We need a set of guidelines/policy around who (and how) can post to News & Announcements
As a reminder, this category is Watched by all new forum users, so we should not overload it. We’ll probably also have some other integrations such as a linked Matrix room, and so on. So we should be careful.
Today, we have a variety of news in several places:
Big stuff on the ansible-announce list
Project stuff in ansible-project, or similar (AWX stuff in ansible-awx etc)
The Bullhorn
Various “persistent” GitHub topics & issue boards
There’s probably more…
There’s clearly a large grey-area[1] between “only people who can post to ansible-announce can post news” and “anyone who ever posts to the Bullhorn can post news”. Neither of those things is ideal, in my view, so we need to set some expectations.
I think we need to start by defining what sort of news we expect the majority of forum users to want to know about, then see if we have a large category of news leftover that needs it’s own handling, and then see what to do with the rest.
From a technical view, we have plenty of options:
We can use moderation, but that means news can be delayed until a moderator looks at it (and we still need guidelines as to what is acceptable)
We can create subcategories (I suspect the website blog will get a subcategory, for example) which have different Watch rules
We can use tags so that for more targeted news, interested people can Watch that tag
We can ask news to continue to go to the Bullhorn (indeed, there is quite some overlap with the Bullhorn here)
With all that said, my take is:
Keep the main news category for project-wide stuff
Big releases of core/AWX/devtools etc are probably ok too, but the rest should stay in the Bullhorn
New initiatives, forum/website/etc changes, events - anything that both users & contributors would want to see
Problems / feedback / surveys for info gathering
Subcategory for the blog (which will power the blog comments)
Bullhorn goes to the blog and thus ends up here too?
Smaller news for a given project stays in Project Discussions, tagged with the project (eg awx) and a news tag
Keep main news category for project-wide and general community announcements. I would wager the only release announcements that should make it here are ansible-core and ansible community package.
For ecosystem releases, I would expect announcements in the forum as well besides the ones in The Bullhorn (not competing, complementing). We need a place to see and discuss new releases. If we think collections and the ecosystem projects would overflow the category, we should have an “Ecosystem releases” sub-category in News & Announcements to allow projects and collections to announce new releases. This would also allow to flex a bit on the permissions and allow for maintainers to have posting permissions. See kubernetes and elastic for examples.
Subcategory for the “Blog” +1. I think it is a must if we intend to have comments and discussion from blog posts. We are also able to link from the current blog even without integration to allow for discussion.
I don’t think Bullhorn and the forum are competing, they are complementing platforms. Not everyone has time to check a forum and not everyone wants to check newsletters. Even if the Bullhorn ends somewhere in the blog as an archive, having an individual entry per news/release allows people to discuss that specific topic.
Agree, those things that usually go into “: General News Updates” and “: Major New Releases” in the Bullhorn assigned by newsbot.
However, currently all major and minor releases go into Bullhorn under “Major New Release”. Do we want to limit it to only Major releases (Ansible 8, ansible-core 2.15, AWX 22) or also include the minor releases (Ansible 8.3.0, ansible-core 2.15.3, AWX 22.6.0)?
Or a separate subcategory for Bullhorn so as not to crowd the blog category? (since it’s weekly and at least in the beginning we probably won’t have blog posts every week.)
I would like to say major only to keep it simple, but, sadly, I have been biten by minor releases having breaking changes. So, thinking with my former Ansible end user hat, I would like to have an easy way to see those and the discussions around them if it were to happen.
I do think that the projects that go into the main News & Announcements category should be very specific. ansible-core and ansible community package are must. AWX probably should be too, as i’ts so popular and has a big presence, but other than that I would have a specific releases subcat like I mentioned above.
I kind of like this. Let’s say we go with the proposed subcats:
News
Blog
Bullhorn
Ecosystem Releases
3 subcat It’s not so bad, how are you feeling on the becoming a maze @gwmngilfen?
Agreed, three seems reasonable. I would want to make sure people understood what those three are. For anyone not well versed in the Ansible Community at large might not know what two of those are.
Though thinking about it, I would hope a curious mind might explore and discover what they are
I’m liking the subcategories, I’ll create those shortly (although I’m not sure how easy it is to get the comment integration for the website working across 2 categories, but we can test it).
That eases the pressure on who should be able to post to News & Announcements, but we still need some guidelines here (and a list of people). For example, excited as I am by “Taking documentation upstream with AWX” I think that’s probably something we’d put in the “ecosystem” subcategory, right?
Proposal: News & Announcements should be moderated - instead of a hard list of who can/can’t post, anyone can post if they think it belongs there, and staff can decide where it needs to go. How does that sound?
on ‘taking documentation upstream with AWX’ - I’d say that one is more bullhorn/project discussion vs news and announcements. (Not picking on ya @oranod, but it’s a useful example to help us decide where the line is). Maybe it’s news and announcements when there is a new AWX docsite to point to. Otherwise, feels more of a day to day letting people know what’s happening item.
I still feel News and Announcements is for only the big things - Releases, major events (aka not meetups) etc.
So guidelines to ask before posting in news/announcements:
1 - is it Big? Major and minor releases qualify for every project.
2. Is it a major event? community days etc qualify. Surveys count, but not minor polls.
3 - If it’s not a release, is it something that impacts a broad range of community members?
Everything else is a bullhorn item and/or a project discussion with an appropriate tag.
I’ve created Newsletter and Ecosystem Releases, and I’ve set all these categories to “anyone can post/reply, but new topics are moderated”. I’ve also set the defaults such that newsletter/releases are not visible on in News & Announcements so that key info get highlighted. I have added boxes for the other two subcategories though, as you’ll see:
Once there are some posts here it’ll feature a topic or two in the box, so that people get a flavour of the subcategory.
I haven’t created a Blog subcategory yet - we’ve talked about the blog being quiet (apart from Bullhorn) to start with, so it feels to me that anything else we post to the blog deserves the eyeballs from being posted to News & Announcements. Obviously if we get the blog rolling at a faster pace we can change that.
: General News Updates” and “
: Major New Releases” in the Bullhorn assigned by 
