I don't understand how the current proposal at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discourse fits with the stated purpose. Discourse is a forum system, not a Q&A system. It may compete with existing discussion venues such as mailing lists, IRC and Phabricator, but it's not a support system. I don't see any benefit in adding yet another forum.

The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%26A_software lists some criteria for a Q&A system (T31923). Askbot is the clear winner if we want a self-hosted instance.

Discourse can be used as a support system. We have discussed features that we would miss (T155678#3750581, T155678#3765636, T155678#3766315 ) and they don't seem to be critical for our goals.

We want to support developers, especially newcomers. The ultimate goal is not to answer questions, even if this is an important factor in the mix. The ultimate goal is to attract new developers and retain them. There is the hypothesis that a more flexible tool will be able to handle questions/answers properly and also become the nice and welcoming landing space for newcomers that we don't have. Strict Q&A systems are to be used for questions, and users leave when they get their answer.

In T155678#3772466, @Qgil wrote:

Discourse can be used as a support system. We have discussed features that we would miss (T155678#3750581, T155678#3765636, T155678#3766315 ) and they don't seem to be critical for our goals.

These don't address the basic features of a Q&A system, described in the link I gave.

For instance, how do you even mark a topic as resolved, without clunky workarounds? https://meta.discourse.org/t/issue-resolved/28483
Even on-wiki discussion is better in that regard.

Let alone selecting the best answer among multiple which were provided, improving the best answer and so on. A forum system is a thoroughly inappropriate solution for the stated problem. If your goal is just to add another chatting venue it might be fine though.

@Nemo_bis if before or during the pilot (or at a later stage) we miss this functionality, we can install this plugin officially supported since June 2015:

Discourse Solved (Accepted answer plugin)

The Discourse Solved plugin allows users to accept solutions on topics in designated categories.

And how do you propose to gauge whether the functionality is missed? It's not about feelings, it's about choosing solutions which fit the stated purpose. Again, it's fine to just state you want one more chat/discussion system: people keep creating new ones all the time, it's not like it will be the end of the world.

In T155678#3773266, @Nemo_bis wrote:

And how do you propose to gauge whether the functionality is missed?

What about continuing this conversation? :)

I'm not against adding Discourse Solved (Accepted answer plugin), not at all. I just think that any plugin added to the default install deserves a discussion.

In this case we are talking about a stable plugin officially supported. The options are:

• Let's start without this plugin, and check again (say) after a few weeks of pilot.
• Let's start with this plugin since the beginning.

Opinions?

There are many orgs. that use Discourse as a Q&A system, and help new developers navigate documentation/code. Here are several that jumped out to me, and there are many open source projects using this platform. Here are some of the boards I found, if people would like to see how others orgs. are using this:

Mozilla: https://discourse.mozilla.org/
Twitter dev: https://twittercommunity.com/
Glowforge: https://community.glowforge.com/
Discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/
Atom: https://discuss.atom.io/

More: https://www.discourse.org/customers

In T155678#3788967, @MelodyKramer wrote:

There are many orgs. that use Discourse as a Q&A system, and help new developers navigate documentation/code. Here are several that jumped out to me, and there are many open source projects using this platform. Here are some of the boards I found, if people would like to see how others orgs. are using this:

Mozilla: https://discourse.mozilla.org/
Twitter dev: https://twittercommunity.com/
Glowforge: https://community.glowforge.com/
Discourse: https://meta.discourse.org/
Atom: https://discuss.atom.io/

More: https://www.discourse.org/customers

https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/ :)

So I started to play with discourse. One thing I wonder is what scope should this new discussion tool should target to have good chances to be complementary rather than a competitor with existing canal – if there is no long term goal to close some of them.

What are the question one should ask in order to decide to post its thoughts on phabricator, mailling-list, discourse, IRC, or some wiki talk page? I willingly exclude third parties such as stackoverflow.

Some activity diagram might be interesting here. By the way, is it possible to create plantuml diagrams within phabricator?

@Psychoslave: Phab is not an UML diagram creation software. General Phab questions should go to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Phabricator/Help

@Psychoslave that's a neat idea actually. I filed T183689: Support diagrams on mediawiki.org about it.

@Psychoslave about scope, it is explained at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Discourse#One_place_to_seek_developer_support

This new channel is for developer support. If you are a developer and you have questions, this will be the place to ask.

That's it. If someone wants to propose other use cases, they will have to be discussed and agreed case by case, taking care of eventual closure of channels used for that same purpose.

Let's consider the plan for a pilot approved. There has been enough support to start the pilot. Some concerns have been raised, but none of them are considered blockers for the pilot.

Let's continue the work at T180854: Create discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org (pilot instance).

In T155678#3861681, @Qgil wrote:

Let's consider the plan for a pilot approved. There has been enough support to start the pilot. Some concerns have been raised, but none of them are considered blockers for the pilot.

