Re: [libreoffice-design] Topic for design team to investigate: Content hosting consolidation on ask.libreoffice.org

Hi Miguel,

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On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 10:56:43PM +0200, Miguel Ángel Ríos Vázquez wrote:
> Can we really think about using Ask for that?

yes. The problems are well-known, have repeatedly communicated in the project
since at least 2013. There really isnt any news here. Unfortunately, there has
been little movement, the community around the old extension webpage did not
grow despite efforts to do so and even external commercial support wasnt
unlocking the situation.

OTOH, my mail clearly stated that I would like to invite the design team to
consider thinking outside of the box and ALSO think about ask.libreoffice.org
as a platform. This e.g. doesnt mean that the old Plone site _needs_ to die --
but it should not be the only platform considered to provide the much needed
content hosting.

If this results in three to four people volunteering to push the old page
forward in a coordinated effort, I am a happy bunny. BUT: Given this has been
tried since 2013 at least and given the feedback I heard from even commercial
suppliers about the state of things, I am not too optimistic.
 
> My impression is that it is not even very well accepted as a forum. Not an
> example of success.

Impressions are odd in that. ask.libreoffice.org is certainly the most
successful forum LibreOffice currently hosts. 

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/users/ shows currently 1547 pages of 30 users
each, so >45.000 registered accounts on ask.libreoffice.org. For comparison:
wiki.documentfoundation.org has ~17.000 accounts. I'd assume all other TDF
infra has less accounts.

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/questions/ has >29.000 _english_ questions
alone. For comparision: wiki.documentfoundation.org has ~22.000 pages in all
languages.

While there is always room for improvement, ask.libreoffice.org is our most
successful platform -- by far.

> And on the other hand we could be more thankful with the volunteer work of
> the people in the project, whether we like it or not.

That is also true for those content creators trying to use the extension
website to publish content. I posted some random tweets that show their
experience. Unfortunately, that feedback isnt too hard to find and has been
around for years. People uploading their first extension or template are
newcomers to the community -- and as active contributors we should make sure
their experience is not too aweful. The tweets -- together with the fact that
so many extensions and templates are hosted elsewhere (e.g. on github) shows
that we are loosing contributors and miss the opportunity to integrate them
with the wider community. We let those future contributors down.


So: tl;dr: I encouraged the design team to look ALSO look at ask.libreoffice.org
for allowing content publication, esp. since we had good past experience with
getting commercial support for it for well-defined feature requests. That
doesnt rule out Plone as a platform should we (finally) find enough volunteers
for it to gain some more inertia. So if you like the old extension site, feel free
to contribute to it (and find some others to do the same).

Best,

Bjoern

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