 Okay, yeah, you're right. I did. I can start over. Of the people who came in, does anybody not know what Discourse is? Okay, alright, so then we're back to this. Yeah, it's a web forum in a lot of ways, but it also is intended and is a design goal to replace mailing lists, even though it doesn't do it by being like a mailing list. And I think, this is something I've been talking about for a long time, our interaction on the Internet is buried in mailing lists, which are for old people, and IRC, which is for weird hacker old people. So I think that having a discussion forum that kind of fits in with the modern way people use the Internet is important for the future of Fedora, and I thought that all along, which is one of the reasons we have Hyperkitty in the first place, so not a surprise. It is also potentially an Ask Fedora replacement, so I'll have a whole bit about that later. It is a fully open source project, but it has a company behind it, so there's active development going on all the time, like huge amounts of commits, and they also have a host adoption, which is nice because our infrastructure team is strained, I'm getting nods from Aurelian, and paying somebody else who is doing open source to do it is like a super everybody wins kind of thing, especially if we can get Red Hat to pay for it, which is currently happening. So yeah, this is what it looks like. This is the discussion at fodoraproject.org that Sonya stood up, and Patrick and some other people. Lots of people get credit for this. Matias could probably get some credit too. And so this is kind of what it looks like as an overview. This one kind of top view of the threads is what the front page looks like here. It's not gorgeous, but it's fairly functional, and I think it's the kind of thing that at first maybe looks a little bit overwhelming, but it's actually gone through several years of like actual interactive use, and they're tweaking the design constantly. So I think that it's the kind of thing that is a little bit overwhelming, but once you start using it, is actually everything's pretty practical in my experience. I mean UX is always subjective. Then there's category lists here, and we can have a bunch of different categories, and that's what it looks like. You can see up there there's notifications and everything. You can look at discussion.fadoraproject.org to actually get a better view of what it actually is live. And this is a random thread that I picked from just today, like somebody has this, and one of the things that's noticed, this is marked as solved there, which I think is kind of a useful thing for, and like I said, possibly an ask replacement in some ways. And I guess it didn't inline the SVGs there, but I'm sharing it, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but if that were a ping image, it would have worked. Okay, so that's kind of what it looks like. This is the what about the hyperkitty thing. They're definitely overlapping goals. Like hyperkitty was designed to replace mailing lists with a modern thing, and when we launched this, it hurt most feelings, which I really genuinely feel bad about. I surprised her with it, and that was not the intention because I know she put a lot of very passionate work in the hyperkitty design. And so this kind of overlaps that. So putting this at discussion rather than having a hyperkitty thing at discussion without actually having discussion about it, may be not the most friendly thing to do, so I regret that. But anyways, part of the thing is, yeah, the vision of hyperkitty reached the real, and I'm glad that Aurelian is also nodding at me here, that we never were able to realize that vision with hyperkitty. We just didn't have the resources to do it. It really would have taken a team of three or four or five people, and having those people continually working on it now rather than getting it to launch and then saying, okay, finally got it to launch. You can work on something else. And we really can't go out alone on this, and I know that hyperkitty is a Mailman 3 project and isn't nominally a Fedora-only thing, but there are not a lot of other big hyperkitty installations out there and not a lot of other developers. Is that fair to say? I don't know. Yeah, okay. But I don't know. Yeah, right. And I think no chance of new features is a fair thing to say because I've been asking for them for like three years, and there's just not resources for it. However, we still do need mailing lists in Fedora. I'm not going to kick you all off of your mailing lists. That would not work. And we still need a mailing list archiver. So right now we've got hyperkitty up and running as that, and I think it serves that purpose fine. I've got a couple more slides, pictures of hyperkitty. This is one of the things like... Right, so hyperkitty has Pistorius as part of it, and that's one of the things like... So this is the point I wanted to make, though. The link to hyperkitty is the archives. This is your web interface to your mailing list. This is your archives of the mailing list. So I think it serves that purpose as an archiver better than the crappy whatever Mailman 2 archiver was called because that was horrible. So this is a much better archiver than that. So I'm not trying to kill that, but I would like to fix this thing right here. Do you know this thing? If you click on this sign up link up here, for any list in Fedora you get told that it's closed, which is not so friendly. Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah. This happens for a very good reason. We walk with FAS, but that's artifacts like that. I think the thing is we don't have time for you to spend all of your time on the polish like that, and I don't blame you at all for this. So skipping on to Ask Fedora. So this is Ask Fedora. Are there Ask Fedora users, people here in this room? That's too bad. There is an actual community of people who are on Ask Fedora, and I didn't actually make a screenshot of it, but it is an Ask Bot powered Q&A forum, and it is basically meant to be an open source clone of Stack Exchange, which, although it is awesome, is not at all open source. And to be blunt, I put it in the slides event. It's a really bad Stack Exchange clone. It kind of is a clone of what Stack Exchange was like six or seven years ago, in appearance only, and not really understanding how it worked, and especially not understanding the user interaction and the community moderation and all the things that make Stack Exchange successful. So we're trying to kind of build a community on top of something that's not very good software for a self-powered community, so that kind of sucks. We had been having our own instance of it, and it was basically bit rotting and becoming very slow and awful and not managed at all. So we have actually moved it to be hosted by the developer of that, but I would not say that that move has been a home run. It is now updated to a newer version, but we had a bunch of feature requests and things that were supposed to be getting development kind of as part of the hosting deal, and that's not really happening. And so that's, and it is, again, it's just one developer working on this. And a key point is, I asked Fedora, actually, so one of the things about Stack Exchange is it is very focused on, you have a question, and then there are answers to it, and every question must be an answerable question or it gets shot down, whether you like it or not. There's some good and bad things about Stack Exchange there. And they really frown on interactive diagnostics, like, okay, have you tried rebooting your computer? Have you tried this? That kind of back and forth is not welcome on Stack Exchange in general, which is not necessarily great because we need Fedora anyways. It's one of the reasons we didn't just say, hey, just go ask everything on Stack Exchange because people didn't like that kind of feeling. They wanted to actually have something where they could help people, but the AskVot tool is not really great for that anyways. So actually I think something that is more web-form-like is probably better for what people are using AskFedora for anyways, especially with the, you've solved my problem plug-in and some of the other things that exist. That basically other people are working to develop these add-ons for discourse that are useful to us. Okay, and then this is the other resourcing thing. Hubs is another project that is dear to my heart and sadly we do not have resources to develop. Basically it is the idea, again, that Fedora's web presence, especially, I mean, with our refreshed GetFedora and the new Dock site and some of these things, it looks a lot more alive than it did, but several years ago if you'd look at Fedora, your interface to it was the Wiki and the front page of the Wiki was not great and then there was some bit rot, like two clicks away from that and it would be easy to have looked at Fedora and say, this is a dead project, which is awful because even then it is very, very active every day. Thousands of, you know, there's something like 1,100 IRC meetings every year. A lot of activity, just not surface. So the idea of hubs was to surface that activity, but again, we don't have the resources to develop hubs, but that's how it is. However, it is possible, one of the things hubs is going to be is kind of the community front end. We have GetFedora for if you're who just want to download Fedora and then if you want something more than that, if you're involved in the project, there's something on the web that kind of feeds you into where you're going. It's not possible, but not necessary. This isn't the only possible answer. A discourse forum could kind of provide that front end where every different groups in Fedora could have, even if it's not their primary, like maybe they still work on a mailing list, but you could have a landing page on the discourse forum that's, you know, this is the ambassador's discourse thing that could then point to resources elsewhere and kind of be a front page kind of thing that isn't a wiki and is in software that's currently maintained. Yeah, so here's the other thing. I picked this URL discussion at Fedora project org and I didn't want to name it discourse because as a sysadmin, I've learned never name your things after the software that runs on it. And I wanted, the idea was initially to be discussion for a silver blue and for CoroS. And