Private discussions (via private message)

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#1

Wanted to point out that private messages are extremely powerful on this platform. A private message is in most ways just like a topic, just with restricted viewership.

You can:

  • have multiple users in the thread
  • edit posts
  • use transclusions
  • convert posts into a wiki for collaboration

This should fit my needs perfectly for privately gathering feedback on things not yet ready for public consumption (Streams beta releases and other prototypes). Would also be great for offering support when discussing sensitive content, without having to share email addresses.

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#2

It sounds like a recipe for making cliques. I can understand sub-groups, because not everyone wants to follow the details of Stroll, Bob, etc. But by-invitation-only conversations sounds a bit … exclusive. Will outsiders even know the threads exist?

#3

I agree with @Mark_S on this: the community as a whole is paying for this forum, but there’s no community benefit to hosting private discussions that are inaccessible to the wider community.

I would prefer to disable private discussions entirely, but appreciate that there may be use cases for (e.g.) being able to message an author privately about a security vulnerability.

#4

I have to say I am very surprised at this reaction @Mark_S and @jeremyruston

It is not as if other private forms of communication do not already exist or are not already used outside of Google Groups. The difference here being that Discourse offers better collaborative tools - at no extra cost to the community - as well as an easier transition to sharing things with the wider community at the appropriate time. Which in turn means that the outcomes of the discussions are more likely to be shared than stay forever in an isolated silo like email.

For my work with plugins like Streams, I prefer a user centered design approach that involves frequent iteration and feedback cycles with a small group of users while initially prototyping new features, before sharing for wider feedback once the idea has reached a certain level of maturity.

My attempts at doing so in the open on Google Groups have been a failure as conversations either never take off as they are lost in the crowd, or inevitably go off track and are not productive. The idea to have all conversations in the public eye is fantastic in theory, the practical reality of it not so much. In contrast, working with a small group of users outside of the public eye to get initial feedback before an eventual public beta was a great success for both the performance improvements in Streams 0.2 as well as new features like support for swiping on mobile, albeit with the friction that comes with having to juggle multiple participants in an email thread.

So it is quite disheartening to hear such use cases for this new community infrastructure dismissed out of hand, as well as their benefit to the community.

On a similar note, I have been discussing a rather promising new TiddlyWiki idea with another community member and we have been struggling with co-ordinating on writing it up and getting on exactly the same page for sharing with the community. So it seemed like an obvious choice to try and write it up in a private Discourse message as a wiki post that we both can edit, perhaps even get someone else to proof read for us in that thread, and then it could simply be copied into a public post.

If this isn’t a valid use case for this forum - being able to collaborate in this manner without resorting to sharing email addresses or using third party services - then I too would have to ask the question: where exactly does the value lie with this forum?

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#5

Granted, trying to have a focused conversation in a GG thread is like holding a séance in Grand Central Station.

Is there some way that conversations can be private, but publicized? With a contact name? So anyone who is interested can request and be added? But no one is left out who feels they have something to contribute?

#6

Yes, groups AND categories can be created with permissions, with a wide variety of options.

Just as there is already a private category that is the management group for moderators and admins.

But really, @saqimtiaz’s use case, is more convenient than just having a private email thread. Including being able to easily keep things in one platform.

In Saq’s case, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that he gets to invite people to beta the plugin he is the author of.

In the GG, he would have just announced publicly, asked people to email him if they wanted to take part, and just done everything over direct email, which is more work for him and them.

I totally agree that doesn’t make sense for any core / community wide work that gets done. It’s good for work like that to be discoverable.

I’ve made an example #meta:private-category — which you won’t be able to see or post to. Unless you join the privatebeta group.

The group is publicly visible and anyone can join. And it has a description describing what it is that anyone can read.

There are a number of other options around visibility and permissions.

The group can be used just for private messaging (without a category attached). There are lots of other options for various settings, like needing to request access to a group.

Hope that helps explain some of the possibilities and permissions.

