Dear git-annex community,
git-annex has a great documentation, consisting of the wiki articles and the converted man page. On the other hand, in my opinion there is room for improvement when it comes to the forum. It's lacking quite some features you expect from a modern forum, e.g.
- Slick UI
- User friendly way to (un)subscribe to threads
- Bump threads on new replies (that may be a matter of taste)
- Reply via mail
- Ability to pin posts (at least I've never seen it)
- Weird markdown formatting, e.g. marking code by indenting by 4 characters, which is hard to achieve for many lines at once inside a browsers text field (Joey already told me pre does job, too)
- no private messages and more...
Therefore I think, that a better forum would significantly improve git-annex's user experience!
I'm hosting a Discourse forum for some time now and think it's quite a decent, user- and admin friendly software. I would be happy to host a forum for git-annex on my own server, e.g. on a subdomain of git-annex.branchable.com.
I had exchanged some mails with Joey about that, he asked me to take this discussion to the forum...
What are your opinions on that matter?
Best, Florian
Thanks, Florian for raising this topic.
Granting the missing features you list (and perhaps adding that people seem to sometimes find it annoying to log in successfully here), I wonder how much those features are limiting use of this forum, if at all. I suppose one way to find out would be to move to another forum and see if traffic increases (or SNR or engagement improves).
For myself, having the forum integrated in the git-annex repo is quite helpful to me, since I automatically track it along with all the other changes to the website, and am sure to see every single post here, and it meets my offline/low bandwidth needs. Also I sometimes promote forum posts to bug reports or make a commit following up to a forum post with a requested feature or fix.
I suspect that the git-annex community is kind of split between people who are more comfortable in web forums, and people who are used to mailing lists, who are currently being left entirely out in the cold (and probably using the irc channel more). It could be that mailman3 with its mix of forum and mailing list could better unify the two groups. Or perhaps there's no point in trying to do that, and a simple mailing list would be a bigger win than changing the forum?
I'm ok with however git-annex users choose to get together and talk about it, including ways that I can't/won't use myself (including non-free stuff like Slack..). To that end, if people want to get a git-annex community going somewhere, be it another forum, or reddit, or whatever, I'm fine with the website directing users to it.
Thanks, Joey for being open to suggestions!
I was holding my reply back for while to see if more feedbacks comes in. It seems everybody is ok with the current forum. I'm still open to setting up a test forum. Discourse, the forum I have in mind let you couple the forum with a mailing list quite easily.
Best, Florian
For me, the most difficult thing is keeping informed of responses to my questions.
It looks like adding a comment, or creating a new thread, does have the “email comments to me” checkbox but this is un-checked by default. Maybe it should be checked by default? I must be forgetting to check this box. It seems a lot of people ask a question on the forum then never return to read the response, maybe they aren't subscribing? Or maybe there can be a new user preference subscribe to threads I comment on by default, which would check this box for us. That way users who want to stay informed via git checkouts on the forum don't have to worry about un-checking the email comments to me box all the time.
+++ User friendly way to (un)subscribe to threads
Agreed, it would be nice to have an unsubscribe/subscribe button on every forum thread. I don't know how to do this from Preferences, my PageSpecs don't seem to be working right now.
++++ Bump threads on new replies (that may be a matter of taste)
Yes, I think that would be nice. I do care about seeing active threads first. It would also be good to see some visual notification for threads with no responses.
++++ Weird markdown formatting
My main issue is being unable to quote people with nice formatting. The default for Markdown quoting, Right bracket, doesn't format well in this forum, so I end up using space plus-plus-plus…