[python-committers] python-committers is dead, long live discuss.python.org

[Chris Jerdonek]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 2:45 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:

> There is a user trust system where proven community members get more power
> in time, for example to fix typos and move topics to a better category.
>

Will committers start out as "proven," or will we need to "re-prove"
ourselves to gain additional privileges? How is the trust evaluation
bootstrapped in Python's case, and who can confer additional trust (e.g.
can it be non-committers, etc)?


*CALL TO ACTION*
> We'd like to heavily test this new forum. As such, I would like to ask you
> to *NOT USE* python-committers for the remainder of the year and direct
> all conversation to Discourse.
>

I hope this thread about transitioning is exempt from this call to action!
:)

--Chris


On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 2:45 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:

> Hello committers,
> since this got pretty long, here's the tl;dr:
>
> - we're at the point where it is hard to make mailing lists work for us;
> - we're switching to Discourse; it's better in many ways;
> - go to https://discuss.python.org/ and create your account there;
> - please do not post to python-committers for the remainder of the year to
> give Discourse a real shot.
>
> And now the long version.
>
> *What's the issue?*
> During the core sprint in Redmond we discussed how we discuss. The
> overwhelming feel is that we have reached the limits of what is possible
> with mailing lists. We identified e-mail as a contributor to some of the
> problems we're dealing with now. To fix more and whine less, I talked with
> everybody in Redmond about a possible replacement for the trusty mailing
> list. We identified one: Discourse.
>
> *What is it?*
> Discourse is forum software started in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward,
> and Sam Saffron. It's used by many large scale open source projects and
> companies, including Github Atom, Twitter Developers, Rust, Kotlin, Elixir,
> Docker, Codeacademy, Patreon, EVE Online, and Imgur. It's open source
> (Ruby, GPL2), it supports plugins and has an API.
>
> *Why is it better than e-mail?*
> It's both a Web app and a terrific mobile application. It supports regular
> flat conversational threads and collapsible replies. There is community
> moderation where users can flag inappropriate messages to notify
> moderators, moderators and authors can lock topics, move discussions
> between categories, archive things that are no longer applicable, and so on.
>
> You can edit posts, quote posts, link between posts, add rich media, code
> snippets with syntax highlighting, there's Markdown support. You can still
> use it via e-mail similarly to how GitHub notifications work. See:
> https://meta.discourse.org/t/set-up-reply-via-email-support/14003
>
> There is a user trust system where proven community members get more power
> in time, for example to fix typos and move topics to a better category.
>
> There's much more: dynamic notifications, topic summaries, emojis, spam
> blocking, single sing-on, two-factor authentication, social login support,
> and so on. Read: https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-vs-email-
> mailing-lists/54298.
>
> *What about Zulip?*
> Zulip is chat software which some of us find useful but its UI is proving
> to be challenging for many of us, the mobile application leaves a lot to be
> desired, and it did not end up moving discussions out of the mailing lists.
> I see Zulip as replacement for IRC whereas Discourse is replacement for
> mailing lists (or both; we'll see!).
>
> *Where do I sign up?*
> Create an account at https://discuss.python.org/. You'll recognize the
> set up as essentially mirroring the main mailing lists:
> - Committers
> - Users
> - Ideas
> There's also Discourse-specific sections:
> - Discourse Feedback (post here if things don't work like you'd like)
> - Discourse Staff (hidden category for moderators and admins of the
> instance, boring discussion)
> - Inquisition (hidden category for users with trust level 3+)
>
> As you can see, I combined python-committers and python-dev into just
> "Committers". If we find in the future that this is too limiting, we can
> always open up another category. For now though I'd like to avoid the fate
> of python-dev where there's 20k+ subscribers and we don't know who is who.
>
> *CALL TO ACTION*
> We'd like to heavily test this new forum. As such, I would like to ask you
> to *NOT USE* python-committers for the remainder of the year and direct
> all conversation to Discourse.
>
> The goal to replace the mailing lists with Discourse met unanimous support
> at the core sprint. As long as we don't identify any deal breakers in
> October, I will send an e-mail like this to python-dev on November 1st, and
> to python-list and python-ideas on December 1st. If everything goes
> smoothly, those four mailing lists will be archived by end of this year.
> Other mailing lists are welcome to port over to Discourse too.
>
> *Acknowledgements*
> Pablo and Ernest worked on setting up this instance for us (thank you
> both! 🖤). The question whether Discourse or the Python Software
> Foundation are going to pay for this infrastructure is still open but, as
> Elon Musk likes to say, funding is secured. Yury and I are helping in
> configuring the instance.
>
> *Future work*
> We'll be enabling GitHub and social logins soon, ideally with adding
> identified committers to the committers group by default. We are looking
> into this right now. In the mean time, please request membership, an
> existing member will add you. We'd like to migrate old discussion off of
> the mailing lists to our Discourse instance so that search is immediately
> useful. We'll look into that after the governance crisis is resolved.
>
> - Ł
>
> _______________________________________________
> python-committers mailing list
> python-committers at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers
> Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/attachments/20180928/eb033207/attachment.html>