#7

I’m happy to continue to experiment and to learn more, but I stand by my concern about using community funding for private facilities. It sounds like the permission mechanisms mentioned by @boris will provide a reasonable alternative approach.

#8

Which is exactly how far I got for the next round of development, before having to pause to figure out a better way to run the feedback cycles than via a group email thread. I’ve been considering everything from Github discussions in a new repo to a separate forum.

There are very good reasons for not publicly sharing early betas apart from those already discussed.

For example, with one of the early Streams beta releases that I did share earlier this year, I specifically stated that it was for testing only and should not be used for anything important or re-distributed. However, a community member chose to ignore that and package it into in an edition he promoted quite aggressively, which was then tweeted about glowingly from the TiddlyWiki Twitter account. The problem was, there was an insidious known bug in that version which led to data loss that wasn’t easily apparent to users until much later. Such things reflect poorly on the project as a whole.

I believe @boris suggestion was for core/community wide work which I agree should always be easily discoverable and ideally taking place in public.

I am not interested in expending a lot of energy on a potential dead-end or making use of community infrastructure in a manner that is frowned upon, or in which you don’t seem to see the value to the community despite my best efforts to explain. The labelling as “private facilities” seems to miss the salient point that the community benefits just as much, if not more, from the development approach that I have described.

I will reconsider my options outside of this forum and determine how I might proceed with community support and development for Streams.

#9

Hi @saqimtiaz

Firstly, nothing I’m saying here is definitive, it’s just my provisional opinion. We’ll evolve a course of action together.

It’s not that I frown upon these facilities, it’s that providing them makes the system more complex and less transparent, which has a few implications that we need to consider:

  • With private discussions, some proportion of the material flowing through the system is invisible to the broader community, making it harder to see what we’re getting for our money, and how efficiently it is being used
  • Private discussions are open to abuse (ie exchanging illegal material) in a way that doesn’t apply to public postings, and so we may need to have processes in place to flag and remove material, which is a completely new set of concerns for the community
  • Hosting private discussions undermines the ethos of “public first”, and so at the least I’d want to see some very clear guidelines to help people decide when they are appropriate

As you can see, I’m worried about the unintended consequences of increased complexity and scope creep. I understand the need for private communication to support some development workflows, and I use multiple private GitHub repos for that purpose myself. We just need to make the case for doing that sort of collaboration here.

#10

I think, Saq’s group isn’t used as a “private facility”. It’s a non-public group to develop ideas with eg: “alpha testers” to develop something, that in the end will be a win for the community.

I personally did use the possibility to connect to others with the “Reply to author” button in the GG. The disadvantage is, that it was completely disconnected to the forum. And it did leak the other users e-mail address, which isn’t the case here.

Every chat app has the possibility to open a “private thread” on the fly. It’s super handy to coordinate eg: video-calls with someone, without the need change the app / environment.

I think not every communication has to happen in the open from the beginning. But with Discourse we have an easy way, to share it later, when it’s the right time.

I have to say, that I’m using the forum 100% from the web UI from my PC, Laptop and my mobile phone. I’ve disabled most e-mails notifications from Discourse and disabled all the notifications from GG since I can see them here.

#11

I don’t see any problem with private discussions. Yes, they are less trasnparent but they don’t create any extra noise in the forum. I think that many users will not be really interested in what happens in the private discussion thread and other are fine with a kind of “report”/announcement when they don’t know if they want to partipate or not.

We have a example of a open development thread that was announced in GG. Few active users. How many viewers?

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#12

I share @saqimtiaz and @Alvaro’s sentiments. I also think, with all due respect, wanting to stop private conversations is frankly a little paranoid. Apart from the fact it is easy for members to establish private conversations on other platforms anyway and trivially.

I have had a number of people directly email me from GG and contacted a few myself. Sometimes this is the only way to discuss or support someone when they feel mistreated by others, or supporting someone when doing so on the public threads may inflame the situation or cause embarrassment.

If a community has private threads it tends only to be used for private communications in relation to that community Or for responsible members to facilitate a healthy culture.

