Gauging interest in dedicated CentOS Discourse

This is a copy pasta of a post to centos-devel. Reply there or here. I’ll watch both.

https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2022-October/120641.html

There have been some discussions about having a dedicated Discourse instance for CentOS. Discourse has a lot of advantages, such as better moderation and integration with our accounts system. But I understand that many people are comfortable with their existing workflows.

There’s no point in running Discourse if it doesn’t get enough buy-in. So I’m asking for input on using Discourse for various things:

  • Project announcements, like events, meetings, and infra changes

  • Activity reports, such as for SIGs and events

  • User support, replacing forums.centos.org

  • Development of Stream itself, basically centos-devel

  • Development of stuff inside SIGs

  • Replacement for the comments section of the blog

  • Alternatively, just replacing the blog entirely

  • Something else I’m not thinking of

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The discourse page here will undergo a strong change soon: discussion.fp will be merged with ask.fp → on one hand, this will make it necessary to tailor the structure to the changed conditions (I do not know if CentOS has been involved in this?).

On the other hand, the merge upgrades our discourse to discourse enterprise if I remember it correctly. discourse enterprise will contain more features, functions, plugins. I do not know if we get all enterprise plugins or if there are more features beyond the plugins, I guess @mattdm knows already (?). I do not know if anything of that is advantageous for CentOS, but it might be taken into consideration.

In any case, I guess it makes sense to make your considerations against the discourse we will have after the merge, not against the discourse we currently have.

Have there already been considerations about how to integrate CentOS in the new, merged discourse? Maybe it makes sense to combine these discussions: how and where can CentOS be best integrated in the “new” enterprise discourse, can it profit from the additional plugins/features and thus, does it make sense to get something dedicated.

Just some thoughts :slight_smile:

@py0xc3 Good call on both of those things.

For the merge with Ask, it would be kind of nice to migrate the CentOS section to its own space if only for the sake of organizational simplicity — keep the number of top-level categories constant.

The good news is: the long work I’ve gone through in getting a Red Hat–CDCK enterprise agreement should get us something that can apply to CentOS as well, so the CentOS discourse would have all of those benefits as well.

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I would definitely love having CentOS and Fedora user stuff in one place. It would also be great if we could, even without explicitly naming, also be a community user source for AlmaLinux and community based distros in the space as well, even if scope ends up being limited to EPEL (I respect that money and trademarks are likely a thing to be considered here)?

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Happy to have Fedora and CentOS together

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To be honest, I feel like the Fedora/CentOS/AlmaLinux/RHEL stuff I do has never been more interactive (with RHEL feeling more and more like the outlier among them). It’s a good potential resource for serving our broader community and also a great way to onboard others to contribute upstream.

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I agree. I’d suggest waiting till after the merge and then seeing how many posts there are in CentOS related categories before deciding. However I do think having a unified Discourse is the way to go because people come here for one thing and the boards can open them up to other groups under the Fedora / CentOS / RH Umbrella.

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