[Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

This thread is part of the Maemo Brainstorm 2010

Can we improve the quality, the organisation, the behaviour, the guidelines for talk.maemo.org and the Maemo mailing lists?

Propose your ideas and suggestions here, let's talk about it, and summarise the best ideas and conclusions in the Brainstorm 2010/Talk and mailing lists wiki page

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

1) Restructure the forums so that it is possible to read 'by platform/OS'
(example: right now the 'Applications' forum doesn't have any device-subforum which makes it often very confusing if a discussed app is for Diabo, Fremantle, etc) - and for people who is just interested in say OS2008 it is hard to filter out the other posts.

2) SSO
Make 2010 'the year when Single System Sign-on was finally implemented'

3) Simple way to file bugs
Bugzilla is anything but user friendly. Maybe develop an optional 'end-user' front-end with a simpler i/f feeding bugzilla

4) Implement Andrew Black's Moderator structure suggestion
(posted elsewhere)

5) Swap the default Seach-tool to Advanced Search

6) Retire the Karma system
People are 'thanking' way too much because they like the person or agree with the positive/negative spirit of a post - not because the post is particularly useful.

7) Implement 'thumbs-down' for posts
Implement a way to rate a post 'thumbs-down' and an option to read the forum 'community-moderated' where posts with X thumbs-down would be auto-suppressed.

8) Public/better site change tracker
Post a much more publicly visible page showing what site-changes are being worked on, their status and ETC - and with more meaningful status-updates (read: no more "did some work on it", 'should be ready soon", etc).

9) Allow thread-creators to change their thread's subject lines
Allow for people to change the subject line of their own posts - and display a change log in the first post of what the subject line has been changed from

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Add an option to filter specific threads, this is a huge community, I'd like to have boring filtered when click on "new posts".

Niko

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Provide rss feeds. Give a feed for each thread, and a feed for the thread topics (including allowing only the most recent X therad entries/topics). Or provide some other api for accessing it. That will allow you or someone in the community to make a dedicated reader that runs in maemo.

Alternatively, provide an interface that works on the devices that run Maemo, or that is just more finger friendly for any mobile device.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Do we want an agreed neighbourhood boundary between the Maemo and MeeGo forums?

As MeeGo gets more concrete and user/media friendly, we will probably get more overlap between http://talk.maemo.org/forumdisplay.php?f=45 and http://forum.meego.com

I have personally no strong opinion and I can see the benefits and concerns on both approaches. It would be good to have one default approach agreed for reference, though.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

EDIT: sorry, I misunderstood the scope of Quim's question-- prior rambling deleted.

I think the forum boundaries will be largely defined by purpose, which will likely change a bit as the nature of maemo.org changes. We seem to have a natural boundary between the two forums already, though, with a wide stretch of limbo in between...

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

From Monday's Sprint meeting it seems there is the consensus to make this happen. So I hope Daniel and Alexey can focus on it pretty soon...

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Originally, the scope of SSO was defined by the people working on it as excluding Talk; as it was too hard. However, the task for SSO must now include the challenges of tmo/garage account merging and single-sign on.

Given the thought which has been spent on thinking about the general SSO solution, this should be straightfoward (although will require the collaboration of Daniel/Alexey and Reggie).

The process doesn't have to be entirely automatic either. As Reggie, Dave and I did for the council election before last, you can match up a lot of accounts automatically. Where there's many-to-one or one-to-many, these can result in emails to the affected users, a web-interface allowing them to choose one before a certain time and archiving any old accounts which can't be migrated.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Note that it is currently possible to subscribe to a subforum (e.g. "Community") via RSS. Re: threads, you can click "Thread Tools" and "Subscribe to Thread" and then visit your Control Panel to see when these threads are updated. Not quite the same as RSS to a thread, but better in some respects as you can reasonably subscribe to dozens or even hundreds of threads.

I don't have much of a compliant here, personally. Re: finger-friendliness, does the zoom feature in Opera Mobile and Fennec help with this?

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

SOME kind of filtering mechanism is needing, I think. I think the patience of pre-N900 owners is being overtaxed here. There was a lot of discussion about exactly what kind here.

