[Devel] Let's talk about forums

[Asheesh Laroia]

There are at least two reasons that OpenHatch site visitors would ask 
questions in a forum:

* "I am a wannabe new contributor to open source, and I'm not sure what 
project can best use my skills."

* "I am a contributor to OpenHatch itself and I am having trouble with my 
environment."

For now, I want to focus on the first type of use. (The recent 
https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue448 bug discusses both, but I think they 
should be treated separately. issue448 begins with a really important 
discussion of exactly why it's important we have a forum.)

Okay, so, look. It's high time we have a forum for this sort of thing. We 
can actually integrate it into the workflow of the site, too, if we like! 
People have been suggesting it at least since 1.25 years ago. I totally 
want it to happen.

I want to come to a decision in the next few days about what it should 
look like. So I'm asking you all for ideas, and also to tell me what you 
think of my ideas.

Here are some requirements that I think would be really nice:

* The forum can be accessed over the web for site visitors who are used to 
surfing in their browsers. It would be great if the same forum could be 
used by email, too (kind of like Roundup).

* Discussions in the forum show up on the main site feed.

* User logins should be integrated with the main site, like we have for 
Roundup and the wiki.

Here are some options:

* We could just create a Google Group and point people there. (Cost in 
time: fairly minimal. Downside: It's not very customizable.)

* We could create a group on http://onlinegroups.net/ (which runs the free 
groupserver software, written in Python). (Cost in time: fairly minimal. 
Pro: Supporting free software, and don't have to maintain something new. 
Downside: Still can't get login integration this way.)

* We could install groupserver ourselves. (Cost in time: Probably a few 
solid days of someone's sysadmin time, plus more time in the OSL move. 
Pro: Ability to do login integration. Downside: Ongoing risk of 
maintenance effort.)

* We could also install a forum like Phorum, which has a mailing list 
add-on: http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?62,129244,138092 . (Cost in 
time: probably half that of installing Groupserver. Downside: Ongoing 
maintenance effort, plus the mailing list module isn't part of the core, 
who knows how well it works. Also downside: I'm not as fluent in PHP as I 
am in Python, so I would be slower at writing customizations for it.)

If we have control over the forum, we can do things like:

* Give people gold stars based on attributes of their profile.

* Let people use their OpenHatch profile images

So far, the main OpenHatch site has been reasonably easy to administer, 
only running into problems when (say) we run out of disk space.

We can probably minimize the maintenance effort if we use Puppet (as 
described in my previous email) to maintain the service, but we will still 
probably have to pay attention about once a month when they make a new 
release, and we will probably want to upgrade to it.

I think that, right now, my preference personally is not to be the person 
maintaining forum software on our server, unless we're really committed to 
some integration that makes it a core feature of the site.

If we want to have me try installing GroupServer, that's okay, but I'm 
going to need some more coding help on other site things. (Like 
there are improvements to the map that need being done.) (-:

I open the floor for discussion.

-- 
-- Asheesh.

http://asheesh.org/

You will be the victim of a bizarre joke.