I think this is an excellent idea! I also agree wit @mattdm’s request for moderation support as key to making this work too.
I think we need to add a :centos: emoji alongside the 
one. 
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This is something I’ve been pondering for a few days. I’m not sure a CentOS Project category (to succeed the CentOS Forums) here will be apt if the purpose of d.fp.o will be for Project level topics.
A CentOS Project category on ask.fp.o would make more sense, with tags for centos7, stream8*, stream9, etc. CentOS makes heavy use the mailing lists for project discussions, with the forums being (for all I can mostly tell) end-user help and announcements. Unless the Project and SIGs wanted to have a non-mailing list area for discussion/participation, I wouldn’t see a need for a CentOS category on d.fp.o. I’m not sure how well Discourse’s email functionality works and whether or not it would be a good fit here, I see there’s some concerns on it in the quoted discussion.
* Stream 8 is part of the EL8 category title on f.c.o (“CentOS 8 / 8-Stream”). Would this be removed if this proposal goes forward? I image the forums will remain until the EOL of CentOS Linux 7; not sure how many folks running EL7 would migrate over to a new platform.
I’m tentatively interested in helping out. But I would like more information on what such a role would entail.
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(On moderating:)
Primarily, responding to flags, which come in three flavors. In order of frequency in my experience:
- A post got marked as spam by akismet — is it spam? Let it through if not. If it is, delete, zap the user, and report to Fedora Infrastructure.
- A post is flagged as spam by a user. Ditto.
- A post is flagged for hostile tone, off-topic, or some other thing. Needs some more discretion and thought.
Also ideally moderators would fix obvious misspellings and add (or sometimes remove?) tags as appropriate. I’d love to see a higher level of activity around this, but really the baseline commitment is low.
Yeah — Ask is probably better for user-level troubleshooting. But I’m not quite sure how that would be best organized over there.
This site would be better for community and technical discussion. In Fedora, the lines between “user” and “community member” and “contributor” are wide and intentionally fuzzy. I think it’s the intention for CentOS Stream to grow to be that way too, so it’s not necessarily bad to invite more folks to this “side” of things.
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Is there a color version of the new logo? If we just use all-white, it’ll only work on the dark theme here.
And I guess the related thing is: do we want to ask Ask (heh) folks about CentOS content over there?
The Ask Fedora team feels pretty strongly about organizing that site by language categories. Unless we can get some alternative like Multilingual Plugin 🌐 - plugin - Discourse Meta in place, it seems hard to figure out how to fit CentOS in. We could use tags (see this I just posted about this site, and require each post to be tagged “fedora-linux” or “centos-stream”, but I’m not sure how well that would go over.
Thoughts?
So anyway: I don’t mean for the question about user topics and Ask, or the planned big site reorganization here, to block this.
CentOS folks, I’m inclined to just set up the category now, and we’ll figure it out as we reorganize. What do you think? And, please let me know who the planned category moderators will be.
Thanks!
And, please let me know who the planned category moderators will be.
I’m now asking the current CentOS forum moderators if they can come up with good candidates.
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I was not able to find anyone who is interested in helping there. Do you have any candidates in mind?
Let’s go for “if we build it, they will come”.
Maybe I could add you and either @arrfab or @carlwgeorge as moderators? I don’t anticipate a lot of work.
This is done. @toracat I interpreted that as add both of them and not you. If we want all three of you (which would be great!) we will need to wait until we can upgrade to the Enterprise hosting plan.
In the meantime, anyone let me know of anything you’d like configured differently. And someone (Carl of Fabian I guess!) should take ownership of and edit (if needed) the About the CentOS category post. (Take ownership with the wrench icon in the … menu below the post.)
That is correct. Just those two great guys, not me. Thanks!
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Awesome! How do SIGs go about requesting subcategories?
For now, ask me, via a post in this thread or in site feedback. But, I’d actually like to hold off on creating categories right now, because of the pending site restructure. And particularly, I’ve grown to strongly believe that categories are the wrong grouping for SIGs. We probably want to use tags, instead — categories are better for really big distinctions (Fedora Project, CentOS Project) or for functional differences (see discussion in that thread).
So right now, my suggestion is to just start talking in the general #centos, and we’ll figure out how to organize as a further refinement.
Or in other words: premature categorization is the same problem as premature optimization. 
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Good point, I’ll wait for the restructure. Concurrently, I’m also still trying to sound out SIG members on this - I’ve grown to like Discourse more over time, and it seems perfect for those activities that currently don’t have a strong mailing list presence anyway since those are harder to move.
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Related to this, I’ve filed an issue requesting Hyperscale SIG’s IRC channel to be bridged to Fedora’s Matrix server.
If this makes sense and more SIGs are interested perhaps at some point they can be listed as a category in the Matrix Space too?
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@mattdm Realizing I never followed up on my moderator questions earlier, sorry about that! I’m being moved into a new role in January and will have a lot on my plate to work through and get caught up on, so despite the workload level you described I’m not going to have a lot of time to pay attention to other alerts/comms. I’ll have to pass on stepping up for that for now.