On 06/07/2020 19:37, Jason Lowe-Power wrote: On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 11:22 AM Andreas Sandberg via gem5-dev <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Bobby,
Can't we solve some of these issues by just moving the mailinglist to a better system with good archiving? That should solve both the spam issue and some of the usability issues. I have looked at bit at groups.io<http://groups.io> since it is used in a project I'm contributing to in my spare time and it seems like a good hybrid between a mailinglist and a forum. They seem to have good support for grouping by topic, hash tag filtering, RSS feeds, and plenty of integrations. The maintenance requirement of [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> has been extraordinary. I really don't see how we can keep using that mailing list. Bobby has spent 50+ hours fighting with it in the past 6 months. From what I can tell, the way we have many people posting to a single list that ~1000 people subscribe to just isn't a normal use case for email anymore. We're getting blocked by spam filters, having to answer lots of questions about how to subscribe, etc. The number of subscribers shouldn't be a problem. The Zephyr mailinglists have close to 2000 subscribers and several other open source projects have mailinglists with thousands of subscribers. I think part of the problem here is that the mail servers for gem5.org are misconfigured or at least lack the configuration required for modern email systems. According to the SMTP headers, our email servers have flagged a recent email from the dev list as failing SPF checks. I suspect the domain lacks (correct) SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Missing records will cause issues (higher likelihood of being flagged as spam), while incorrect ones will likely flag emails as spam right away. If someone else is willing to step up and take ownership of the mailing list that would be great. It's just not something that we currently have resources for right now. We thought that moving to a managed system would help, but it hasn't solved the main problems: mail is still getting hijacked by spam filters, and people are still having problems signing up. I really can't see what a Discourse-style forum would give us that you can't get from an email list with a good archive. I generally find forums at least as annoying as email archives when going back to look for information about a topic. The lack of threading within topics tends to make discussion really hard to follow, which usually isn't an issue in a well-behaved email list. I'm not sure I understand the difference between Discourse and groups.io<http://groups.io> other than the interface. Could you describe why you think that groups.io<http://groups.io> would be better than discourse? Also, from my experience, we have a number of people who try to contribute that *don't* have a well behaved email client. We see a large number of messages that are "off thread" (e.g., replying to a digest, changing the subject line accidentally, or just replying to the wrong message). My impression of groups.io is that it is primarily an email distribution service with a fancy web frontend while Discourse is primarily a web system with email notifications. Is the barrier of entry that people feel like the list is to "formal" or think that their questions are stupid? I'm not convinced that the latter would be solved by switching to a forum-style system like Discourse. A less formal chat system in addition to the list might be a better way to lower the barrier of entry. I disagree somewhat with this. I think that if we had a discourse section titled "any questions here" or "new user questions" that it *would* lower the barrier to entry and make people feel more comfortable. Hmm, yes, that is a good point. I have found the Slack (despite the poor threading) system used by Zephyr very useful when debugging/developing drivers. It has been a convenient low-latency channel when working on the same subsystem as other people in the project and a general "I have seen this weird issue, has anyone else seen anything like it?". It's not a complete substitute for email lists though. I feel that while slack might be useful, it's fundamentally different from the current users list. While it's gotten much better over the past several years, we still frequently answer the same questions over and over again on the mailing list because 1) we need to improve our documentation and 2) the mailing list isn't easy for most people to search. I (personally) just can't imagine answering gem5 questions on slack. There's too much in my life that demands immediate attention already! But maybe that's just me. I see them as serving different purposes. I wouldn't expect senior community members to hangout in an ask me anything channel all the time, maybe during "office hours" or town hall meetings, but not all the time. It's more of a meet other users forum for informal discussions that are more "unstructured" than email. General support still needs a different forum. Cheers, Andreas IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Thank you.
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