Re: IM dev discussions?

Re: IM dev discussions?

[Payas Relekar]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> But then at some point we will have two problems: we will need to
> spend energy encouraging these Discourse users send their patches to
> the mailing list and people on this ML who are mostly here to help
> others will have to split their time and attention between the ML and
> forum.orgmode.org, because both will be official support channels
> for the Org community.

Maybe we don't need to split time checking both Discourse and Mailing
list, because Discourse comes with a 'mailing list mode':
https://racket.discourse.group/t/how-to-enable-mailing-list-mode/167/3

Admittedly I am yet to try it, but it can also provide filtering to mute
particular categories so they don't clutter your mailbox :)

Replying to discourse notification emails has worked well in my
experience, and there are apparently ways to create new posts by sending
emails as well:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/replacing-mailing-lists-email-in/13099

Perhaps we can check if it is indeed possible to bridge both Discourse
and mailing list seamlessly (or close enough). There are some issues
with extra chrome and clutter in discourse notifications, but these 2
links are what I found in 5 minutes of googling. A more thorough
research might just yield what we desire.

Payas
--

Re: IM dev discussions?

[Hendursaga]

Payas Relekar <relekarpayas@gmail.com> writes:

> Admittedly I am yet to try it, but it can also provide filtering to mute particular categories so they don't clutter your mailbox :)
>
> Replying to discourse notification emails has worked well in my experience, and there are apparently ways to create new posts by sending emails as well:

I've tried an email-based workflow with Discourse before and I'll say it's fairly decent, much better than, say, replying to GitHub email notifications, where they can't even apply GitHub Flavored Markdown consistently!

I have no experience in setting up / administrating Discourse myself, however.

~ Hendursaga

Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Ihor Radchenko]

Payas Relekar <relekarpayas@gmail.com> writes:

> Perhaps we can check if it is indeed possible to bridge both Discourse
> and mailing list seamlessly (or close enough). There are some issues
> with extra chrome and clutter in discourse notifications, but these 2
> links are what I found in 5 minutes of googling. A more thorough
> research might just yield what we desire.

The main question we need to answer is who is going to maintain that
Discourse instance. AFAIU, Bastien is mainly concerned with the extra
maintenance burden.

Can we simply reuse some of the existing discourse instances like Org
Roam? Will the existing maintainers be interested to take this task?

If we have a volunteer to run Discourse and setup the email bridge, I
feel we can get something really useful.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
or support my work at https://liberapay.com/yantar92

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Tim Cross]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Payas Relekar <relekarpayas@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Perhaps we can check if it is indeed possible to bridge both Discourse
>> and mailing list seamlessly (or close enough). There are some issues
>> with extra chrome and clutter in discourse notifications, but these 2
>> links are what I found in 5 minutes of googling. A more thorough
>> research might just yield what we desire.
>
> The main question we need to answer is who is going to maintain that
> Discourse instance. AFAIU, Bastien is mainly concerned with the extra
> maintenance burden.
>
> Can we simply reuse some of the existing discourse instances like Org
> Roam? Will the existing maintainers be interested to take this task?
>
> If we have a volunteer to run Discourse and setup the email bridge, I
> feel we can get something really useful.

It is largely about maintenance, but what about hosting? Discourse is
not free - either you have to pay or you have to self host. Where would
we self host?

Given that Discourse is open source and free (in GNU sense being GPL
v2), perhaps a better approach would be to try and get the FSF to host a
Discourse server from GNU projects (not just org). This would be in
addition to the mail lists hosting currently provided.

I think Discourse is an interesting take on things and I can see how it
could be beneficial to org mode, but we need to be realistic about the
costs and resources needed. We have to have a reasonable confidence
regrading long-term viability (i.e. our ability to administer and
resource the service). I think it would be a mistake to rely on a 3rd
party provider unless we have high confidence that 3rd party will be
able to resource and maintain a server over the long term.

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Bruce D'Arcus]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 2:25 PM Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:

> Discourse is not free - either you have to pay or you have to self host.

IIRC, it is for open source projects.

