Practical questions for the site merge: user trust levels, categories, and tags

Site Help & Feedback
8

As for the name, I think keeping “Ask Fedora” is wise for continuity of merge to the help seekers. However, if the rest of us want to change it, it certainly wouldn’t be the EOTW.

English language does seem to be the predominant choice for questions, it is logical to keep the category non-language specific with (noted) english preferred as there are some active members volunteering support I think who speak another native language.

I think of a new user, starting in the Discussion area for the first time, will in all probabilities appreciate a “New Users Start Here!” category. For those who are new to Fedora only but not new to Discourse it will make little difference either way.

I am already a moderator at Discussion and want to keep doing it, more would be better but I find everyone in the community who hang out at discussion are very reasonable people, moderation duties are pretty light. That will change once ask.fp.o is merged though. So yeah, like @mattdm says, we need more moderators.

I would like to keep trust levels, or merge if active at both sites I think. I don’t see this as affecting me personally, but some are very active at ask.fp.o and that shouldn’t be lost.
On this topic, when you refer to “clean slate for everyone” does that mean everyone at both sites or just at Discussion? Why I ask is since it is going to effectively be a new site even for discussion.fp.o members then from that perspective EVERYONE starting over makes sense.

Again, following along with my position on trust levels, I think if TL4 at ask.fp.o then promotion to TL4 at discussion.fp.o should be automatic at time of merge. It just makes sense it would be automatic.

The tags are a thing, could we just have some specific to ask category, such as the more commonly associated with support type questions. Or do you make a project team called Support that members who want to help do, and you can become a team member (under your own control, ie radio button on user preferences page) once you answered one support question (marked as a solution)? Just a thought.

Thank you @mattdm for driving this and doing all the legwork of getting these discussions going.

9

In reply to @hhlp
You brought up an issue I was unaware of and had not considered since I am a regular user on askfp and only sometimes on discussion.

TEAM workflow seems it should likely need to be separated from the regular users discussion, or at least read only, since allowing just any user to post into that discussion would quickly get chaotic and degrade the efficacy of that communication.

I think that the way it is currently set up with TeamWorkflow as its own category is great as I can easily then select the subcategory and see the posts, I just think that opening those up to posting from all users might present an issue.

Maybe limiting access to certain categories on discussion as is currently done for the lounge on askfp to TL3 and up would be a good idea. By the time users reach TL3 it seems assumed they have demonstrated sufficient maturity on the forum to not cause significant disruption.

That would naturally assume that all the team members on discussion (and those in any other groups selected that way) are already to be selected as TL3 with the new structure.

Merging all the tags seems a different ballgame all together. Maybe some way to group the tags according to category if that is possible?

Thanks to @mattdm for the discussion and driving this progress.

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10

Yes, exactly, You have the posibility to group the tag’s on Discourse by I think you can’t group the tag’s in the list…

@mattdm I forgot that thanks to drve and get this posible

Regards.,

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11

@mattdm, did you see the new burger menu in action?:

order tag’s by group:

6d8fdb39f3972eb285c106c4b0778cc30aace96e.png
6d8fdb39f3972eb285c106c4b0778cc30aace96e.png1466×851 68.9 KB

I think this will forced to us to use it…

Note

Regards.,

12

Yes, all topics and posts will be migrated, and mapped the the appropriate users. Since it’s the same SSO, this should be reasonably easily done. (The Discourse company will handle this as part of the migration.)

Based on the poll, I think we should:

  • Bump everyone to match their TL up to at least TL3
  • Check individually with current TL4 users here if they want to be TL4 there — or possibly an Ask Fedora category mod instead
  • Check individually with current mods here about whether they want to be full mods, category mods, or step back from the role

Does that make sense? Is that what you were asking / suggesting?

Tags can be put into tag groups — on this site see https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tags where we have “Fedora Linux Releases” as one group, and then everything else is uncategorized (“Other Tags”). On Discussion[1] there is a specific “Teams & Tags” tag group linked to the Project Discussions category[2] and a separate set for Social and Fun, etc. These categories are configured to only allow tags from the provided tag groups.

There are several possible approaches we could take:

A. Create a new “Ask Fedora” tag group. Note: tag groups can only be managed by admins, so new tags would need to be created by admins (not even moderators).

B. For the Ask Fedora category, don’t restrict by tag groups, so all of the uncategorized ones can be used. This should give an experience similar to what we have now.

C. I think this might work but I’d need to test it: first, as is the case now on Discussion, make all categories require a tag group (including Ask); and second, make a special category under Workflows where “other” tags are allowed; then, third, set the permissions to create tags down to TL2 or whatever; and finally, enable topic voting in that category. Then, tags could be created in this category, argued for, and voted up. Admins could periodically then move tags to the Ask tag group (or any other tag group, for that matter).

And, independently of this, we could do a tag cleanup. (I think this is probably a good idea anyway.) We could delete any tag that isn’t used at least N times [3]. That would make most sense with one of the approaches where we’re more controlling with the tags, but might be useful even if we make things wide open again just as a periodic “spring cleaning”.

  1. https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/tags ↩︎

  2. Note that I’m going to add -team or -sig to most of these. See this topic for details. Short answer is it’ll make it easier to subscribe to, say, server and server-wg separately. And also, I hope it will be more clear that these are team-tags. ↩︎

  3. where N is some arbitrary number. 5? ↩︎

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13

Yeah, this is worth looking at. On the one hand, I want to remove barriers — people should be able to easily shift from active user to team participant. But on the other, a flood of perhaps-well-meaning-but-not-really-invested commentators could be overwhelming to people trying to communicate with their team. (And worse, if there are people showing up with demands and unreasonable expectations, as we know we sometimes do get here, that might drive the real conversations to private exchanges.)

