Re: Dealing with list volume

[Joe Doss <joe@solidadmin.com>]

Hi Daniel,

I already said I would dedicated the time and energy to hel0 make a forum 
successful. I said that in my first reply. I just won't do it in an 
unofficial capacity. An unofficial forum isn't going to set it up for 
success and it's going to take more than just me to make it a first class 
support channel and user community work.

In the end it's Jason's call. A users@ mailing list is a perfect 
alternative if he wants to keep things in email as stated in my first reply.

Joe


On December 8, 2017 11:57:26 AM Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> 
wrote:

> On Fri 2017-12-08 10:44:41 -0600, Joe Doss wrote:
>> * Large FOSS projects like Fedora have every support channel avail. IRC
>> (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/IRC), Mailing Lists
>> (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/), GitHub Clone
>> (https://pagure.io/), Forums (https://fedoraforum.org/), Ask Fedora
>> (https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/questions/) and they don't say well X
>> should be good enough. They let the user pick the channel that works
>> best for them to find help.
>
> You're right that this approach is important for large projects.  What
> your request here doesn't acknowledge is that each channel of support
> that you make available has some additional cost in terms of time and
> energy.
>
> Also, wireguard is *not* currently a "Large FOSS project" -- it's a
> small FOSS project with a ton of potential and small but active user and
> developer community that is still very much in the experimental phase
> (the release notes do not lie!).
>
> If the project adds new support channels, but doesn't have the capacity
> (time, energy, knowledge) to maintain them responsibly, that's
> potentially a worse situation for the project than just having fewer
> support channels.
>
> If Jason feels comfortable managing IRC and a mailing list, but feels
> spread too thin to manage a web forum or a discourse instance, i don't
> think we should pressure him to spread himself too thin.  He needs some
> time left over to focus on the code too, right? ;)
>
> That said, if someone knowledgable from the community wanted to
> volunteer to set up, maintain, and supervise an *unofficial* web forum
> or other communications platform, with regular reportbacks to to the
> support channels that Jason *is* willing to support, i can't imagine
> anyone would have a problem with that.  But, be aware that this
> represents significant work.  And an ill-maintained, unsupervised
> platform that presents itself as a WireGuard support channel (even an
> "unofficial" one) is probably *worse* for the project than just
> encouraging people to learn to use a mailing list or IRC.
>
> If you're not willing to commit to that maintenance and supervision work
> involved with running such a channel, that might be for the same reasons
> why Jason might not be willing to commit to it either!
>
>     --dkg