BTW, I certainly hope the MeeGo folks find some way to deal with this problem. From day one, they could have people reading their site interested in the NetBook UX or the Handheld UX or the base MeeGo or base MeeGo on the N900 or base MeeGo on the N810 or MeeGo in my BMW. Going forward, if MeeGo gets on as many devices as they'd like, cutting through the noise to find what is relevant to you will only get worse.

Or split the "Thanks" button into "Like" and "Useful". Allow the ability to search based on usefulness.

Is the goal here to deal with trolls or improve moderation or something? Because this could be used far beyond those purposes. I worry that a 'thumbs-down' could breed ill will among community members. I agree with Facebook -- "Like" needs no explanation, but if you dislike something you should explain why.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

It's not quite subscription - you get new threads, not new posts, or even "updated threads". Plus, there are about 10 or 12 subforums now - that makes a lot of feeds...

Plus, when I subscribe to a thread, I only get the first unread post to the thread sent to me - I don't know of a way to get an email for every post to a thread.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

I don't personally mind this limitation. If I cared about an old thread, I would subscribe to it. :)

I just go to the thread in the forum to read it. I would guess full email or RSS support is mostly for people who want to create their own interface to the forum, right? Otherwise... it's pretty common for a thread to have more than a hundred posts. That could easily clog up an RSS reader or email inbox.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

I think it would be nice to have sticky posts(similuar to sticky threads). It can be very usefull for threads that have proposal or announcement. So OP's first would be displayed at top doesn't matter which thread page you are at. And he would update only it
Some of announcement of apps thread have over 300 posts and you need to make search thru whole thread or go back to the first page to find up to date info (or new screenies :P ) everytime.
Same with brainstorm. I would like to have proposal and updates of current status on the top of any page in relevant thread.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Based on the meeting, here are the proposed/pending changes for Talk, and my comments about them:

• SSO via CAS
• Allow thread creators to change subject line
• Enable email to forum bridge
• Add RSS feeds of posts per thread, and per forum (currently the RSS feed is "new threads in forum")

SSO via CAS:
I can code an SSO vB plugin once the CAS is up and running. Note that while TMO is not included in the proposed SSO architecture diagram, I did add vBulletin's user table's structure at the SSO LDAP page (link) more than a year ago (see history). I have just been waiting for something concrete to work on, with regards to SSO.

Allow thread creators to change subject line:
Done. I don't think anyone should be able to update the thread title for a 5 year old thread for example. Right now I've set it up to 1 year. Note that this can become a problem. Members who search for threads based on title may not find them anymore since the author of the thread keeps changing the title.

Enable email to forum bridge:
Let's revisit this once forum.meego.com is off the same server as talk.maemo.org (this should happen in a few months). Emailing thousands of users for every new post will surely have a big effect on the server. If we really want to implement this efficiently, we should consider using a different dedicated email server to send and receive the emails.

Add RSS feeds of posts per thread, and per forum (currently the RSS feed is "new threads in forum")
This, I'm a bit hesitant of implementing. Actually, I'm not sure why we need it. It's like asking for an RSS feed for all your emails, when you can just read your emails via an email client. If it is being requested as a workaround for the email to forum bridge, then if the bridge is implemented, do we really need the RSS feed per post?


Thanks.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Hi Reggie,

Thanks Reggie, good to see your comments!

Hopefully I can answer some of your questions (although of course I can't speak for others).

Do you have any numbers on the effect on the server, Reggie? On the email to forum bridge, how many people signed up for it, how many emails were sent, etc? I can understand you're hesitant, but I'd really like this to go live for at least the community forum, and see how it works. It can always be reverted if the load is too heavy.

It seems like it would not be difficult to do it.

The point is, if someone is interested in a forum, right now they must visit the forum to be notified of and read new posts. If it were possible to easily add an RSS feed for a thread or for a forum, then why not? Another way for people to consume the forum.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: [Brainstorm 2010] Talk and mailing lists
 

Yes, we can definitely try it out.


The forum doesn't support it out of the box so I have to code something to support it. It will not be straightforward if we intend to provide the option to specify feeds for a specific thread, specific forum, a parent forum including its sub-forums, and all forums.

Thanks.