I wanted something that would encompass both of those things and then we thought, well, why not just make it a wider experiment and see how it goes. So that's kind of the idea. We've got this stood up, Sanya, who's community manager for CoroS, something silver blue, I don't know what her actual job is, is funding this for us for a while. So that's a good start and we can figure out how that goes from there. And that is the end of the things that I have slides for. Does anybody have any comments? Okay, wait, I'm going to give you a microphone. Is that microphone on? I'm going to give you this microphone. Wait, no, here, you can have my microphone. Thanks. So that was just a quick question. So this discourse instance is hosted by discourse, the company. Is that it? Okay. That was just my check. And for the record, the answer is yes, it is hand hosted by the company and it is their medium level hosting option, which I forget what the pricing is. We thought we might need to do the top, very expensive level, but Patrick found out a hover way to make it make Fed messages, which was the main reason I wanted it to have it be. There's like a webhooks thing that it can use, so it's generating Fed messages with that. Yes. Is the discourse thing which I'm looking for? Yes. And the proper project and automatically creating... Can you make this work? Yes, so the question is, can this be embedded in copper and have topics for every project? I think possibly, I haven't seen it scaled up in exactly that way, but one of the places they launched this was... Do you know the blog Boing Boing? It's a geek blog. I mean, it was briefly one of the top 100 sites on the internet, so it's fairly popular. That was back in nerdier times probably, but still. And they switched their discussion forum over to this, so every post gets an automatic topic created that is in discourse. So I think something like that probably could happen in copper where you get a topic for every project. Yes, Brian. I have a question. Is this Mike on? Okay, yes, I know the answer now. Awesome. Now you're the Mike Kvetcher person, so thank you. To whom I should spoke if I want to make it happen? I just checked some documentation and there is something like enabling and bending, so I guess that it will need some fitting on the discourse side. You should go to our discussion at FedoraProject.org and there is a section on there for what topics... Fine, fine, it looks most appropriate for that and post it there and we'll see how that works. Some time ago I have seen a project to have a bridge between Mailman 3 and discourse. I don't know what the stage of this is, but it may be possible to relay the discourse topics into a mailing list that a lot of people like to use here. So there may be a technical solution to that if you want to keep people having a mailing list. Should I say if people don't want to leave, there are email clients to participate in discussions, so maybe that could work. I'm used to repeating things, but now you have a mic, so I don't have to repeat, it's amazing. Cool, that sounds awesome. I don't know if the development really started or if it went somewhere, but I know some people mentioned it on the mailing list. One of the things around this is it is a very popular software. What was it? Foreman? Yeah, Foreman recently switched their mailing list over to using this, and they have a blog post which I maybe should have put in the slides. They had a very high increase in activity switching from the mailing list to this. I think it was an experiment in an open source project that shows this can work. Rich had a question way in the back. Yeah, I mean, if you would like to put loads of resources into Hyperkitty, that would also be awesome. Yeah, so I just repeat for the camera. I've seen some small projects using discourse and still having their mailing list with a bridge works out really well. Inside OpenSUSA we recently had a discussion about this and the two options above to the top were either discourse or the one that's currently most popular is adopting Hyperkitty. You might see some contributions from us on that. Yeah, and like I said, I don't think we're going to ditch Hyperkitty as long as we still need mailing lists. What? Yeah, Hyperkitty is still going to be important to us for a long time. One of the things that I'm completely unclear about is how well this would scale up to 200 different discussions going on at once because I think that's pretty big scale and we've got how many mailing lists do we have? There's like 400 mailing lists and there's obviously a long tail of activity and some of those in the middle are just spam. But there are at least hundreds of active mailing lists and so I don't think we can translate those all into one category per mailing list. I don't think that would work and I don't think that discourse really works with thousands of categories. That is something to find out in the experiment, I guess. Misk. So I do have a discourse instance for pattern fly and if people want to test, like creating 1000 categories, I can spin up a VM quite fast and then we can create a million and see if it starts to work or not. Because the other issue I have with that