[Bf-committers] Blender Development Forum Proposal

[Aaron Carlisle]

While discord has some nice benefits there is something
to be said about just sticking with the software we already use.

What I mean by this is phabricator has a similar system called
"Ponder" Here is a live demonstration of it:

https://secure.phabricator.com/ponder/

Aaron Carlisle

Picture taker | Bit cruncher | Pixel pusher | Document writer | Artist
Project administrator for the Blender 3D Documentation Project

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 2:21 AM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Recently the possibility of using a forum was suggested
> as a way we can help on-board new developers.
>
> A quick summary of the issues with current communication channels:
>
> - Realtime chat is too timezone sensitive *.
> - Bf-committers mailing lists aren't setup for Q&A.
>   while responding to some questions from interested dev's is OK,
> noisy discussions are discouraged.
>
> I suspect some people might be too shy to ask questions on our
> official mailing list too.
> My impression is IRC is getting a reputation as having a higher barrier of
> entry
> with alternatives like Slack, Mattermost, RocketChat .. etc. gaining
> popularity.
>
> In a discussion with the other admins we considered doing a trial run
> of a blender-developer forum.
> Unlike the old blender.org forums, which had too much overlap with
> blenderartists.org
> this would focus on people working with Blender's code, developer
> tools and anything related to becoming a committer.
>
> User questions, feature requests - would be off topic, there are
> better places that handle this.
>
> It's hard to know if this is really needed or how much it would be
> used, there have been a handful of times
> new developers have asked questions in bug reports, but further I cant
> say for sure.
>
> When talking with Bastien Dalai & Sergey, our main concern is the time
> needed to respond to posts,
> that we end up in a similar situation to what we already have with patch
> review.
>
>
> Proposal
> --------
>
> - Create a forum using discourse:
>   https://www.discourse.org
>   see rust-lang's forum as an example:
>   https://users.rust-lang.org
>
> - Appoint someone to be responsible for triage, they can contact
> maintainers if it's needed.
>   The intent here is to take some pressure off maintainers for
> handling day to day posts.
>   It's possible it ends up being an unnecessary role, it's just to
> avoid diffusion of responsibility
>
> - Maintainers who already spend time helping others should not need to
> spend more time doing this.
>   As a rule of thumb - time helping others on the forum can replace
> some time helping out in IRC.
>
> - This is to help people who are serious about getting into Blender
> development
>   anything else can be redirected to the appropriate site or closed if
> it's really off topic.
>
> - Trial run for a fixed time-frame (3-6 months for eg).
>   if it's not working well after we've made a reasonable effort, close it.
>
> Thoughts and suggestions welcome.
>
> ----
>
> * Newer online chat systems support stored scroll-back,
>   making real-time chat work better across time-zones, even so,
>   switching away from IRC is a different topic and not part of this
> proposal.
>
>
> --
> - Campbell
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