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Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool. Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is use

by raspie 8y ago

Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool. Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually. This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues. And so the users are left with a messy stream of collective consciousness that is impossible no search or navigate effectively.

MadLittleMods 8y ago
Heya, Gitter developer here, Search definitely needs improvement and is on the roadmap. You can track these issues, - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387
bad_user 8y ago
Chat works better than forums. Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for months before I replied. That's because my time as a contributor is very limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets. And you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. But not really. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects you're talking about are insanely popular. This is because of two reasons: 1. people with problems are bad at describing those problems — this is why StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else; whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the intent 2. people are afraid of being wrong; but chat is more casual, so in my experience more people end up participating Chat has other benefits. You can have off topic conversations, you can make jokes, you can make friends. I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. They promised it at some point but nothing came of it. Also, I do like Discourse (https://discourse.org https://discourse.org). It does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. Scala has Discourse forums, like for example https://users.scala-lang.org https://users.scala-lang.org ... but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular. And one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful online presence. You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at least you've got some chat channels to go to.
- andybak 8y ago
  > Chat works better than forums. I've never had much satisfactory help from chat. I think I've never quite understood the social element of it. Do I wait for a pause? Do I make friends first? Just ask my question and wait? Ask a question and hang around for half hour to see if anyone replies? And in the meanwhile 6 different conversations, statements, off-topic chats and other noise is scrolling past me completely ruining any focus I had. I find them utterly hateful things when I'm in problem-solving mode. Maybe they are more fun when you're in a "sort of working" mode but that's not when I need help.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    Gitter sends you an email when you’re being mentioned. Our experiences are wildly different. On Gitter, on the channels I hang out, I think I got answers to my problems in 99% of cases.
- carwyn 8y ago
  As someone who interacts a lot with front line support for a fairly large organisation I find this balance interesting. Support channels are often a strange mix of FIFO with priority based queue jumping. I was at a talk by Kate Russell of BBC Click recently where she showed some stats on customer service based interactions heavily moving towards chat based interaction, obviously more and more backed by AI chat bots with human fallback. The next step on this path being voice chat also with bots. Without the AI tier though scaling this is near impossible as you tend to a "most recent loudest" priority system, certainly if your support case to support rep ratio isn't balanced. Users also have to resort to repeating requests in a chat-only forgetful system. This is why I ended up investigating hybrid sync/async interaction systems that cater better for not forgetting threads.

by raspie 8y ago

MadLittleMods 8y ago

Heya, Gitter developer here, Search definitely needs improvement and is on the roadmap. You can track these issues, - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387

bad_user 8y ago

Chat works better than forums. Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for months before I replied. That's because my time as a contributor is very limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets. And you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. But not really. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects you're talking about are insanely popular. This is because of two reasons: 1. people with problems are bad at describing those problems — this is why StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else; whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the intent 2. people are afraid of being wrong; but chat is more casual, so in my experience more people end up participating Chat has other benefits. You can have off topic conversations, you can make jokes, you can make friends. I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. They promised it at some point but nothing came of it. Also, I do like Discourse (https://discourse.org https://discourse.org). It does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. Scala has Discourse forums, like for example https://users.scala-lang.org https://users.scala-lang.org ... but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular. And one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful online presence. You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at least you've got some chat channels to go to.

andybak 8y ago
> Chat works better than forums. I've never had much satisfactory help from chat. I think I've never quite understood the social element of it. Do I wait for a pause? Do I make friends first? Just ask my question and wait? Ask a question and hang around for half hour to see if anyone replies? And in the meanwhile 6 different conversations, statements, off-topic chats and other noise is scrolling past me completely ruining any focus I had. I find them utterly hateful things when I'm in problem-solving mode. Maybe they are more fun when you're in a "sort of working" mode but that's not when I need help.
- bad_user 8y ago
  Gitter sends you an email when you’re being mentioned. Our experiences are wildly different. On Gitter, on the channels I hang out, I think I got answers to my problems in 99% of cases.
carwyn 8y ago
As someone who interacts a lot with front line support for a fairly large organisation I find this balance interesting. Support channels are often a strange mix of FIFO with priority based queue jumping. I was at a talk by Kate Russell of BBC Click recently where she showed some stats on customer service based interactions heavily moving towards chat based interaction, obviously more and more backed by AI chat bots with human fallback. The next step on this path being voice chat also with bots. Without the AI tier though scaling this is near impossible as you tend to a "most recent loudest" priority system, certainly if your support case to support rep ratio isn't balanced. Users also have to resort to repeating requests in a chat-only forgetful system. This is why I ended up investigating hybrid sync/async interaction systems that cater better for not forgetting threads.