is that we are limited by the number of visits and I do remember having done the computation to see how much we will pay but yeah, right now I think we need to get the underpriced plan, the one where they say you need to contact us so we tell you how much you have to pay if we want to post everything for Fedora. Just that you know it before. Yeah, so the... Honestly, I thought successful with it, that's a problem that we'll be happy to have. But yeah, and obviously it is open source and we could look at self-hosting as well so if we get to the point where it's that... you don't know to self-hosting... So I did try to self-host it and it took me three weeks to install it and I did swear a lot. So I'm pretty sure that... Yeah, paying somebody else to do it is, you know, valuable and if it takes you two weeks... No, because right now the installation is you take a container which is based on Ubuntu and I try to make it work on Fedora and it's working, it's not very clean and I know that Fedora Info is not going to like it as I was... we deploy everything in Java and do that so... It will cost some time and resource if we want to do self-hosting. It's like GitLab, we try to do that in the past and instead we decided to just write Pagu. For those of you who get the mic please hold it away from your computer screens there appears to be an interference coming off of that. That's because we turned your computer off. Yeah, I just thought about it and we will probably run into a problem when we have more than 400 categories because the category selection happens when you open a thread it will just pull off a list of more than 400 entries and I'm pretty sure that this is not very convenient to navigate through. Right, yeah, it's not really a problem of can it technically scale, it's a matter of can the UX and user experience scale to that and the answer is probably no. On the other hand, a lot of our discussion is really fragmented in the existing Fedora mailing lists and we end up cross-posting between server cloud, this and test list versus other kind of things. Maybe we don't really need so many different lists for things especially if some of the project lists like Anaconda patches just happily stay in mailing lists forever because that's fine. All right, so that, okay. Yeah, you can do this one. So, you mentioned that there's a Fed message hook with this course? Yeah, is it working? Yeah. So, can we use Fedora badges to make it more popular? What kind of things, what kind of ideas maybe you or anyone else in the room have for different badges we could use? Yeah, it also has its own badges because the stack exchange is heavily gamified so it kind of ties into that so I haven't actually looked very much at those badges and I don't know how they don't use the same badges system we do which would have been awesome if they did because then we just tie it together. But yeah, there are Fed messages coming out that we could easily tie into our own badges and we could find some way to link the two kinds of badges together or rename something to there's to not be badges or I don't know. That is actually kind of a problem but we actually already have that in Askbot because it has badges as well. But yeah, one of the things it does have is like stack exchange there's kind of a built in reputation system where you get more power the more you are active in positive ways on the site you automatically gain privileges to do things like you moderate other people's messages and things like that which I think is generally positive because it helps empower people in the community to do things themselves without needing to be granted power automatically. Yes, I definitely think so although I don't know if we want to rush to doing it because if we decide this isn't working I want to shut it down in three months then we probably don't want to have too many badges. Yes, counter point was wouldn't it be more successful if we had to take off so yeah, okay, let's do badges. Does anyone have ideas in the room? I don't know how much people in the room have used this course or not but what kind of ideas, four badges does anyone have any? I have not personally used it so what if we did something like you earned 5, 10, 15 badges on discourse? Yeah, like which I'm sure you can work with I mean that's pretty meta but I think people would be into it. No, that's a great idea actually and also who's filing the ticket? I can do it right now No, I can't, I have no internet, sorry someone with the internet could file the ticket Does anybody think this thing is horrible and we should not try it or do anything with it? All right No, yeah I wouldn't say it's horrible but I have reservations about it at scale especially thinking about the amount of traffic we have on the development mailing list and some of that stuff and all the different SIGs and things like that and then when you go and log in there's 400 or even 100 categories to try and wade through and find the three that you're actually interested in I think discoverability is going to be a big problem Yeah Very possibly So I think one of the main issue with discourse, there is no threading I cannot imagine having a good flamware on that like