I have been informed that there may be whole routine development discussion threads here that are closed to the public (including logged-in fedora contributors), in that they are hidden from search, and thread URLs show up as “Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private.”. What’s up with that?
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I think you have been misinformed. There is a moderator coordination group that is not visible to everyone, but nothing else.
Fedora development is very open. It happens on Matrix and the mailing lists. Feel free to check them out.
Developers can email each other privately, have chats in other messenger programs or maybe have a beer or lunch together though if they want to.
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I believe users on this platform (Discourse) can message each other too, so these would comprise of “private/personal messages”. I think one can “private message” multiple people at once too.
Is this what you mean?
Otherwise, as Mat noted, all Fedora development discussion happens openly. “Default to open”. That does not mean community members are forbidden from speaking to each other in private, of course.
(Also, can you please tell us where/how were you informed?)
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Maybe; I didn’t know “discourse” could function as a private chat system, thus my question. I guess that means if one’s handed a discourse URL to comment on something, one cannot assume that it’s a normal public discussion; it might be locked up in private — unlike the mailing lists.
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@fche, there are HyperKitty URIs that you and I shan’t be able to access. The W3C hosts some for private groups. Just because some mail might be sent through Mailman doesn’t per se make it public either.
Well, people shouldn’t be sharing links to their private chats/messages—they should know that these are private/personal and unless they’ve added you to them, you cannot access them.
Everyone else already said what I think needed to be said, but there are also several private mailing lists in Fedora. Especially for security and CVE-related bugs. This is standard practice in Fedora for several years, and it was one of the reasons why I saw pushback on deprecating mailing lists, because people rely on these private mailing lists for coordinating responses on highly-sensitive security bugs before they are more openly revealed to the wider community or before a fix is available.
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My point is that it’s not obvious that a particular development chat is “private” when it’s hosted on discussion.fedoraproject.org , which is normally for public discussions. But fine, you’re happy with this, so be it.
(CVE and such security related forums are well understood as requiring secrecy; off topic here.)
If it’s in a private chat, it’s not a Fedora community “development discussion”. It’s particular members of the community having a private chat.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
Can you tell us more about this chat you’ve been informed of, and why it is considered a “development discussion” because I’m not seeing the issue at the moment. People are allowed to speak to each other in private. Only when it is discussed openly on the community channels does it become a “community development discussion”.
“It’s particular members of the community having a private chat.”
OK, my point has simply been that it was news to me that this was possible on this installation of Discourse. I hope the system is good enough to disclose to the parties that it is private, despite possible expectations otherwise.
Hi,
I think it is confusing especially if you are only using discussion through email like I do. I don’t really visit the website but just get emails when I get mentioned. They contain some text like:
Visit Message or reply to this email to respond
So I had a development discussion with someone else through email assuming it was of course a public (mailinglist like). So I was certainly surprised that when I shared the Visit Message URL others couldn’t see or join that discussion.
How would I have seen this was really a private email/discussion? And is there a way to make the discussion public?
Thanks,
Mark
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It is not just the emails. I just visited the discussion website and the URLs and discussion webpages of “public” and “private” messages look exactly the same to me. Maybe there is some indicator that would have let me know. But if so it is too subtle.
I think you have been misinformed. 
Yeh, I dislike that the URLs are of the same form. The only indicator I have been able to see is that private chats have a mailbox icon next to the topic header, and if you hover your mouse over it, it’ll say something like “this is a personal message”. Here’s an example of a private message to a few of the moderators from the system:
Edit: also remembered that private chats have this box under the main topic listing who is involved in the chat. Public discussions don’t have this:
On the e-mail side, e-mail notifications about private messages to me have [PM] at the end of the e-mail subject.
@mjw : I can’t access either of the links you’ve shared, so I would think those are private chats. Otherwise, as a moderator, I should have access to all public topics, as far as I know.
The “settings” bit for the private chat does seem to have an option to make it public, but I’ve never tried it myself. So I don’t know if everyone gets this (and how it works if one person wants to make it public but others don’t etc.):
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As a site admin, I can see this topic. @py0xc3 was reaching out to you privately about a perspective in another topic where you both were active. It was feedback about communication. In respect to the privacy of this conversation, I think it should be between the two of you on what you want to share or not.
You know, this is a good point though. And generally, the Discourse staff have been really great at listening to our feedback and how our community uses Discourse.
@mattdm Do you think we could raise some sort of feature request on making it more obvious from emails when a conversation is “private” or not in the public forum? I think this might address the root confusion we are seeing here. The feedback I am hearing is that for email-only workflows, it could be more obvious when a conversation is only happening in private, and who is involved in the private conversation.
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Sorry for causing this confusion. My goal was just to get a feedback about my summary of your position, or alternatively to get an appropriate summary of your position of the discussion to include it, so I thought a PM is the easiest thing to use. I wasn’t aware this can be so confusing for those working mostly in the devel mailing lists.
You can invite other people into the topic (button “add or remove…”). While I do not know if everyone can make a private chat public, I can create a public topic and move our private posts to this public topic, if you want this to be part of another public discussion. Shall I do so? It’s just us two in the PM so far, so we do not need consent from someone else about that.
Yes, it’s a PM 
I guess I’m confused, why would you expect there’s no way to send a private message on the platform, to moderators and/or other users?
And why is it a problem?
There is an old adage: it is okay to disappoint people, but not to surprise people. And perhaps here, there was an element of surprise in not understanding whether a conversation was public or private in an email-only workflow.
Given how email is an important workflow we have tried to preserve on Fedora Discussion, I think it is not a bad idea to think about how we can make it more obvious from emails whether a conversation is in the public forum, or whether it is a direct message.
I typically see Discourse use [PM] in the subject line for these emails, but we all get so many emails and there are so many acronyms out there, maybe we could suggest a feature to Discourse to make this better.
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Hi Francisco,
Yeh, I dislike that the URLs are of the same form.
This was really what confused me the most. I just wanted to forward
the discussion URL to some other people who I thought would be
interested in the discussion and then they couldn’t see it.
On the e-mail side, e-mail notifications about private messages to
me have[PM]at the end of the e-mail subject.
Aha. Right. Others only have [Fedora] at the end. Now that I know
that certainly helps. Thanks. Although it would be better if it was
expanded to something like [PRIVATE] or maybe [Private Message]. In
hindsight [PM] is clear, but not if you don’t know already what it
stands for.
Thanks,
Mark
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Hi Chris,
Sorry for causing this confusion. My goal was just to get a feedback
about my summary of your position, or alternatively to get an
appropriate summary of your position of the discussion to include
it, so I thought a PM is the easiest thing to use. I wasn’t aware
this can be so confusing for those working mostly in the devel
mailing lists.
No worries, if you hadn’t pinged me I would probably have missed the
whole discussion. So thanks for including me. I just didn’t realize it
was a private discussion. But that is better than the other way around
(thinking it was private, not realizing my comments would be public).
You can invite other people into the topic (button “add or
remove…”). While I do not know if everyone can make a private chat
public, I can create a public topic and move our private posts to
this public topic, if you want this to be part of another public
discussion. Shall I do so? It’s just us two in the PM so far, so we
do not need consent from someone else about that.
I do think it is better as a public discussion. The specific messages
themselves are that interesting though. If people want to know the
technical details they can follow the public wiki edits. But maybe
even better to have a discussion on the public fedora-devel
mailinglist. I am not sure others with the technical background on
this specific topic follow the discussion forums.
Cheers,
Mark