My inclination is to leave it open to start, but we have some options. Particularly, I’m working on a bridge that will sync Fedora Account group membership to Discourse[1] . This would make it possible to restrict posting in Project Discussions to folks who have agreed to the FPCA[2] or who are members of specific groups.[3] And we could include TL3 in that too. So, if it becomes problematic, we could increase the restrictions.

  1. Issue #10952: mini-initiative proposal: skeleton for bridge from fasjson groups to discourse - fedora-infrastructure - Pagure.io — help wanted, actually… ↩︎

  2. although we may do away with that… ↩︎

  3. I don’t think “at least one group” is easily done, but the bridge could create a virtual group that works that way ↩︎

14

Regarding the language grouping;
Some impressive progress has been made in the machine-translation space as of late. Seeing as how forum topics don’t necessarily need to be translated within 15 seconds of posting, we could use some decent language models with a not-ginormously sized server to bridge the gap between english writing users and users writing in other languages.
Just a thought.

I’ve used argos-translate for a year or so now, and it provides pretty decent results (it’s no deepL in terms of quality, but still pretty good).
I also recently began using translateLocally which is an offline port of the Bergamot project (Mozilla w/ others)'s translator. It’s not as accurate as Argos-translate, but the models are small and it’s super fast.

15

As of now, dropping New Users! Start Here! has a slight plurality in favor — but that’s less than the combined votes for keep it (in different locations). So, here is that question again, split out:

Should we keep the separate New Users category?
  • Yes (strongly)
  • Yes (mildly)
  • Don’t care
  • No (mildly)
  • No (strongly)

0 voters

If we do keep it, where should it go? (Multiple picks allowed.)
  • Top level category
  • Subcategory under top-level Ask category
  • Subcategory of Site Help & Feedback
  • Somewhere else
  • Just voting for no reason

0 voters

Also, I thought of something we could do: when users go from tl0 (newbie) to tl1 (basic) — or to tl2 (member) — it’s possible to change the default notification level for a group. We could make it so this category shows up to new users, but then is automatically stashed out of the way once you gain site trust. This would slightly mitigate my worry about too many categories being overwhelming. (And it’s possible for anyone who wants it to un-mute it again.)

Should the New Users! Start Here! category become muted by default at higher trust levels?
  • Yes
  • Yes but only if it’s a top level category
  • This is a terrible idea and will confuse people
  • I don’t care

0 voters

If we do chose to mute-on-level-up, at what level should that be?
  • Trust Level 1
  • Trust Level 2
  • For admins only :classic_smiley:

0 voters

16

Happy to hear that the merge will happen soon. Thank you for everyone working for so long to make this happen.

Pre-question: Will Ask site will still be accessible (in read only mode, I hope) ?

Does that mean English is one Category, and non-English will be another? Or there will only be one Category as “Any Language”?

Common Issues is serving a specific propose - as it can be migrated without issues, should just do that.

Announcements & Site Feedback - use existing Discussion setup. Only current posts need to be migrated or reposted.

New Users! Start Here! - if it is meant for new user to the Site, then no need a separate one. If it is meant for new user to Fedora, then, there should be other better arrangement (like using Labels) then having a dedicated category.

Trust Levels - don’t let Talents go without good reason. Keep those TL3 or above as it is (let them know what they need to do to maintain it). And tell those in TL2- more about TL3+ .

17

As long as you are listing translation engines, what about DeepL? :smiling_face:

You could migrate them into a hidden category and move any useful one out as you find them useful? And there’s another reason:

I’d expect the jobs that look at activity to do their thing within a day. You could certainly test this on a staging site. It’s one of the reasons to carry over all the posts, even ones that you merge into a hidden category for archival purposes; they will be used for TL calculation.

There’s no option for “Discourse should just work” in your trust level post. Is it because you have done a lot of manual modifications of trust levels already that won’t be magically preserved? Have you checked what the user merge code does in practice?

Are you implementing this by taking backups of both sites, going into read-only mode, importing /merging on a staging site, backing up the staging site, and then finally restoring the backup on the combined live site?

18

The plan is for all of the content to be lifted from its current location to the new subcategory on Discussion. I don’t think there will be any need for a separate archive. Or am I missing something?

19

My plan is two categories — English and others. I’m thinking we will have language tags for the “others” in that subcategory.

20

The first three are the ones Discourse already supports. And we might be able to get IBM to help because of the whole “bought RH” thing.

If we can get the plugin to support it, I’m not opposed to more possiblies!

21

I was mostly thinking of the manual TL4 users, but then threw in the rest. Good point that it should Just Work.

22

I am primarily implementing it by paying CDCK (the company behind Discourse) to do it as part of the enterprise contact. I assume it will look something like that.

23

Oh, I thought the support had been accepted, but I was wrong. It’s a fork:

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24

Ah, this is collecting specs to ask then to implement, got it.

The script/bulk_import/discourse_merger.rb at a quick glance clearly has some badge and group merging code; it might already just do this?

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27

It is this way to let everyone, as well as in a chat, go through.
I do not doubt that most people are helped but I also have to read a lot of what I am not interested.

28

No you don’t.
If the title does not catch your interest then skip it.

If you choose to read it then sure, you may not find the content interesting, but all of us experience the same.

I read the title, then read those that interest me, and reply where I feel I have something valuable to contribute. This is just the nature of a forum and is not exclusively a plus or minus for discourse itself. The same exists on almost every forum around.

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29

If Discourse allow us to set a default language filter, it can be set to English, and all language posts can be keep in the same category.

If a default language filter is not possible, then yes, one for English, and one for Others.

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