You hijacked the "Discourse" page on mediawiki.org in November 2017. Now, in December 2017, you are declaring the page you wrote to be approved by yourself? This is a bit bizarre.

In T155678#3862740, @MZMcBride wrote:

You hijacked the "Discourse" page on mediawiki.org in November 2017. Now, in December 2017, you are declaring the page you wrote to be approved by yourself? This is a bit bizarre.

Please don't troll.

In T155678#3863072, @Tgr wrote:

Please don't troll.

I'd say that throwing the "troll" word is an act of trolling here.

Generally speaking: If you have specific and constructive criticism, bring up specific constructive criticism.
The change summary from Nov 2017 says "Taking the liberty to dedicate this page to the discourse.mediawiki.org plans, since meta:Discourse covers already the rest."
If you have issues with that, explain your issues if you are interesting in solving issues. Accusing folks of "hijacking" isn't explaining your issue.

In T155678#3863603, @Aklapper wrote:

If you have issues with that, explain your issues if you are interesting in solving issues. Accusing folks of "hijacking" isn't explaining your issue.

My "this" referred to declaring the page/plan approved, not to hijacking that particular page title on mediawiki.org. Closing a discussion as having consensus that you both started and heavily advocated for a particular outcome in, to me, lacks propriety. I see it as a clear conflict of interest and a violation of basic principles such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemo_iudex_in_causa_sua.

Skimming this task, it seems like no amount of arguments against pursuing Discourse were going to work, though plenty of valid points have been raised yet again by Tgr and others. A few people are convinced there's a real problem and that introducing another forum will be the solution.

The proposal was announced on November 17. There was an initial wave of feedback and then some more comments and questions. The result of this feedback was a more complete plan to start this pilot (see diff). Meanwhile, support for the pilot was also confirmed from the Wikimedia Cloud Services and the Operations teams, ans it also got green light from the CTO.

The conversation has been pretty much inactive since the beginning of December. While there arae potential blockers and questions marks to have such service deployed in production, none of them block a pilot. Some of the questions actually welcome a pilot to proof whether such new space is needed and more effective than the ones we have.

For all these reasons, I believe it is reasonable to decide that the proposal made 6 weeks ago has enough support to move forward and start the pilot.

The conversation has been pretty much inactive since the beginning of December.

Perhaps because people who were active in the discussion earlier saw no reason to repeat their arguments. For instance, the diff you mention doesn't address any of my points.

Your points made in this topic were addressed above. The plugins that would provide functionality that you were mentioning were documented in the wiki page.

@Nemo_bis, you seem to be concerned about using Discourse as opposed to a QA specific software. The decision to run this pilot on Discourse is compatible with T181377: Set up test instances for popular Q&A software. We can try different options, compare, and then see what technology selection we make for a service deployed to production.

Sorry for the dance of tags. We are rearranging some things.

Let's consider this task a support request from the Developer-Advocacy team. I keep owning it and I plan to resolve it either way during this quarter.

Maybe a solution could be solved with federated networks like T198363: Consider ways to integrate with federated social networks ? One might define additional activity to "mark answer as correct", or for upvote/downvote if such features are desired.

@saper Do you mean to build a web application for Q&A based on ActivityPub from scratch? Or to add features to i.e. Mastodon?

Search is a key functionality for any Q&A system, and search is probably the weakest functionality of federated networks, almost by design.

At least when it comes to the scope of this task, I still think the right approach is to continue with the Discourse pilot in the direction of T180853: Bring a discourse instance for technical questions to production .

Yes, but the search can be made better. Discourse is almost good, but it has a habit of limiting brand new user options, which is a big limitation of a Q&A system. But it can be configured not to do this (giving more options at the level 0).

Regarding the first question I'd think we could do it in a step-by-step approach: take something ready to use (Mastodon/Pleroma/whatever) and see how that could fit and work from there. Then we'd have at least a something to extend OR a pilot experience with requirements for a good custom system if needed.

Of course, if ActivityPub federation could be added to Discourse, even better - but I think this is hard since Discourse is very opinionated of the content that is being fed into it, so I don't think it can be made to federate easily.

Discourse is almost good, but it has a habit of limiting brand new user options, which is a big limitation of a Q&A system.

Those limitations can be configured via admin interface. In any case, developing a Q&A system based on ActivityPub (something that as far as I know nobody has attempted) sounds like an option well above our ambition here.

Back to Discourse, today I took a look to the admin dashboard and extracted some metrics:

https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/t/past-the-50-users-mark/113/4

My quick & brief read is that Discourse is accomplishing its functions as a developer support space (most of the developers landing there with questions get a reply fairly quickly) but maybe it is time to promote this space decidedly.

I am going to work on it again, helping the Developer Advocacy team to bring it from pilot to production unless someone comes with a better plan.

(Possibly not a support task though? :) )

(Although not a pure support task because it mixes my previous responsibilities in Technical Collaboration, I am doing this work for Developer-Advocacy.)