Sometime in early 2023, this site is going to merge into Fedora Discussion. This will put user and contributor conversations closer together, which feels more “Fedora” than having a big separation. We think that’ll be less confusing for people trying to decide where to post (and even easier for moderators to move things when they end up in the wrong place).
In preparation for that, I am going to make a number of big changes here in the next week:
Create a new “Ask in other Language” category, and move posts from the existing language categories there (with language-specific tags).
Make banner post explaining what’s going on.
Move some of the posts from #start-here to #english and to their respective categories and make them pinned posts. After the merge, we may put them elsewhere… this will hopefully keep them from getting lost in the next step:
Delete the Start Here, Lounge, and Staff categories.
Move this message to Site Feedback. Delete the Announcements category.
Look through Site Feedback for anything that seems relevant to the merged site… delete everything else, and eventually the category.
Once that’s done, everything remaining should be ready to be transplanted to Fedora Discussion as a sub-tree of a new top-level Ask Fedora category.
Maybe we have discussed that already earlier (sorry if this is the case : ), but do we keep https://discussion.fedoraproject.org as forwarding to the merged site’s new top-level “Ask Fedora” category? I guess that makes sense because several if not many users will not be aware of the change (or simply forget about it once they have a problem).
Ideally, I would love to not just forward ask → discussion, but forward links from old posts to their new homes as well so we don’t break all the links in search engines, blog posts, social media, IRC, etc. to helpful solutions to things. Having done that kind of migration before, though, I know that is very much not a trivial work, but perhaps Discourse has a method for such a migration.
Yes — the plan is to have the URLs for all migrated topics redirect to their new locations on Discussion. These will use the HTTP code which indicates that content has moved permanently, so search engines will over time update to point directly to the new location.
You’ll notice that Discourse topic[1] URLs don’t actually encode the category, so it’s just a matter of new hostname and new number.
I wish we could have done that last time we moved Ask, but then we had lost control of the original site. Here we are in a better situation and have both sides. We are also arranging for CDCK[2] to provide us with automatic full-database backups[3], so we’ll have that as a fallback in some very-worst-case situation[4].
for basically ideological reasons, they call them that instead of “threads” ↩︎
Excellent! I’m impressed by the way this is being handled . Once the dust settles, it should be a good improvement for end-users and hopefully get people who come in for support more engaged in the project in general. Thanks to all who worked/are working to make this happen!
So just to set the record straight as a normal Fedora user, should I be making topics/bug reports on ask.fedora or discussion.fedora from here on out? Sorry I’m just a little confused, as I’ve always only used ask.fedora for bug reports and help.
ask.fp.o will continue to exist. The difference is, it will be one instance instead of two. With the new “the enterprise contract” we do have enough capacity to run everything together.
No need to have two different logins anymore. So if you are watching on ask.fp.o you can read anonymous or with the account you are using on discussion.fp.o if you do not have one yet your existing here gets:
Yes. Login is already shared. If there isnt an existing account here, the existing profile will be left, but if there isnt, the one from Ask will be migrated. (I can’t think of a sensible way to merge them, really…)
Hmm, then why is it asking me to create a user when I login with my credentials at the discussion forum:
Anyway, I don’t know whether discourse uses a primary key internally that is different from the userid. If so, it might be a bit problematic to move over the topics and keep the association with the userid…
I’m curious about what this will mean for history and TL, etc., between the two (unless you were strictly referring to the profile page?). Will activity, badges, etc. on ask.fp.o not end up reflected on the discussion.fp.o account? It looks like there may have been a way added to do this kind of merge, though I don’t know that it includes merging profile or TL?
Since the posts are going to be migrated and will be associated with your account, that will show up as activity.
I don’t intend to migrate Discourse badges — instead, I’m going to extend my Fedora Badges integration. We can / should create some Fedora Badges related to Ask and to Discussion.
I assume once the activity is merged between the accounts, the badges should automatically follow, assuming the Discourse requirements are the same between the two instances, right? Stuff like “Popular link”, etc.
They would, except I’ve turned those off on Fedora Discussion. I didn’t want there to be two things called badges — and I’d rather the focus be project-wide, rather than “the forum is the community”.
Then am I to understand that building up the earned badges has to start (again) from the very beginning for everyone once the switch over & merge is complete?
I guess that will apply to everyone here, but it will be a bit frustrating to start as if a newbie.
I can work with that as long as TL stays approximately the same.
As ask.fp.o is still a separate domain, could we not go one for more a year with the statistics/badges for this year and look for a integration of this peoples effort who really gave quite a lot of manpower?
A nice example is the user @vgaetera, since I started he was always here and helped. With more complex questions he was the one who found a solution.
A other example is @computersavvy, if we left of the Nvidia troubles because they appeared in a huge amount, he was the one who repeated hundreds of times how users have to salvage their system. With a lot of patient he went thru all the steps needed to give assistance. This is just a small part of effort i mention here.
I find it sad that just because of a peace of software and of missing effort a part of the community looses their recognition.
I believed we do talk about a integration in to d.fp.o and not a clean an wipe, to start over.
I’m perplexed. You are right — it is an integration, not a “clean wipe” or “start over”.
I don’t see why that would be. I’m proposing we create some appropriate badges for https://badges.fedoraproject.org/, because I think that’s better than have a separate, isolated system — and because Discourse’s built-in badges are kind of bland by comparison anyway. But there’s no reason the criteria for those badges would need to start at the merge point — it seems perfectly reasonable to include all the work everyone has put in so far.
Yes, as previously discussed, Trust Level should not go down.
. Once the dust settles, it should be a good improvement for end-users and hopefully get people who come in for support more engaged in the project in general. Thanks to all who worked/are working to make this happen!
