of some of the work in case something doesn’t post correctly. Also, I find that when I do have problems with GG it’s because my local network is running slowly. I imagine I would experience the same thing with Discourse under similar circumstances.

I don’t understand. This is a vague complaint. Are you saying that people can’t sign in with particular email accounts? You don’t have to have a Gmail account to sign in. You should be able to sign in with your own, favorite valid email address. It has to be a valid address and not one that bounces mail from google because you need to validate your mail.

In the worse case scenario, someone can always set up their own Gmail account (oh the horror!) and log in. I don’t think anyone who really wants to participate is being blocked out of GG.

#21

The design of Discourse is such that it auto-saves drafts continuously. I have never lost content with Discourse across a number of forums I’m part of.

You are correct that it’s just one server. Mostly more users at the same time would create load. It will be interesting to look at month 1 stats in mid September.

More content can slow down specific functions — search is one I can think of.

A number of people don’t want to tie themselves to Google in any way. You may be OK with it, but not everyone is.

My personal view: I’m not locked out from GG, but the majority of my contribution time is mobile and web first. Since the mobile interface is terrible / posting doesn’t seem to work for me, I just haven’t participated for years. You may not care about me participating, which is fine, but it’s a real thing, as is a distaste for Google accounts.

Discourse supporting web-first and email interactions, as well as a great mobile interface and a wide range of login options, seems a good fit. I can’t speak to the pure mailing list mode interaction.

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