Proposal to make this instance read-only by August 2020:Copying from https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2020-July/093642.html :
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* For the bigger picture: **Space** is another Discourse instance and that is NOT what this task is about.> In January 2018, an experimental instance of the Q&A platform "Discourse" was set up for developer support at https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org . See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180854 .
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> Since its launch, the usage of this instance has declined: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247010#6270883
> On average, there are two users who are engaged daily.
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> Other support venues which exist in parallel are much more active, such as IRC, mailing lists, [[mw:Project:Support_desk]], [[meta:Tech]], local technical village pumps, [Space has been canceled](https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/closing-the-space-blog-and-launching-diff/3559).newsletters, Zulip for outreach programs, As of todayor other third-party sites such as mwusers.org, Space has [25 open tasks](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/0SV0yPqlEISP/#R)StackExchange.com, or Reddit.
* Stalled T180853 states that moving discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org to a production instance was at some point a proposed FY2018-19 Q4 goal of SRE>
> Discontinuing the least frequented venue (which unfortunately is Discourse though it seems to be a great communication platform) would keep us from further fragmenting our conversations and efforts.
* T180853#4844720 from late 2018 states that #Developer-Advocacy is responsible,>
> Planning, implementing, establishing and running a centralized Wikimedia developer support venue on production infrastructure (puppetization, data backups, uptime, etc) would require significant technical and "social" capacity. which sounds unrealisticIf Discourse was to me (but maybe I misunderstood things).be further evaluated, Same with T155678#4844716 from late 2018 which states that "#Developer-Advocacy will proceed with next steps."https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678 and its subtasks list part of the remaining needed work.
** This raises questions about responsibility for deploying software updates>
> **I propose to make discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org read-only by the end of August 2020.**
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Random other links:
* Historically speaking, future communication / venue fragmentation, etc.stalled T180853 stated that moving discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org to a production instance was at some point a proposed FY2018-19 Q4 goal of SRE (but dropped again)
*** For the records, Discourse offers quite nice statistics for admins, e.g. on "Daily Engaged Users". I'm not going to draw conclusions as I have no data to compare with other support platforms T180853#4844720 and T155678#4844716 from late 2018 states that this experiment has been passed (?) to #Developer-Advocacy.
* #Discourse (any instance, I guess?) has [22several open Phab tasks](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/6Stp0mf93jgA/#R).
* https://openstack-browser.toolforge.org/project/discourse
* Only for the bigger picture: //Space// was the name of another Discourse instance which [has been canceled](https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/closing-the-space-blog-and-launching-diff/3559) in March 2020.