On 8/21/18 10:08 AM, Ali wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 05:30:07 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Ask 10 people, and you'll get 10 different answers on what a better forum would be.
> 
> Actually I think we can get 8 out of those 10 to agree,
> rust, ocaml, fsharp, nim, scala, clojure .. all use https://www.discourse.org/
> I think this software is nowadays regarded and the best

Cool! Does it support an interface on top of a newsgroup server? Priority #1 in these parts.

> 
>> If people leave because of the forum software, changing it won't change that.
> 
> I also agree with that, most people who leave probably leave for more objective reasons, like that the language doesn't answer their needs, or they didnt find the libraries they needed within the ecosystem etc...
> 
> But what I really meant, is that out of those who leaves, there is possible a very small percentage who left, because they couldnt communicate effectively with the community, and that better communication channels in general ( and a better forum software as an example) could have kept them around for longer , replacing the forum software is a small change, a small win, and I expect small returns. But a small win, is a win

On the contrary, many of the regular contributors here, don't give a lick about the forum software, as long as it's primarily backed by the newsgroup server. Many, including myself use the NG server, many others use the mailing list interface. If the NG was ditched, I would have a big problem communicating, as I hate dealing with web forums.

The forum software probably could be better in terms of formatting code (see for example vibe.d's forums which are ALSO NG backed and have code formatting features). Other than that, editing posts just doesn't make sense in terms of a mailing list or newsgroup. And it also doesn't make sense in terms of a discussion where things you thought you read mysteriously change.

-Steve

On 8/21/2018 7:18 AM, Seb wrote:
>> some rely on stackoverflow, some have an active wiki
> There are a few good points to move D.learn to Stack Overflow and that's actually one thing that we have talked about a few times and somehow never has happened. In the D survey there was a 2:1 "consensus" for StackOverflow.

My reservation about stackoverflow is it could go dark at any moment, and we'd lose it all. Having critical business data dependent on any third party that has zero commitment or accountability to us is very risky.

With the NNTP, git, and bugzilla, we all have backups under our control.

On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 06:53:18 UTC, Daniel N wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 03:42:21 UTC, Ali wrote:
>> Many of those new comers who ask about the forum software .. they never stick, they dont complain, or question, or try to change for the better, they simply leave
>>
>
> I think this is the best forum I have ever used, it's a big contributing factor to that I post here! I don't post every month praising the forum, I'm silently happy. But if we changed I would likely complain every month.

Second that.

The 2 big things this forum frontend has, is forcing to snip quotes (go look on realworldtech to see whole threads of quote galore of 400 lines where the answer is just one word) and speed.
The thing that comments cannot be edited is also an advantage. This forces to put a little be more thought in them.

On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 21:33:13 UTC, Patrick Schluter wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 06:53:18 UTC, Daniel N wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 03:42:21 UTC, Ali wrote:
>>> Many of those new comers who ask about the forum software .. they never stick, they dont complain, or question, or try to change for the better, they simply leave
>>>
>>
>> I think this is the best forum I have ever used, it's a big contributing factor to that I post here! I don't post every month praising the forum, I'm silently happy. But if we changed I would likely complain every month.
>
> Second that.
>
> The 2 big things this forum frontend has, is forcing to snip quotes (go look on realworldtech to see whole threads of quote galore of 400 lines where the answer is just one word) and speed.
> The thing that comments cannot be edited is also an advantage. This forces to put a little be more thought in them.

What about if you accidentially press a button that posts the comment?

Why can't syntax formatting be implemented, does anyone disagree that is a useless feature?

On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 19:25:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
> With the NNTP, git, and bugzilla, we all have backups under our control.

I just don't see why it is a concern[1]:

"So we set out to look for a new home for our data dumps, and today we’re happy to announce that the Internet Archive has agreed to host them:
The Stack Exchange Data Dump at the Internet Archive[2]"

1. : https://stackoverflow.blog/2014/01/23/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/
2. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 22:00:31 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 August 2018 at 19:25:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> With the NNTP, git, and bugzilla, we all have backups under our control.
>
> I just don't see why it is a concern[1]:
>
> "So we set out to look for a new home for our data dumps, and today we’re happy to announce that the Internet Archive has agreed to host them:
> The Stack Exchange Data Dump at the Internet Archive[2]"
>
> 1. : https://stackoverflow.blog/2014/01/23/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/
> 2. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

The dlang bugzilla and forum are both hosted on dlang-specific servers. If they go down, it's easy to get a replica and get back up and running in a few hours. Same with the wiki.

