On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 09:38:26AM +0300, Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
My main trouble with Discourse and other places where I try to help people with answers to their questions is that forums promote a drive-by questions without further engagement. This experience is opposite to what forum proponents are claiming but I see it pretty consistently on Discourse, on Stackoverflow sites, on Reddit and in many other places.
I think some of that is natural in any support forum. The same thing happens on the Fedora Users' mailing list.
In my area, identity management and authentication, the topics are complex enough to want to help others but lack of further engagement simply kills any interest to use a particular discussion board. If people asking questions aren't interested in getting the answers or even tying in the ends for their own questions, it comes hard to keep an interest in helping those people again and again.
I can point you to one specific topic on Fedora Discourse as an example: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-login-bug-having-a-128-charact...
Well, in that case, I think the person was primarily interested in getting access to their account back, not the underlying bug. Justin helped them find where to file a ticket, and presumably everything was resolved from their point of view.
I would have supposed that someone would follow-up, right? As a FreeIPA maintainer in Fedora, as an upstream FreeIPA contributor and a contact for security issues, I have never been contacted with either details for what the thread claims to happen or never got any follow-up on the thread to my comments.
I really don't think that's a _tooling_ issue.
This is an experience I want to avoid. If this is what Matthew is proposing a Fedora development discussions to be, then sorry, this is not an improvement.
Well, no. It is not what I am proposing.