forum
I think we need to have a forum for the project. I find IRC as a medium really useless and a waste of time, and furthermore, once an issue gets solved, no one else will ever find the solution. Nothing gets indexed, nothing is searchable.
GitLab is too formal for many basic questions. And there is no searchable database for all questions: Everything is in its own repo.
For example, I want to get some info on the N900 back camera support and the the progress of libcmtspeech data? -- where should I send that query?
- Gitlab: No its too formal. a) and I have to find the specific repository for the specific question (UGH). ex: https://gitlab.com/libcmtspeechdata/libcmtspeechdata
- Send it to IRC and hope that Pavel sees it.
a) - If I don't know who is involved with the project, we have play the cat and mouse game of @ing the important
people.
- If I don't know who to @, this burdens other to @ people they think might know the question.
- This puts a further burden on the person who the question is posed to as well, as he has to keep up with lists of text that do not apply to him, and that don't matter.
- I also have to look through list of text that DONT APPLY to my question, or area of interest. I have to hunt and
peck to find where they replied to my question. - Replies might not come immediately, and it gets even worse when I have to scroll up through, and read a bunch of stuff I don't care about to find if anyone replied.
This whole workflow is really ridiculous, and really turns me off from the project. I would like some sort of forum.
have categories like: pmbootstrap... off-topic...
Devices: n900: hardware.. software..
Maybe I don't understand the current workflow. Ideally I would have like to make a post in the n900 forum, called like libcmtspeech, where we could have a centralized discussion on it and the progress. Same idea with the camera module (in the hardware subforum). Please add a forum though.
Activity
We have previously discussed this in issue #51 (closed)
We currently try to keep all important information on the wiki so that it's searchable, in this case libcmtspeechdata doesn't have a page on the wiki, I would've expected to have a page for that or a more detailed note on the progress for libcmtspeechdata (it does have a link to that repository).
By Martijn Braam on 2018-08-19T22:06:18
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I'm still in favor of a non-rolling, indexed and categorized, informal chat system (a forum), at least as an option.
I also think a forum would be great as well. Sometimes you want to ask questions that do not have any informational value, and don't have their place in a wiki. At the beginning I did not know where to reach out people.
What about /r/postmarketOS? Maybe we can improve the description there to state that this is sort of a general discussion forum and use that - after all we already have 2K subscribers there.
By Oliver Smith on 2018-10-09T06:55:57
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Issues with Reddit are:
a) privacy
b) no categories (I guess tags or something could work, but its clunky)
I think this project is missing out on building a larger user community, because most of the communication methods are for devs.
Example, I use Gentoo, and If I have an issue, I go on the forums. Or I search (or ask) the forums by category. With PostMarketOS, there is no categories or indexes of resolved problems (or general discussions). A lot of these "issues" are not, and should not be wiki-posts in themselves, but do deserve to be indexed and searchable.
By Gregory Hablutzel on 2018-10-10T14:13:56
Edited by Administrator -
Issue with reddit: last time I posted a message on it (in the postmarketOS channel), it did not seem to get published for whatever reason. I've never got how this reddit thing was working.
Also I really do not like the topics being sorted by popularity, rather than by date. It does not give confidence to a user who would be about to ask a maybe stupid question.
By Pierre Parent on 2018-10-10T14:16:44
Edited by Administrator -
Example, I use Gentoo, and If I have an issue, I go on the forums. Or I search (or ask) the forums by category. With PostMarketOS, there is no categories or indexes of resolved problems (or general discussions). A lot of these "issues" are not, and should not be wiki-posts in themselves, but do deserve to be indexed and searchable.
Well, for the issues, we have the issues on gitlab. They are searchable and have labels attached:
https://gitlab.com/groups/postmarketOS/-/issues
Issue with reddit: last time I posted a message on it (in the postmarketOS channel), it did not seem to get published for whatever reason. I've never got how this reddit thing was working.
This is weird. Maybe the internet connection dropped out at this point? If the issue persists, let me know and I'm sure this can be worked out.
Also I really do not like the topics being sorted by popularity, rather than by date. It does not give confidence to a user who would be about to ask a maybe stupid question.
New topics are always at the top. It is a mix of popularity and date, for really big subreddits like /r/linux, new topics that don't get upvotes disappear quickly. But for /r/postmarketOS they will still stay at the top for days or weeks.
a) privacy
That's one issue we'll have with every hosted service, and for gitlab we also chose to go with gitlab.com because we don't have the resources to maintain our own instance right now (we would like to put that energy into developing postmarketOS instead).
Reddit is not perfect, but it seems to be a good trade-off for the amount of effort (almost zero) we need to put into it.
If we want to open up forums, at least we will need one dedicated moderator. I think it will make sense once we become more stable and end-user faced in general.
I've also thought about asking for a subforum over at Alpine's forums, but they closed down: https://forum.alpinelinux.org/
(Another note for people only active on gitlab: the matrix/irc chat is quite active as well! https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC)
By Oliver Smith on 2018-10-12T08:02:47
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A subforum on https://forum.disroot.org should be fine IMO. Since, discourse also has mailing list mode, People who like lists can also be happy using it
By kskarthik on 2018-10-23T16:55:00
Edited by Administrator -
Went looking for a place like a forum to ask about building for the Nexus 7 (asus-grouper) yesterday. (It worked beautifully just last week, but the target was removed in the meantime and the ostensible replacement common nvidia tegra target doesn't boot after flashing).
Immediately thought of reddit, but the postmarketos subreddit is private...
By Patrick Casey on 2023-12-11T13:34:28