If github went down or banned the dlang org, we'd lose in-progress pull requests and the history of pull request comments. Aside from that, we would be up and running on gitlab or what have you in hours.

If Stack Overflow went down, we'd have to find an alternative, and then we'd have to figure out how to import that data. That could take weeks. And it will happen eventually.

On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 05:05:48 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
> The dlang bugzilla and forum are both hosted on dlang-specific servers. If they go down, it's easy to get a replica and get back up and running in a few hours. Same with the wiki.
>
> If github went down or banned the dlang org, we'd lose in-progress pull requests and the history of pull request comments. Aside from that, we would be up and running on gitlab or what have you in hours.
>
> If Stack Overflow went down, we'd have to find an alternative, and then we'd have to figure out how to import that data. That could take weeks. And it will happen eventually.

It is weird that you make loosing current and historical pull requests is minor compared to:

* Having all the data readily available for search engines to have archived (today, not tomorrow).
* Having an established forum/newsgroup readily available to handle the load of new questions.

I just don't see data retention and recovery for StackOverflow to be a concern for making such a choice. Even if it did take weeks or months to host the historical data, risk should be weighed against possible benefit from visibility and growth from heavily using StackOverflow.

On Wednesday, 22 August 2018 at 15:17:36 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> It is weird that you make loosing current and historical pull requests is minor

It would be disruptive. However, work could resume rather quickly.

The disruption would be reduced if we had a periodic job set up to mirror github pull requests. There is at least one export tool, but it seems to get only the titles and not the comments or patches.

> compared to:
>
> * Having all the data readily available for search engines to have archived (today, not tomorrow).
> * Having an established forum/newsgroup readily available to handle the load of new questions.
>
> I just don't see data retention and recovery for StackOverflow to be a concern for making such a choice. Even if it did take weeks or months to host the historical data, risk should be weighed against possible benefit from visibility and growth from heavily using StackOverflow.

And similarly, the choice of Github instead of a self-hosted system is weighed against requiring people to sign up with a private gitlab instance. Also similarly, the disruption would be reduced if we had a periodic job set up to handle long-term stackoverflow unavailability in advance.

I'm a little paranoid about centralized services like Github. I'd prefer a federated service for source control / project management, where you could easily fork projects from my server to yours and send back pull requests. Then there would be no extra cost for hosting your own vs using an existing instance.

I've been low-key thinking about making a federated github, one where exporting your data is as simple as a `git clone; git submodule update --init`. Probably nothing will come of it, though.

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 04:06:38PM +0000, Neia Neutuladh via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> I'm a little paranoid about centralized services like Github. I'd prefer a federated service for source control / project management, where you could easily fork projects from my server to yours and send back pull requests.  Then there would be no extra cost for hosting your own vs using an existing instance.

In fact, git itself was designed with such a decentralized usage pattern in mind.  Ironically, people have rebuilt centralized platforms on top of it, and even to the point of building walled gardens like github.

I don't argue against the usefulness of the features that github provides, but I'm also wary of the fact that it's basically a walled garden -- there's no simple way I know of to extract data like pull requests, comments, cross-references, etc..  I mean, it's *possible* to write a web crawler that does just that, but such functionality is second-class, and one might argue, that it is possible at all is merely a happy accident, since github's very design seems to be geared at drawing people to centralize everything on github.  It's not quite at the point of vendor lock-in, but it's certainly uncomfortably close, in my view.


> I've been low-key thinking about making a federated github, one where exporting your data is as simple as a `git clone; git submodule update --init`. Probably nothing will come of it, though.

That would be more in line with the decentralized design of git. I would welcome such a platform, if it ever materializes.


T

-- 
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird. -- D. Knuth

On 8/22/2018 10:28 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I don't argue against the usefulness of the features that github
> provides, but I'm also wary of the fact that it's basically a walled
> garden -- there's no simple way I know of to extract data like pull
> requests, comments, cross-references, etc..  I mean, it's *possible* to
> write a web crawler that does just that, but such functionality is
> second-class, and one might argue, that it is possible at all is merely
> a happy accident, since github's very design seems to be geared at
> drawing people to centralize everything on github.  It's not quite at
> the point of vendor lock-in, but it's certainly uncomfortably close, in
> my view.

As for github comments, they get echoed to me as emails. So I have an email archive of them.