disabling, CADE, SLINUX or this kind of stuff but it's indeed much more friendly for users I don't know if people have already tried when you connect for the first time you get a bot that explains how to do everything speak with you and everything and I got it three times because I opened three accounts so by now I know what to do to get my first badges but everything is done to make sure that people do something and learn how to use the system so I guess it's good for user-facing stuff especially since you are not forced to create a federal account system someone wants to report an issue maybe it's overkill to ask for a federal account and just use Google, Facebook, this kind of stuff I do not see any project doing development work on that so you cannot send badges and comment on them you cannot get threading forwarding this kind of stuff so it depends also on who wants to discuss and where and oh yeah I think that it probably a patch discussion I don't see those mailing lists that work that way still moving although I see most software that used to send patches to mailing lists and discuss them moving to code review tools and things like that instead of discussing on mailing lists anyways but yeah, actually I guess we kind of solved two of these problems at once by not trying to move the development mailing list because that's where most of the threading flame wars happen and also where most of the traffic is so if we focus on things like the silver blue discussion user discussion council discussion I think would be fine there move those things that are lower traffic that we can get that so private form because you speak about conceal how do we make sure that something stay private and yeah there are private discussion that is a possibility but then the admins of it also have to all be in on that being private whereas we've got a more restricted we have a council private mailing list full disclosure the council private mailing list mostly gets messages and we have new council members where I send a message that says so you are now on the council private mailing list we sometimes use this to discuss confidential and secure information but we try to do everything in the public and then there's silence on that list for another six months until there's new people elected so I'm not super worried about that every now and then there's something more than that but that's most of what goes on on that list so most of our discussion should be in the open even the council so yeah but code of conduct enforcement and this kind of security issue that's legitimate reason to be secret and I do not know also I can take a look but I say that so we can remember that I say that in six months yeah we've been talking about code of conduct issues in PAG or private tickets so that again has admin you can probably read them I don't know don't you don't want to but yeah the fact that we do have other makes me less worried about that okay yeah so one reason why we are interested in using discourse or why we started using discourse for silver blue bus to attract like new audiences new users who may not be comfortable with mailing lists do you have any way to measure that actually successful in that discourse um yes we definitely can again with the fed message stuff that's a pretty easy way to do it because I can tie in and I can see are these accounts that are coming in are people signing up for new accounts and discussing on discourse and we certainly even though we're making people sign up for past accounts we're definitely getting new people coming in to this although a little bit slower things kind of a trade-off in making people make a fast account that I don't know I think it's worth it um also everybody who's not using everybody's using Facebook and Google to log into things like those accounts can be shut down at any time Facebook can be like I would like you to mail me your passport please and then you can't log into anything you're using Facebook to log into terrible so anyways that's a different topic but I don't yeah I think that the ability to tie in people who are posting on this to other Fedora activity makes it worthwhile to ask for people to have fast accounts alone and yeah we can definitely maybe I'll put reports on this in my next flock talk about new contributors that come in this way which is a good suggestion anything else anybody we can we can go on early yeah and this is obviously a fairly small group of people compared to all of Fedora but I definitely encourage you there's a section on on the discourse discussion from there basically saying what other categories should we have so if there's something you'd like to try out post there and we can create some more categories there's a Fedora friends thing that's just for chatter feel free to show up and start chattering there and we'll see what kind of activity we can start getting and then see how it goes in real life from there someone was saying that Fedora should do a better job at trying things and failing if they're not working so I think it's good for us to experiment and then let's reevaluate this six months whenever the amount we're paying runs out and then see if it's worth continuing I guess