[developers] DELPH-IN Discourse (Q&A)

[Francis Bond]

Thank you for taking the initiative Olga!   I hope that this make
information flow even better.

I think one of the problems with the wiki is that it does not seem to
be indexed by, e.g. google.   Stephan: is there a setting you can
change to get it indexed?   I think this would make the information
there a lot more discoverable, ...

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 7:02 AM, Olga Zamaraeva <olzama at uw.edu> wrote:
> Dear developers,
>
> In the last summit in Oslo, we discussed a possibility of having a Q&A forum
> in stackexchange style.
>
> Many people were enthusiastic, and, thanks to University of Washington
> staff, we were able to set up a forum powered by Discourse:
>
> https://delphinqa.ling.washington.edu/
>
> I would like to invite each of you to create an account and try it out!
>
> The forum was created very recently, but at this point, there should not be
> too many hiccups. We need to decide a few things soon (see below), so, we
> want to involve the entire community at this point, even if we are still
> testing the forum.
>
> A few notes, for those inclined to read them :).
>
> 1) The primary purpose of this forum is to accumulate concrete solutions to
> technical problems and make them easily discoverable. So the primary
> scenario is for one to encounter an error message, and, instead of trying to
> locate the answer somewhere on the wiki or in the email archives and ending
> up emailing the list for the 100th time anyway, one would query the forum
> (using e.g. the text of the error message). If their question was already
> answered, the assumption is they will be able to immediately find out what
> the working solution is. This is, in my opinion, the most important feature
> of stackexchange Q&A style, and one that other types of support lack.**
> Moreover, the forum is also a fine platform for open-ended discussions, with
> a nice addition of the upvote button which makes better, clearer posts more
> salient in the thread.
>
> **(Some people oppose this style since, in their opinion, finding the right
> solution "too easily" leads to lack of understanding of why the right answer
> is the right answer. I agree  that there may be some truth to that but I
> also think that this ultimately depends on the user and how much and in what
> style they are willing to learn; there is also a question of priorities:
> sometimes what is needed the most is to fix the problem asap.)
>
> 2) I will be the admin of the forum for now. This means I am the person to
> whom you can complain about things if something is not working for you. It
> also means I can do various things for you, such as create/merge categories
> and so forth. If you would like to also be an admin or a moderator, let me
> know. It will probably help to have more admins, especially in other time
> zones.
>
> 3) You do not need to monitor the forum or anything like that, unless you
> would like to. Instead, you can subscribe to categories or tags, and the
> forum will email you when a new post is created in the category or with that
> tag. You can choose whether you will be notified about the first post only
> or each reply.
>
> 4) Some developers expressed concern that we are thus fragmenting our
> support platforms. I understand this concern and would like to address it by
> both making an effort to import the email archives into the new forum
> (unless it proves too messy) and by pointing out that the email+wiki do not
> and cannot really serve the purpose that I think this forum will serve. It
> seems that the wiki, the email list, and the forum can very happily coexist,
> just like python documentation and python-related sections of stackoverflow
> (and presumably some people exchange emails about python when they want to
> discuss something in a manner they don't think the general public will
> necessarily benefit from). Obviously, the wiki should be linked to from the
> forum (and vice versa) and instructions on the wiki can be updated whenever
> it makes sense to do so.***
>
> ***(Note however that it can be rather impractical to try and incorporate
> every single detail into the wiki, especially if the detail only makes sense
> in the context of a concrete question. In fact, every time one adds
> something to the wiki, one in a way is adding a new dimension to the space
> in which people will be searching for solutions... without adding a starting
> point for the search, necessarily.)
>
> 5) The forum is hosted by the University of Washington, so, there is no
> danger of some external host interfering in our affairs. Discourse is
> open-source software. It is also a very flexible system already, with
> various plugins etc. We can customize it as we like.
>
> If you would like to discuss any of this, we can do it here over email or on
> the forum; there is already a topic there regarding the email archives:
> https://delphinqa.ling.washington.edu/t/importing-email-archives/28/5 In
> particular, that topic invites you to participate in a poll.
>
> Thank you for considering,
>
> Olga
>
> P.S.: You will see that there are already some users and topics; I hadn't
> advertised the forum here earlier because it was not yet working in a stable
> fashion, but it should be now :). Note also that for now, this is all in the
> testing stage. For example, if we do decide to import the mailing list
> archives, we may need to purge the existing content.



-- 
Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University