In wake of the first release of dev bundles, I was wondering how everyone feels about this forum having a greater influx of developer/technical discussions and how that will affect new folks coming into the community.
There’s a lot of casual/political/random discussion on here which might not mix well with straight up technical discussions. In practice, it’s probably not best to mix the two crowds simply because of need for different information (a big reason why we’re splitting maidsafe.net into a user site and a separate dev.maidsafe.net portal).
Wondering if we need to be prepared for separating the forum into 2 distinct sites if it seems like it’s not meshing well.
It may help, Rust uses an internals.rust forum and user forum. Both have tech discussions, but Internals is more in depth. The users forum is more for app developers. Maybe an app developers forum would be a good fit here. Internals can be github etc. for now and this forum, where I think we reach out to the community and cross post dev updates, perhaps.
As Beta happens then an Internals forum may also be useful, but we don’t want to have too many places, slack is busy (well our internal one). I would think we do need an app developers forum as we launch the build site as a compliment to it.
I think that that mods should really look at which category people choose when they post. I always move all questions to the Dev-catergory when people are asking about compiling libraries etc. Even when they’re beginners. Maybe we even should remove topics from Dev when they’re not about compiling, building, programming etc. It only confuses people. So far I think this forum is great, no double questions about compiling etc. All is there, the Devs help out. Maybe the coming months another forum for “deep tech” is needed, I think David and the Dev-team should ring that bell when needed. After launch I think this forum will not be any longer about compiling etc. 99% of people will just download the binaries and use SAFEnet, just like they use Android. There will be tech discussions, but that’s more about how routing work etc. So far I think we’re good. But good topic to think about.
Its not a bad idea to separate the two. It would be nice to have a complete dev discussion where you can go in depth detail without scaring of a user with all the technical details in a discussion. @ioptio how soon do expect the release of dev.maidsafe.net will be looking forward to it
Ya, the point isn’t to take action immediately but anticipate a potential need for a quick split in the future.
We essentially have 3 groups to make sure get adequate support/discussion: client users, API users and core devs. I can see core devs becoming its own thing as @dirvine alluded to with the Rust internals separation (maybe we just encourage core devs to use github issues and a mailing list… seems like a common occurrence) but maybe app devs and users will be able to coexist for longer.
Okay lets wait then, it would also be good to have intro videos of the main development and discussions for each maidsafe repo. There are a couple of them that i have watched crust, sentinel, routing and vaults. However, it would be nice more of them on the dev site e.g development discussions on repo or crash introduction to maidsafe for a new core developer am sure the main dev team has steps of integrating a developer into their development process.
The videos would go a long way into showing developers what part of maidsafe specifically repo they should concentrate more and follow closely. I realise asking this, is quite a lot since videos are time consuming to make and compile but its worth it. And am sure with time other developers will chip in slowly
Having everything all together (if sorted into different categories effectively) almost seems more in line with the idea of SAFE, at least to me.
Having them together gives everyone access to all the information, and if it is in different categories, new people can choose to steer clear of daunting technical discussions, while still allowing everyone else to gain from / contribute to them.
The only reason I say this is because I logged into my gmail account for the first time in months today and saw all sorts of technical MaidSafe discussions going on, in the mailing list, and read through them all cause I was so interested in all the dense discussions I had been missing out on.
No need to separate anyone from anything, that’s the opposite of what SAFE is supposed to be about I think
I agree with @whiteoutmashups. Also the base of current threads should be brought over and searchable into any splitting. Although again why split sites if you can just specialize a dev section in the current site?
For the core Maid group and founders the project goes way back but there was a point where all that gestation hit this forum. That point may be historically interesting some day, maybe some day soon so keep it together!
And there is no users vs devs, there is only devs in service of users and a better world. Its all about the users! The devs are going to throw a template out there but the users are going to remake the world with it. Almost like confusing football with the rules. Football is not the rules or its rule set, but those rules do matter. The inspiration must continue to go back and forth between devs and end users.