If anyone in the world wanted to contact me privately about a tiddlywiki matter and only know me, from here in discourse, how do they contact me? Some people like a private conversation because they feel they would look stupid publicly.

Similar to @saqimtiaz I and @pmario found value in undertaking a private conversation because Github and Discourse messaging was insufficient to address the complex arguments and technical issues we were discussing. It need not become public because it would have just confused people. Of course, as soon as we can the issues we were working on will become public.

If we cant be contacted privately people will be prompted to share contact details in threads, risking harvesting from malicious players. But sharing contacts immediately defeats the disabling of private messages.

I expect you can set a community standard that private messages should primarily be for the subject of tiddlywiki and only if you see someone abusing this (because people complain) or they have large volumes of private messages, only act then and preferably only stop a single user.

I also see the value in community members developing friendships and personal relationships that sometimes only private messages allow. As a whole this will only make the community stronger.

As an active participant I would like to be able to give someone private support, or a friendly message that they sounded harsh, needless to say I have received some of these messages myself in the past, perhaps because I subscribe to an “Egoless Programming” ethic which is sometimes thought of as personal attack when I was disputing the idea not the person.

Also we attract many with different languages, has anyone thought about this yet? Private messages may help non-english speakers seek help from others with the same language without embarrassment.

Finally I have started contributing to the funding, and will more so, when I have an income, So how can I view this as;

using community funding for private facilities

When I contribute to community funding for public and private facilities to promote and develop tiddlywiki. The private facilities which I will use rarely but when essential are about tiddlywiki why should I have to use less appropriate messaging and give away my private details unnecessarily?.

I was recently involved in a private conversation in tiddlywiki Discord because it allows this facility. It was to make some private arrangements and share contact details to help and “support English as a second languages speaker(s)” in our community.

I have being in communication PRIVATLY with a few members who’s personality can “run some up the wrong way” to help them participate more meaningfully and not be judged and I have even received a few apologies’.

I plead with you all to consider my arguments and forget this ill founded idea. Remember I argue the idea not the person.

Tony

#13

Oh, And I have received two unjustified attacks by private email, which I am glad did not go public and we worked the disagreement out PRIVATLY.

#14

Gosh, you misunderstand me! I am not for a moment saying that people shouldn’t have private conversations. This is about whether those private discussions should be hosted at talk.tiddlywiki.org. The whole point is that it is easy for members to establish private conversations on other platforms trivially.

Beyond that, you make a good case for why private communication is sometimes needed, but not for why it should be hosted here.

#16

Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.

How would I know the privatebeta group exists?

If there’s a project going on, how do you know who is, or isn’t interested? Shouldn’t people at least know that the project exists? Who gets to judge if I’m interested in a project?

The situation that saq mentions involves a loose cannon individual. That could happen even with a private group. I don’t know how you would avoid that other than to invite nobody! I guess you could ask people to sign a digital NDA, somewhat like contributors to TW are asked to digitally agree that their postings are copyright-free.

#17

It is publicly listed in the groups, available under the top right menu. We haven’t used this yet which is why I was demo’ing the feature.

Only admins can create groups, so roughly:

Person who wants a group posts about why they want a group and with what permissions. Interested people can follow it.

Group gets created (or not).

Announcement gets made about new group.

This is effectively like a mailing list, except more public and discoverable.

#18

I don’t think that’s the case, other than “send me your email”.

Or… sending people off to create a Google Group or other mailing list.

And Saq and others are telling us they would find it valuable.

Running high quality forum software needs some skills, so sharing the load for community focused use cases could be good.

We’re co-creating community norms here, so it’s good to talk this through. We don’t have to use every feature.

#19

Can you do a screenshot? I’m not seeing it in the top right menu. You mean my avatar (M) or the Hamburger menu? Or something else?

Thanks!

#20

Yes under the hamburger menu. This is a logged out user view on mobile, just to make sure I got the permissions right!

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And here’s a direct link to the groups directory https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/g, where you see this:

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You can see the join link visible. If you click through you see owners / members:

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