We’ve been thinking for a while about the various communication channels that exist for the wider Ansible Community. We want to establish The Forum as the official & default discussion platform, as it has critical mass.
Google Groups (ansible-announce, ansible-project, ansible-devel, awx)
GitHub Discussions
Ansible Network Slack instance
The AWX Google Group has already been migrated to The Forum.
During the past 9 months, we’ve already seen that The Forum has more unique engaged users per week that IRC or Matrix. Engage users people people replying to, or adding a thumbs up on a post. We saw The Forum basically over took IRC at launch, and Matrix about a month later. You can see the full stats here.
Given the massive success, we want to establish The Forum as the default place for all discussion. Matrix/IRC will still exist, though we know realtime chat isn’t always the best, and by the time you need that level of support you are likely already there.
Proposal
Therefore we are proposing:
Remove all references to IRC
Remove most references to Matrix
Link to The Forum (with links to the right tags) so individual repos will direct people to the right subsections of The Forum.
Deprecate the Google Groups (ansible-announce, ansible-project, ansible-devel)
And we will bulk-import old Google Group posts into The Forum)
We will likely continue to post ansible and ansible-core release announcements to ansible-announce, at least in the short-term
Future
There are a few GitHub Repos that use GitHub Discussions, there isn’t much traffic there, so we will archive those.
There is a low-traffic Ansible Network Slack instance, which we will also archive and move over to The Forum
moreover, most of IRC and Matrix links are dead. I saw several times that matrix and irc links mentioned in the collection don’t have a single active collection maintainer.
@yurnov Welcome to the Forum, and thanks for your comment.
That’s very true, and related I did a quick search earlier and found we have over 100 references to irc.freenode.net under github/ansible/*.
One thing we’ve learned it not to over optimize. We initially created many Working Groups, which was OK when they were active, but often ended up with a load of small/empty rooms with no critical mass. Using the Forum means that all discussions are in one place, and we can use Tags to filter/group information.
As a community, we need to talk about how and what we want the various GitHub repos to link to in the Forum. Maybe they will all just link to communication.html so we’ve just got one thing, maybe they should have Deep Links including Tags to take you to directly to the right part of the Forum. I don’t know as much about the functionality of the Forum and how links can be done, so I’ll let someone else reply with ideas.
I think it’s a good idea to make the forum the default discussion platform.
But it’s hard for me to say what to drop. I use Matrix (and I see some valid use cases for chat) and GitHub Discussions for ansible-inclusion. But I don’t want to say “drop everything else” just because I don’t use it.
I don’t object to your proposal, but how about defining the official & default discussion platform in a first step, and then decide what this means for Matrix / IRC / Google Groups / GitHub Discussions / Slack in a second one?
The Forum can operate as an email system, so if you prefer emails (like the ansible-announce Google Group`) you can have it configured that way.
I didn’t go into detail, though we the existing release announcements that for ansible and ansible-core that currently go to the ansible-announcements Google Groups will go to The Forum. Since the Forum has a much richer set of meta data (such as Tags), we think we can actually increase the number of Ansible Projects that have release announcements going to The Forum, without causing “spam” for people that aren’t interested in that particular project,
You are right, this is about setting the default (though Google Groups will be going away).
I should be clear, Matrix isn’t going away. My team and I are all active in there there every day, and that’s not going to change. This is more about defaults, as you correctly state. It’s more that the number of mentions/links to Matrix across out GitHub repos & documentation will likely massively reduce,
I think ansible-inclusion actually make very good use of GitHub Discussions (threading, checklists, ability for reviewers to update the top level checklist). This process seems to work well, so I see no reason it should change. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it
Google Groups will be going away, they aren’t in a good state. It’s a difficult platform to use, and it overlaps directly with The Forum, and offers far fewer features.
If there are repos with GitHub Discussion (ansible-lint for example only has 3 posts this year), then I feel it’s OK to archive those.
That’s an option, and where we are right now with the AWX group.
However, there is value in importing it here:
Owning our history: Having our project history where we control it is important. I fully expect Google Groups to go away one day, as Google have already tried to do that twice. When it does, we may not get a lot of warning, so let’s deal with it as soon as they become read-only
Search results: Discourse is good at search - when writing a topic you’ll often see something like:
so enriching this with older stuff can be useful in making sure we’re not repeating ourselves too much.
Deep linking history: Somewhat a combination of both, but the ability to say “we’ve discussed this before, see this topic” is useful. Yes you could link to Groups, but if feels different I think.
I don’t expect it to make a huge difference, but it’s worth the effort, IMO. I still link people to the original post I made to move Foreman to Discourse in 2017, and though it was written on Google Groups, I find it by searching the Foreman forum
Thinking about your question, and @gwmngilfen reply makes me wonder should we import everything, or be selective?
Does it make sense to bulk-import everything, including unanswered questions?
It it worth the time/effort to review and work out if a post is good?
I expect the answer will be to bulk-import everything, though there maybe something better we can do.
The lack of meta data around Google Groups (ie, is this post solved) is yet another reason we want to move from Google Groups to This Forum (Discourse).
I agree that this forum has become more active and its easier to communicate. I haven’t joined IRC in a while and months ago joined the matrix. A lot of the matrix is not active at all and get random conversations that get lost easily. It makes sense to promote and point to more conversations here since this forum platform makes it easier to communicate and see all the recent conversations and participation. I love this forum so much so I support anything that helps it.
I like the idea of making the Forum the default, keeping Marix and IRC as chat (and reducing how often they’re mentioned), and to definitely get rid of Google Groups and GitHub Discussions (except for special situations where they are used for processes, like the Ansible community package inclusion process). I also like the idea of getting rid of Slack, but that’s something the network team has to decide on I guess since they are the only ones using it.
I’m inclined to say remove all IRC and all matrix from github readmes. We list general rooms already in the docs (social, user, dev rooms and maybe the community room). Everything else points to the correct category and tag in the Forum. Or for those who have active groups/working groups, point to the group page here in the forum, which can list their active matrix room.