We’re all developing maidsafe in one way or another. We just have different skill sets. Coding, graphic artists, marketing, UX, forum admin, or whatever else. We all contribute. Also I’m finding that programming code and philosophy aren’t that different. We’re coding what we believe so keeping an active conversation between the two is important. Also with any luck people will pick up more skills in order to contribute more to the project or their own projects and apps as things move along so there’s an educational aspect to all this as well. I’m not saying be disorganized or anything I’m just saying you don’t want to have it being devs vs users anymore than it would be graphic artists vs users or songwriters vs musicians vs music lovers. You know what I’m saying? It all works together.
Mainstream users and others looking for support, will likely dull the conversation and could be hard to contain. Their would likely be complaints about access to any read-only sub-forum alternate.
/internals or /dev seems a good option to make clear the difference between what is support and what is development.
I hear what y’all are saying about it all being important but that doesn’t mean specialization and focus is bad… its sort of hard to filter through philosophy discussions which are not relevant when you’re wondering about technical issues imo.
Looking at it again the discussions are what determine what a person would like to read and contribute to it. Hence rather than have different discussion environments implement a filter based on interest and level of understanding that a person would like to track.
Got this two scenarios to explain what am thinking to in terms of content for dev and content for user as well as where the two merge.
Scenario 1: Rust Coding e.g Cargo test --release won’t work. This is purely dev side similar to an issue against the repo on github. This would be filtered out for dev and only developers would like to be notified of such a disucssions.
Scenario 2: Client software on my machine has crushed or not working. The discussion here would be to provide support to such a person(user). Clearly this discussion is both for dev and users who can both contribute to best find a solution of why client fails/not working. However, there is not for all developers considering their different levels. An app developer may choose to opt out of such discussion since he/she is more concerned with whether network works as a whole and not for one person.
Scenario 3: Feature Request/ App Request Another example where both dev and user can contribute together.
Pretty much dev is involved in all available scenarios that may exist but its there preference as to whether to participate in the discussion. As for users it wouldn’t make sense to have them participate in scenario 1 since its very technical for them.
@ioptio can you say a bit more about your thinking a split is needed, rather than people choosing the categories they read to focus on areas of interest? Do we mods need to get more active in keeping the categories on topic, or within topics when they stray for example?
I can see we are a bit relaxed about that, particularly within a topic - they often trail off into a side discussion.
It may be a good idea to have some tags as opt in, instead of opt out*, to keep the signal to noise ratio bearable though (if/when it comes an issue).
There are a lot of technical debates which interest those with some understanding. We want them to be accessible easily too.
Ultimately, we just need a way to distinguish content type. Having a whole separate place to monitor, search, register, etc adds overhead. Without clear benefits, we should try to avoid this.
maybe even choose an outline preference at registration, which defines the default view (i.e. which tags are visible by default)?
Whether the forum splits or not, one thing is for sure: though traffic seems to have slacked lately, we’re going to need more moderators soon. When the traffic picks up, which it will with launch or beta–or likely before if I can help it–we’re going to have a pretty big variety of folks dropping in.
I’m split on whether to split or not. It all depends on the traffic, but I think @ioptio is right to be prepared to split. If it becomes needed, it’ll be a whole lot better to be ready.
Why remove things from this site so stuff loses context?
Just duplicate a subset elsewhere.
I remember the open bazsaar guy coming on the site calling people nut jobs. Do not pander to such people even if they have some power because they can wave money around or do sound bite PR.
Trying to tone it down to become respectable is
is not respectable. At one point not so long ago on this site it was going too far even on the shirt to talk about a replacement internet even when that was already in the media hype. There is no way to unpaint the target except through overwhelming success.
Ok everyone making the points that this forum should avoid splitting… where do you see this practice functioning in other situations? Tags simply won’t be sufficient to avoid distractions imo.
@happybeing, it’s not about moderation… it’s about developers looking for specific contexts while those seeking general discussions look for another.