On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 2:30 PM Nir Soffer <nsoffer@redhat.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 9:13 PM Greg Sheremeta <gshereme@redhat.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 1:53 PM Nir Soffer <nsoffer@redhat.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 4:52 PM Evgheni Dereveanchin <ederevea@redhat.com> wrote:

The primary function of lists.ovirt.org is to provide mailing lists and display their archives.

Hyperkitty is a UI to display archives and it was not intended to act as a forum.

Maybe not intended to be that internally, but it was certainly sold as a forum on memo-list years ago.

 

It does have issues displaying archives yet there are outstanding issues upstream.

Until they are fixed the preferred use case is subscribing and communicating via email.

As for integrating with Reddit - we can set up one-way forwarding (reddit->ML) using one of the existing bots

to ensure new threads are visible to subscribers yet discussion would still happen on Reddit.

From my point of view, mailing lists are a good solution for people with lots of incoming correspondence

as everyone can set up their own filters and processing rules. The best use of Reddit is probably as an

alternative to the users list where people can exchange experience and fix issues.

As I understand, this is the subreddit in question: https://www.reddit.com/r/ovirt/

~500 subscribers, 5 threads this month.

~1500 subscribers, ~100 threads this month

From the first glance it looks like the list is doing fine with many active users.

Will it be enough to just notify list subscribers of a new reddit thread? What do you think?

I agree that the mailing list is doing fine, almost too active for me to follow :-)

Mailing list is easier to search since everything is indexed by Google (or whatever search

engine you prefer).

That's not working 100%, because the UI is not adding all mail replies to the threads.

e.g. https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/issues/206

Also, people are sending an email, then going to hyperkitty to see their message, not seeing it, and re-sending it (happened twice this week) 

But this is an issue with hyperkitty, not with the mailing list :-)

Mailing list allow also integration with other mailing lists like qemu-block, qemu-discuss,

libvirt, lvm, gluster, sanlock, and people on these lists. It is important that we can get public

input from from the projects we depend on.

+1, for developers. For users (think admin personas, home lab people), mail lists are odd and lack social features like votes (likes, upvotes), reputations, etc.

I don't think home lab is our audience.

I'll concede that home lab isn't our primary audience, but admins are, and some of them asked for a forum just last week.

[slightly off-topic -- I do think home lab is a valid use case to pursue, because it gets the product in more hands. Look at Ubuntu's dominance of containers and cloud and you'll see how important this actually is. ]

 

We are not very good at small scale, and I don't see any company investing in this

direction.

I think we're really good at small scale, but we just don't know it. I can install SHE via Cockpit and connect it to a cheap FreeNAS via NFS in under an hour.

Reddit is nice (I use it a lot) but not a replacement for mailing list. If someone want to 

maintain the sub redit, why not. But I don't see us spending time on both the mailing

list and reddit.

What are the real issues we have in the mailing list?

1. that the mails aren't showing up in the UI

The UI of a mailing is is:

- your mail agent

- web archive - if hyperkitty is broken, lets use something else.

 

2. users have asked for something more user-friendly and feature-rich. Discourse (offshoot of Stack Overflow) was mentioned specifically.

How many users? Which kind of users?

See the thread on users last week. (I'll leave your finding it as a fun exercise in testing the UI ;) )

[juuuust kidding, it's https://lists.ovirt.org/archives/list/users@ovirt.org/thread/TUU357HINGWFA23T3SMKDVTM7EKLX6VS/

but you can see how messed up hyperkitty is there -- most of the replies are missing]

 

 

3. IMO, it's hard to have a community feel with a list. We might as well rename "users" to "help-me" because it's only ever used for support. With a forum/reddit/discourse/facebook/whatever, we could build more more of a sense of community.

I'm not sure about that.

Do you have examples from similar project supporting this?

I'm mostly thinking about /r/homelab, but maybe I'm being idealistic. I'm prone to thinking I live a Star Trek utopia.

What I don't have many examples of are people talking about their cool oVirt setups and best practices on users list. We occasionally get "can someone share a best practice with me?" but again, that's just "help-me", not community building.

Thanks again for your opinions :)

 

Thanks, everyone, for your thoughts.

Greg

 

Nir

On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 2:51 PM Sandro Bonazzola <sbonazzo@redhat.com> wrote:

Il giorno ven 8 feb 2019 alle ore 16:00 Greg Sheremeta <gshereme@redhat.com> ha scritto:

Hi,

After a user on the users list asked about a forum, I pointed them to our hyperkitty instance [lists.ovirt.org], which people did not know about. Maybe that was a bad idea, because a few who started looking at it commented that it was broken. This is not a good community experience. [Thank you, Marc, for opening https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/issues/206  - but no reply for 2 months on a *major* bug like that?]

While investigating the threading issue today, I found a new issue (attached screenshot).

Also, one person sent the same message to the list 7 times today because he never saw his message show up in the list / UI.

Perhaps hyperkitty is not well-tested nor really used by others, in which case we should not use it. There are many alternative forums, including popular (although admittedly walled off) ones like reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/ovirt]

Please share your thoughts.

Is there a way to integrate reddit wit existing mailing list?

I agree hyperkitty proven itself not being enterprise/production ready and we need a better platform.

 

Best wishes,

Greg

--

GREG SHEREMETA

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - TEAM LEAD - RHV UX

Red Hat NA

gshereme@redhat.com    IRC: gshereme

--

SANDRO BONAZZOLA

MANAGER, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, EMEA R&D RHV

Red Hat EMEA

sbonazzo@redhat.com   

--

Regards,

Evgheni Dereveanchin

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GREG SHEREMETA

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GREG SHEREMETA

SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER - TEAM LEAD - RHV UX

Red Hat NA

gshereme@redhat.com    IRC: gshereme