Use GitHub 'Discussions'?

[t-paul]

Moved here from openscad/openscad#3902

@dinther let the cat out of the bag on the discussion Mailing-list:

https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

I haven't played with it yet, I want to see if it is a potential replacement for the Forum.
If so, whether we want to have the wider community that close to the developer community.
If a separate repository may allow a degree of isolation if such is desired.
etc.

Separately, if it should be used for developer discussions instead of issues which have been used for such here.
(don't see why not, but I haven't played yet)

[t-paul]

@MichaelAtOz You should have Maintainer access, I hope this covers the Discussions part too.

[MichaelAtOz]

@MichaelAtOz You should have Maintainer access, I hope this covers the Discussions part too.

Well it lets me edit your post so seems that way.

One of the first topics is, if it is a feasible Forum replacement, do we want to have the wide user base this close to the development process? You don't always need to know how the sausage is made.
I don't think Discussions under the main 'openscad' repository would work for that.

Would 'openscad-community' be too close, or a new group [I need to look into security/user management] top level e.g. 'discuss-openscad'?

[jordanbrown0]

Somebody start a new discussion, please, so that I can see what it looks like now that I have it set so that I'm notified of new discussions.

[jordanbrown0]

Test, reply-all.

[jordanbrown0]

Test reply to an old message.

[jordanbrown0]

test second reply to an old message.

[jordanbrown0]

Test, replying explicitly to the Reply-To address.  (Reply-to-sender ignored that address for some reason, apparently triggered Thunderbird's workaround for badly configured mailing lists.)

[jordanbrown0]

Conclusion: a reply using Thunderbird's reply-to-sender feature goes into a black hole. If you explicitly reply to the "Reply-To", which is what reply-to-sender should do if everything is configured right, wrongly goes back to the public discussion. (And that's exactly the behavior that TB is trying to suppress, but since the From in the notification messages is useless its workaround doesn't work.)

[MichaelAtOz]

Note I haven't looked at any possibility for Mailing-list integration yet. Some of that address mangling is done by Mailing-lists.
It's also a policy question some lists are configured to try to keep it all public, it can get confusing with side channels merging back into the main thread.

[jordanbrown0]

Yes, I know that some mailing lists are configured that way. I think they are wrong, wrong, wrong. Every mail client in existence has a "reply to sender" operation and a "reply to all" operation, that do exactly the obvious thing if some intermediary hasn't messed with the headers. When a mailing list sets "Reply-To" to point to the list, it means that when the users do the obvious thing to send a private message, their intended-to-be-private message goes public. Since there's usually a reason that they replied privately, those errors are often embarrassing.

Merging a private conversation back into a public conversation, or in general bringing another party into a conversation, requires some care to establish context and to avoid taking intended-to-be-private material back to a larger audience, but is not terribly difficult.

[dinther]

I think there is a big difference between how openSCAD developers use a common forum and how openSCAD users use a forum.

OpenSCAD developers know their peers for an extended amount of time. This forges respect and reputation to one another. I can understand that not all of that communication is for the world to see.

openSCAD users are different. They want to search for help using openSCAD, ask for help, or suggest new feature. Communication might extend a few rounds and then it's over thread closed. Private communication isn't necessary and I'd argue not desired. If I help someone I don't want to take that conversation private.

Contrary to others, I don't like my inbox flooded with discuss emails full of stuff that doesn't interest me. Yet I still have to look in case that one topic I care about shows up, even if it does I have to wade though this wall of characters to find the actual text I am after.

Not to mention the nightmare of piecing together a thread that runs over multiple discuss emails.

OpenSCAD is hugely popular thanks to you guys who put in the hard work in the program. But you don't have the user community you could have because they have nowhere to go. Right now Reddit and Thingy is making money over your hard work. Those are users you can't talk to or encourage give a donation.

[jordanbrown0]

Your first mistake is using the digest mode, because then your mail reader can't use its own smarts to help you organize the discussion. And it sounds like the digestifier may mangle the messages.

As for piecing together a thread... I don't know about other mail programs, but Thunderbird is happy to sort in thread order, so that it displays the discussion as the tree that it is. (Versus the structure here, which seems to be a limited tree with a depth of 2. Each new message in a discussion can spawn a chain of replies, but that chain is linear. The notifications don't include the threading information that would let my mail reader put them in the right place, so I have a choice between a strictly chronological view in the notifications, and a threaded view in the web page where I'd have to reread from the top to find anything new.)

And yes, a forum style UI is probably better for somebody who wants to ask one question, get an answer, and leave... at the cost of the people who at least briefly look at most if not all messages.

Anyhow, my opinion is the same as it is for any other forum proposal/request: go for it, but don't be surprised if many of the people you are here to talk to aren't interested in using your forum. If they wanted to use a forum UI, they'd use Reddit.