Yes:

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/

Bruce

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Tim Cross]

"Bruce D'Arcus" <bdarcus@gmail.com> writes:

> On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 2:25 PM Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Discourse is not free - either you have to pay or you have to self host.
>
> IIRC, it is for open source projects.
>
> Yes:
>
> https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/
>
> Bruce

Thanks Bruce. That option is not mentioned on their pricing page at all.

Looking at it, it seems there are restrictions and it is at their
discretion (you have to apply). There are also bandwidth limits, but
I don't know what our 'normal' usage is and what it would be using the
discourse UI. Basically, we only get 50k page views per month.

Their definition is

"Page views
All requests for content such as a list of categories, topics, or posts,
count as page views, whether by a human or a web crawler. Any request
that reaches our servers and incurs significant work will be counted as
a page view."

If you assume 10 posts per day, that would allow
only around 178 views per post. That feels a little low to me. However,
this could be completely wrong a it isn't easy to tell exactly what data
is transferred with each request. It isn't easy to know exactly which
clicks on UI elements result in a new data request.

The concern would be that if it did turn out to be a popular solution,
we could end up needing to purchase the 'standard' plan and while we
wold get that at a discounted price, it is an expense that would need to
be met. (the standard plan would give us 100k page views per month).

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance (was: IM dev discussions?)

[Ihor Radchenko]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:

> Given that Discourse is open source and free (in GNU sense being GPL
> v2), perhaps a better approach would be to try and get the FSF to host a
> Discourse server from GNU projects (not just org). This would be in
> addition to the mail lists hosting currently provided.

I think that it is premature to talk about this just yet.
As I stated in the subject, I am more interested in ML-Discourse
integration possibility. Preferably with an existing Discourse instance.

We can indeed have a community Discourse (hosted by FSF or some other
means). But it will not help with current fragmentation of the Org
community. Not adding yet another place for discussion.

> I think Discourse is an interesting take on things and I can see how it
> could be beneficial to org mode, but we need to be realistic about the
> costs and resources needed. We have to have a reasonable confidence
> regrading long-term viability (i.e. our ability to administer and
> resource the service). I think it would be a mistake to rely on a 3rd
> party provider unless we have high confidence that 3rd party will be
> able to resource and maintain a server over the long term.

I envision Org ML being a central hub of the Org community with ability
to access its portions from other platforms (like Discourse). Individual
platforms may or may not include the whole message traffic from Org ML.
The key point is making it easy to share Org core-related questions with
Org ML without compromising accessibility ML provides.

A number of people prefer using shiny new platforms these days. If those
platforms can be transparently connected to Org ML, we do not need to
worry about new trendy things dying out over a couple of years. Org ML
will still remain and record the relevant discussions in public inbox.
Yet, people who are cringy about using email will be able to communicate
with the core Org community.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
or support my work at https://liberapay.com/yantar92

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance

[Bastien]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> The main question we need to answer is who is going to maintain that
> Discourse instance. AFAIU, Bastien is mainly concerned with the extra
> maintenance burden.

Not just this: I'm concerned with setting up a user-to-user discussion
space that reify a split between users (on a forum) and developers (on
the mailing list).

If a community-driven Discourse instance for Org emerges, that will be
a good thing: people could go there instead (or on top) of SO/reddit
if they don't want/like to interact on a mailing list.

If this instance is stable and useful enough and futur Org maintainers
feel like this should be advertized as forum.orgmode.org, they will be
able to do it of course.

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance

[Timothy]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 704 bytes --]

Hi Bastien,

> Not just this: I’m concerned with setting up a user-to-user discussion
> space that reify a split between users (on a forum) and developers (on
> the mailing list).

For what it’s worth, as a developer I’d be very interested in the ability of a
forum to categorise feature requests/bug reports/workflow discussions, etc.

> If a community-driven Discourse instance for Org emerges, that will be
> a good thing: people could go there instead (or on top) of SO/reddit
> if they don’t want/like to interact on a mailing list.

We could canvas reddit for example to see if the people currently on there would
be interested in an Org discourse.

All the best,
Timothy

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance

[Bastien]

Hi Timothy,

Timothy <orgmode@tec.tecosaur.net> writes:

>> Not just this: I’m concerned with setting up a user-to-user discussion
>> space that reify a split between users (on a forum) and developers (on
>> the mailing list).
>
> For what it’s worth, as a developer I’d be very interested in the ability of a
> forum to categorise feature requests/bug reports/workflow discussions, etc.

