Re: [Caml-list] Discourse instance for the OCaml community? (was: how to encourage adoption of OCaml?)

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

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Thanks Andreas, I think those are valid points.

On the other hand, I suspect that a forum may be complementary with a
mailing-list instead of replacing it. Armaël wrote:

> I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on a forum.

and I think we should recognize that the caml-beginners list is a failure.

  https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/ocaml_beginners/conversations/messages

Some people use it, but in numbers that are fairly small compared to the
number of people that discover OCaml on a given time period (there are like
3 to 10 questions a month). It is sensibly less active than, say,
StackOverflow

  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ocaml

and its "yahoo group" interface is horrible (I don't know why people are
enthusiastic about Google Groups either, but well).

Any beginner-level discussion is ill-served by caml-list, and currently the
only choice I think are IRC and StackOverflow, the first being fairly
unstructured and the second being completely over the top in term of
rigidity and blind application of dubious policies.

I don't yet have a super-good idea of how to clearly delineate "beginner
questions" and "stuff that would be a good fit for caml-list", but I think
having a clear picture there could be an answer to your concern.

On Sun, Jul 10, 2016 at 3:21 AM, Andreas Rossberg <rossberg@mpi-sws.org>
wrote:

>
> > On Jul 9, 2016, at 22:58 , Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Armaël: Discourse looks like an interesting option. If we tried to setup
> a Discourse instance for OCaml, would you be willing to act as a moderator
> there?
>
> To paraphrase Dijkstra, IMHO email and mailing lists are an improvement
> over more “modern” forums in almost every way, once you get past the
> “flashiness” thing:
>
> - participation without having to constantly log into yet another account
> (with potential tracking),
> - all communication through the same tool/UI (that actually works), easy
> cross-communication and cross-quoting, archiving in one place, etc
> - offline reading & writing,
> - proper threading (Discourse sees its lack as a “feature"),
> - no annoying gamification,
> - open, standardised and guaranteed to still be around in 5 or 10 years
> from now.
>
> Also, IME, email generally encourages a slower, more considerate and more
> comprehensive discussion style.
>
> Discourse has an email gateway, but last time I looked, it wasn’t deemed
> very usable.
>
> It would be sad to fragment the (not so huge) OCaml community just to hop
> onto the latest train in forum fashion, be it Discourse or the next thing.
> I’m sure we would lose some people on the way (happened with Rust). I’m
> less sure about the people we gonna win over that way.
>
> /Andreas
>
>
> > The Rust people have experience with Discourse as their main user forum
> (I just created a topic (
> https://users.rust-lang.org/t/what-are-rusts-discourse-hosting-plans-and-time-requirement/6462
> ) to ask about the specifics of their hosting plan), and closer to home the
> Unikernel community also adopted discourse:
> >
> >   github issue about the move:
> >     https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/issues/25
> >
> >   Discourse forum:
> >     https://devel.unikernel.org/
> >
> > (I'm adding Amir Chaudhry, who organized the Unikernel, transition, to
> the loop. He had excellent feedback when the ocamlbuild community asked
> similar questions -- https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild/issues/31 )
> >
> > I would be ready to finance a six-month experiment of using Discourse
> for the OCaml community, to see what it gives, but I'm not interested in
> doing the setting-up and other administration work myself, so we would need
> to have volunteers for that.
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 9:03 AM, Armaël Guéneau <
> armael.gueneau@ens-lyon.fr> wrote:
> > Le 09/07/2016 à 00:18, Fabrice Le Fessant a écrit :
> > > I have no time to go on IRC, so I don't really care about it, but I
> think that
> > > we miss something in the middle between mailing-lists and IRC, which
> is a
> > > forum that would be hosted on
> > ocaml.org (ocaml.org/forum
> >  ?). I used to go on
> > > some BB forums at some point, I am pretty sure we could use something
> like
> > > that, or one of its more recent clones (but not a proprietary
> website). Such
> > > forums are quite practical, as you can both monitor them to answer
> questions
> > > immediately (à la IRC) without filling your inbox, and still be able
> to come
> > > from time to time and look at former discussions.
> >
> >
> > If there has to be something other than IRC and the mailing list, I
> personnally
> > quite like the idea of a forum. The *BB things sure have an old-school
> > look&feel, but discourse [1] looks nice, for example, and I think the
> rust
> > people use it for their user forum [2] (and it is free software).
> >
> > I personnaly would be happy to help newcomers on such a forum. I'm also
> not so
> > fond of IRC-like mediums: the density of useful and actual content is
> usually
> > quite low (because of the informal aspect of the discussions), and not
> > structured or easily searchable. It's not because you have access to the
> 500k+
> > lines of backlog that the informations there are actually usable.
> >
> > — Armaël
> >
> > [1]: https://www.discourse.org/
> > [2]: https://users.rust-lang.org/
> >
>
>

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