Hello, Jumping in here...
1) I remember discussions from the past while the (Anything)overflow era was booming, there was ideas to create the Sageoverflow database of Q&A... For me, the main reason not to go is *ownership of the data* and *hosting*. As Sébastien perfectly illustrated, the immense heritage of the answers there carries a *huge value* and should not be lost. Be it only for the sake of the time spent answering questions. How to make sure that Q&As remain in our hands and that we do not depend on the good will of hosting platforms? Having ask-sage as it is currently satisfies this, and I am happy about that. 2) I myself use it very very often to find answers, and I do not always logging to add my thumbs up (and probably many users do the same...), *so seeing that there aren't many upvotes might not be a fair indication of value here*. There are also answers with many upvotes... 3) I just come back from a Summer School (ECCO 2024) in Colombia where I taught Sage to 130 students, and I do mention that AskSage exists and they can ask their questions there. Yes, the 0 year bug is annoying, but a user doesn't care: they care about getting the answer quickly, period. Meanwhile I asked the students that know about Sage where they get their knowledge from, and many told me that asksage is a very useful ressource to get the answers they need: asksage is well-known to the Sage-user base. So again, I think that a simple-and-stupid Q&A webpage has its value. The simpler it is for the user, the better. Side question: what is necessary to host such a webpage? I could ask my IT about the possibilities to host such a page at my department. Best, Jean-Philippe Le jeudi 4 juillet 2024 à 11:13:12 UTC-4, kcrisman a écrit : > 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. 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