[Bf-committers] Blender Development Forum Proposal

[Danrae Pray]

Thanks Campbell.  I think this is a really great idea.  While I don't have
any suggestions as to what specific tool (Discord or Phabricator/Ponder,
etc.) is best for the job, I think it's really important for this forum to
be a "searchable" Q&A format and not simply a persistent "chat" or "ongoing
discussion" format.

Having something where people can search through previously asked questions
*before* asking their own question saves them time (if it's already been
asked and answered) and also the time of experienced blender devs who are
generously taking time away from their own work to help others.

Moreover, being able to tag questions and answers with relevant blender
versions also saves ppl time, so people aren't looking for code in 2.7 that
only exists in 2.8, for example.

In the end, I completely agree that the goal should be to help people use
time as efficiently as possible when doing blender dev (considering the
limited time of experienced blender coders too).  That's why i think a
persistent IRC-like "clone" would not be helpful in the longer term.

Thanks again for all you guys are doing to help get the community more
involved!  You guys are awesome :)

Cheers,
Danrae



On Nov 21, 2017 1:21 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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