But then the ML and the forum would compete with each other from a
maintainer's point a view: the ones using solely the ML would not get
the same information than the ones using the forum.

>> If a community-driven Discourse instance for Org emerges, that will be
>> a good thing: people could go there instead (or on top) of SO/reddit
>> if they don’t want/like to interact on a mailing list.
>
> We could canvas reddit for example to see if the people currently on there would
> be interested in an Org discourse.

Yes, but mentioning that this would not be "the" Org discourse (not
forum.orgmode.org), just "a" Org forum maintained by X for the benefit
of the whole Org community (which is not really a thing actually, just
a mental shortcut for "every Org user out there").

It would be a good outcome to have such a forum: I'd be more comfy
recommending users to ask questions there iff they don't want/like
sharing questions on the ML than recommending them using reddit and
the like.

All best,

-- 
 Bastien

Re: Org ML integration with an existing Discourse instance

[Ihor Radchenko]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

>>> Not just this: I’m concerned with setting up a user-to-user discussion
>>> space that reify a split between users (on a forum) and developers (on
>>> the mailing list).
>>
>> For what it’s worth, as a developer I’d be very interested in the ability of a
>> forum to categorise feature requests/bug reports/workflow discussions, etc.
>
> But then the ML and the forum would compete with each other from a
> maintainer's point a view: the ones using solely the ML would not get
> the same information than the ones using the forum.

I do not know the details about Discourse-email integration. If category
changes are also emailed, Woof! might be able to work with those.

In any case, we cannot really expect everything going on in Discourse to
be reflected on Org ML. Org ML will always get less metadata and, as
discussed, we do not even aim to sync all the Discourse posts with Org
ML - just relevant.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
or support my work at https://liberapay.com/yantar92

Re: IM dev discussions?

[Bastien]

I don't think we should try to bridge the current mailing list with a
Discourse instance.  One heavy blocker is that the Discourse instance
will not accept incoming emails from people who are not registered on
the instance.

If someone wants to set up a Discourse instance dedicated to the Org
community, please go for it -- we don't "own" the community.

We can advertize it like we do for SO and reddit here:
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-web-social.html

-- 
 Bastien

Re: IM dev discussions?

[Ihor Radchenko]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> I don't think we should try to bridge the current mailing list with a
> Discourse instance.  One heavy blocker is that the Discourse instance
> will not accept incoming emails from people who are not registered on
> the instance.

Discourse does allow anonymous email replies.
https://blog.discourse.org/2016/07/reply-by-email-enabled-for-all-discourse-customers/
(search "unregistered")

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
or support my work at https://liberapay.com/yantar92

Re: IM dev discussions?

[Bastien]

Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:

> Discourse does allow anonymous email replies.
> https://blog.discourse.org/2016/07/reply-by-email-enabled-for-all-discourse-customers/
> (search "unregistered")

I did not know that - thanks for the pointer.

I'd interested in exploring a use-case: does anyone know of a
Discourse instance that is *fully* bridged with a mailing list?

In the hypothesis of

1. someone maintains a Discourse instance for Org users

2. this instance proves to be very useful to many Org users

3. we find an example of a full ML/Discourse bridge that works

3. Org maintainers decide at some point to promote it from
   org-mode-community-forum.org to forum.orgmode.org

then I'd be in favor of a *partial* bridge with the list, forwarding
only topics that have a "ML" category, for example.

This way forum.orgmode.org would compete with reddit, stackoverflow,
etc. as a user-to-user platform without competing with the list as the
place to contribute to Org's development.

This is the same reasoning than the one I presented on how to handle
third-places like reddit/SO: it is good if they offer various ways for
users to interact with each other *provided* that we have a good way
to ensure that we the ML don't lose those interactions that belongs to
the ML (bug reports, patches, feature requests, etc.) - the "way" here
is to ask for Org contributor stewards on these places.

I hope this all makes sense - I suggest we revisit this topics in a
few months, so that we can all focus on releasing Org 9.6.

-- 
 Bastien