Thank you Sébastien for standing up for users, for distinguishing between users and developers, and for recognizing that those two groups have different needs. May your Karma increase exponentially!
This is the point which we must keep hammering home. Sage users and developers are not the same thing. This is often in tension (as has also been pointed out numerous times) with the limited, unpaid, developer time issue, and that one is also important. However, the latter issue gets a lot more screen time. With respect to Discourse specifically, I just played with it a little bit, and though I was open to it given the import option, unfortunately it seems a lot more like Discord (Slack?) than a pure Q&A site. I think the problem isn't going to be so much not having karma (though I admit that when I had time to be very active on it that was some motivation) for contributors, as that it's sort of like the hoops I had to jump through getting help when I built a computer with my kids. The help forum was on Discord. Okay, so first I have to sign up. Then I have to figure out what "channels" are, and where my question belongs. And then there are "welcome" things, and so on and so forth. While Discourse seems to have different names for these things, the level of complexity is still there. That's what makes Q&A sites (not just ask, or the Stack* sites, but also Quora or whatever) popular. There is ONE thing they do, and that's what you do. You ask questions, you get answers. I'll be the first to admit that ask.sagemath looks a bit dated, and that the "0 years" bug is annoying, and that there are plenty of questions not followed up on. (That's also the case for Sage questions on Stackoverflow.) And I am impressed that there are still users helping each other with Sage and CoCalc stuff on the CoCalc Discord, which has long since been *officially* abandoned by CoCalc (though William checks once in a great while). Infrastructure/hosting has been a problem too, as noted at various points in the thread. However, ask.sagemath seems stable enough right now in terms of actual functionality, and is just very easy for people to sign up for and use. I think the community should be very hesitant to add additional barriers to participation by *users*, some of which (as is clear if you read enough posts) definitely are not going to be engaging in a more Discourse-like option. Or, if we have to do something like that, it would be almost better to archive ask.sagemath and point people to Zulip, which seems (to the laity such as myself) to be pretty much like Discourse, except that there is already a (somewhat?) thriving number of Sage people using it! Still, the first thing should be to figure out if anyone has contacted the askbot developer to ask the relevant questions. I see that he still participates regularly on his own forum, though (annoyingly) didn't respond to the questions Samuel L. asked recently. Not-as-random-as-you-think links: * https://stackshare.io/stackups/discourse-vs-zulip (because they do seem similar) * https://meta.discourse.org/t/forum-owners-how-do-you-fight-facebook-groups/166100/7 (because you wouldn't believe how many people I have to send to sage-support or ask from the Facebook Sage page, probably the worst possible interface for helping with technical things) * https://meta.discourse.org/t/discord-is-taking-aim-at-discourse-how-does-discourse-remain-unique-and-stand-out-from-the-crowd/227765/6?page=4 (because we're all imperfect, and who knows how long Discourse or anything else will be around) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/fb4cd156-e2bf-4382-932e-396809481d2en%40googlegroups.com.
