5 ms·

Superb. Many open source projects still bounce you to Google Groups for discussion, which is archaic at this point. Even requires Google login just to read thre

Superb. Many open source projects still bounce you to Google Groups for discussion, which is archaic at this point. Even requires Google login just to read threads. Also it's often unclear what the policy is on raising questions in the issues tracker (smaller projects are usually fine with it, bigger projects get overwhelmed and don't want it). This will make it a much nicer separation for everyone and keep the issues tracker minimal.

kyrra 7y ago
I can read Google groups just fine in incognito mode. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts It's a matter of what the settings are on the group (the group admins get to decide visibility settings).
saagarjha 7y ago
One thing nice about Google Groups is that you can largely use it to its fullest extent from email.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open source communities for free as well: https://aether.app/email https://aether.app/email)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.
    - rolleiflex 7y ago
      Yeah, I know how that goes. Our formatting is pretty neutral — we just offer a good readable text size, make everyone use the same font and colours so no one is writing in hot pink 16pt Comic Sans, allow Markdown, have a mobile design and dark mode in the emails. I've personally spent the midnight hours to make sure this all works nicely with existing email. It's an ongoing battle but not an intractable one. It's not perfect, but we've gotten it to pretty good already. It definitely survives being quoted and otherwise chomped on by Gmail, Mail.app, Outlook, iOS and Android mail clients, which are our five main test cases.
zarmin 7y ago
idk, i really enjoy the 10+ second load time of Groups
jacobsenscott 7y ago
Proprietary project management tools - slack, github issues, PRs, discussions, etc are terrible places to host OSS communications. Use open source tools.
- geofft 7y ago
  Why? It seems to me the real thing open source projects ought to have is control over their data / autonomy - having some service control your forums and publish the code they use to run them doesn't seem like much of an advantage, if you can't apply patches to their system. For instance, while it helps Debian that their GitLab instance salsa.debian.org is open source, how does it help a non-Debian-affiliated project that happens to use that service? So there are two separate things you could be interested in. One is, am I running my own service? Most people don't want to be 24/7 volunteer sysadmins, it turns out. (A few do, like the people who run salsa.debian.org: more power to them. A few open source projects can pay sysadmins, which also solves the problem.) The other question is, can I get my project's data out of someone else's service if I want to migrate? It turns out that you can do that for many closed-source forums.
  - dewey 7y ago
    Having your OSS discussions on Slack is pretty terrible, it’s a closed source silo where things can’t be found via Google or even with the included search if you are above the limit. Every time I see an open source project asking people to “Join our Slack” it makes me sad. Besides, I’m in too many Slacks already. I really don’t need one Slack account for each project I want to follow.
    - geofft 7y ago
      > it’s a closed source silo where things can’t be found via Google or even with the included search if you are above the limit. How is that different from, say, IRC? How is it relevant that Slack is closed-source? If you want to run an open-source project on Slack, run a logger that dumps things to a publicly Googleable archive - same as you would if you were running the project on IRC or on a mailing list or whatever. If Slack says that running a logger is a violation of their terms, then that's a reason to avoid Slack in particular - but not with closed-source services in general. It's a problem with services run by someone else, open-source or not. And in fact, Freenode (which runs an open-source ircd) has a policy that if you log, you must say so clearly in the topic and you must respond to requests to remove portions of logs. To be clear, I think that if a project says, out of idealism we will only use FLOSS forums, and we don't care about meaningful control over it, we just want to encourage other people to run FLOSS to promote the movement, that's totally reasonable. But if your concern about non-FLOSS platforms is practical and not philosophical, I'd argue what you actually care about is control over the platform. > Besides, I’m in too many Slacks already. I have this problem too, but it's not really about whether Slack is open-source or not, it's about the specific software. (Also, from experience, being in over a hundred channels in irssi is actually less manageable....)
CGamesPlay 7y ago
> Even requires Google login just to read threads. Fun fact: if your session is "expired" but the cookie says you have an account, it forces you to log in, even if the group is public. Workaround: incognito mode.

kyrra 7y ago

I can read Google groups just fine in incognito mode. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts It's a matter of what the settings are on the group (the group admins get to decide visibility settings).

saagarjha 7y ago

One thing nice about Google Groups is that you can largely use it to its fullest extent from email.

rolleiflex 7y ago
Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open source communities for free as well: https://aether.app/email https://aether.app/email)
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    Yeah, I know how that goes. Our formatting is pretty neutral — we just offer a good readable text size, make everyone use the same font and colours so no one is writing in hot pink 16pt Comic Sans, allow Markdown, have a mobile design and dark mode in the emails. I've personally spent the midnight hours to make sure this all works nicely with existing email. It's an ongoing battle but not an intractable one. It's not perfect, but we've gotten it to pretty good already. It definitely survives being quoted and otherwise chomped on by Gmail, Mail.app, Outlook, iOS and Android mail clients, which are our five main test cases.

zarmin 7y ago

idk, i really enjoy the 10+ second load time of Groups

jacobsenscott 7y ago

Proprietary project management tools - slack, github issues, PRs, discussions, etc are terrible places to host OSS communications. Use open source tools.

geofft 7y ago
Why? It seems to me the real thing open source projects ought to have is control over their data / autonomy - having some service control your forums and publish the code they use to run them doesn't seem like much of an advantage, if you can't apply patches to their system. For instance, while it helps Debian that their GitLab instance salsa.debian.org is open source, how does it help a non-Debian-affiliated project that happens to use that service? So there are two separate things you could be interested in. One is, am I running my own service? Most people don't want to be 24/7 volunteer sysadmins, it turns out. (A few do, like the people who run salsa.debian.org: more power to them. A few open source projects can pay sysadmins, which also solves the problem.) The other question is, can I get my project's data out of someone else's service if I want to migrate? It turns out that you can do that for many closed-source forums.
- dewey 7y ago
  Having your OSS discussions on Slack is pretty terrible, it’s a closed source silo where things can’t be found via Google or even with the included search if you are above the limit. Every time I see an open source project asking people to “Join our Slack” it makes me sad. Besides, I’m in too many Slacks already. I really don’t need one Slack account for each project I want to follow.
  - geofft 7y ago
    > it’s a closed source silo where things can’t be found via Google or even with the included search if you are above the limit. How is that different from, say, IRC? How is it relevant that Slack is closed-source? If you want to run an open-source project on Slack, run a logger that dumps things to a publicly Googleable archive - same as you would if you were running the project on IRC or on a mailing list or whatever. If Slack says that running a logger is a violation of their terms, then that's a reason to avoid Slack in particular - but not with closed-source services in general. It's a problem with services run by someone else, open-source or not. And in fact, Freenode (which runs an open-source ircd) has a policy that if you log, you must say so clearly in the topic and you must respond to requests to remove portions of logs. To be clear, I think that if a project says, out of idealism we will only use FLOSS forums, and we don't care about meaningful control over it, we just want to encourage other people to run FLOSS to promote the movement, that's totally reasonable. But if your concern about non-FLOSS platforms is practical and not philosophical, I'd argue what you actually care about is control over the platform. > Besides, I’m in too many Slacks already. I have this problem too, but it's not really about whether Slack is open-source or not, it's about the specific software. (Also, from experience, being in over a hundred channels in irssi is actually less manageable....)

CGamesPlay 7y ago

> Even requires Google login just to read threads. Fun fact: if your session is "expired" but the cookie says you have an account, it forces you to log in, even if the group is public. Workaround: incognito mode.