How to improve the site?
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User accounts
Migrating the user base to Atlassian would help lower the barrier for users to submit bug reports and patches, which would be a boon to the community. (I know of some users who refused to submit bug reports because they didn't want to make yet another account).However, how will that work with the other new platforms? Is it easy to integrate the Atlassian authentication with MediaWiki/WordPress/etc.?
Would an SSO system or OpenID make integration easier?
Content management
I like WordPress' management features, but I'm not sure that bbPress is a good fit for the Q&A format of this forum.We are sorely missing the ability to mark accepted solutions, and to acknowledge helpful posts. This forum is quite polluted with posts that ask users to edit their posts to add the "[SOLVED]" string to their titles.
(Somewhat-related wishlist: It would be great if accepted solutions and "upvotes" could count towards a user's rank in this community -- this would be fairer than the current system which rewards quantity but not quality)
Community involvement
Some other ideas for increasing the "interactiveness" of the community, and helping users contribute to the project:- New licence agreement for doc note (and wiki?) writers, to allow merging into the official documentation
- Simplify the beginners' guide to using Gerrit. The current pages look really intimidating! (I started drawing a flowchart some time ago but didn't finish it. I'll look for it again.)
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[quote author="JKSH" date="1392133211"]User accounts
Migrating the user base to Atlassian would help lower the barrier for users to submit bug reports and patches, which would be a boon to the community. (I know of some users who refused to submit bug reports because they didn't want to make yet another account).However, how will that work with the other new platforms? Is it easy to integrate the Atlassian authentication with MediaWiki/WordPress/etc.?
Would an SSO system or OpenID make integration easier?
[/quote]
The Atlassian tools seem to make integration simple (I should go and look in detail before I make silver bullet statements). The MediaWiki instance in wiki.qt-project.org is already using it, you can login with your jira account (editing is switched off though).Every separate service still has a login screen so it's not proper full SSO, but the login details are the same for all services. Going to full SSO is in my opinion too hard and more work than we can handle.
Adding OpenId to the mix should be possible on some level, and I'm keeping that in mind, just not as the first priority.
[quote author="JKSH" date="1392133211"]
Content management
I like WordPress' management features, but I'm not sure that bbPress is a good fit for the Q&A format of this forum.We are sorely missing the ability to mark accepted solutions, and to acknowledge helpful posts. This forum is quite polluted with posts that ask users to edit their posts to add the "[SOLVED]" string to their titles.
(Somewhat-related wishlist: It would be great if accepted solutions and "upvotes" could count towards a user's rank in this community -- this would be fairer than the current system which rewards quantity but not quality)[/quote]
My first instinct was to look at something that worked with WordPress, but on second thought, there is no need to keep the different pieces on the same platform.phpBB seems to have all the necessary bells and whistles, has an Atlassian authentication plugin, has a very active contributor base and has responsive design built in. Or does someone know of something more suitable? (I would like to stay in the open source domain, it makes life simpler)
On the related wish, I think the current point system should be restructured. As I posted on the ambassador program reboot, I see the need for more varied ambassadors. And to have some structure on which to base ambassador nominations, it would make sense to have more than just one single metric.
I'm not opposed to a single metric as such, but I would like to see more than one number (for example "this":http://maemo.org/profile/view/tekojo/ from my previous life). Making that happen with several different systems isn't easy, but it could be a goal. For a start I'll be quite happy to go and look at several different pages.
[quote author="JKSH" date="1392133211"]
Community involvement
Some other ideas for increasing the "interactiveness" of the community, and helping users contribute to the project:- New licence agreement for doc note (and wiki?) writers, to allow merging into the official documentation
- Simplify the beginners' guide to using Gerrit. The current pages look really intimidating! (I started drawing a flowchart some time ago but didn't finish it. I'll look for it again.)[/quote]
On the first one yes. It is frustrating that there are contributions that are not ending up where they should go.
I haven't looked at the local Gerrit guide. Gerrit isn't so complicated... Maybe I should go and take a look.
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Tero,
you seem to take a bite which you really something to chew on.
since you are asking for suggestions and you are planning to change the platform, it might be a good idea to look back onto JIRA, because not all were bug reports.One thing is still cumbersome for the current platform are picture, screen shots and stuff. Some means apparently do work while others don't. One method working is placing the pictures on dropbox. However, I am not sure if all the pictures are still in my dropbox. The result is that some of the posts become useless. So I would see 2 things. Firstly, another solution working for everybody. An embedded screenshot is the best solution when you are trying understand somebody's problem. Three, four links in a row are mostly useless. Secondly, posts with dead links are useless too. They need to be removed.
Another thing are some connections to versions. The community moves on and problems are getting solved and are no longer present. However, it is typically very hard to recognize if the problem is still relevant or not. So close ties to JIRA are probably good for the forum.
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koahnig, I appreciate the direct approach.
I agree not everything on Jira was a bug, but they were really old. I would like to have as fresh a start as possible.As we stand now, we really don't have a lot of manpower to throw at the site, so I would like to go to standard, best of breed open source platforms for the site (MediaWiki, phpBB, WordPress... really the big tools that have strong developer bases and are known to be solid and stable). Platforms that people here in the community might be familiar with even to the level of helping out in the backends.
I agree about the pictures. The community is big enough to find inappropriate pictures and remove them (I want something where the community can moderate more).
Versions on questions would make a lot of sense. Most questions are with regard to the latest release, but I see a lot of small corrections and questions about for example 4.8 still. Easy way to tag the thread would probably work?
I would at some point like to see jira and the forum use the same userbase, that way opening a bug would be simpler than it is now. Also I hope it would get more people involved with bugs.
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Tero, direct approach is certainly the best thing. I may envision the problems of the bug list growing out of sensible size over the time. Therefore, crawling through this list entry by entry and trying to separate suggestions and bugs is probably a nightmare. Especially when suggestion are not properly flagged as suggestions. Taking this into account it would be probably the best to write a post with a short explanation and ask for reentry in this forum.
[quote author="Tero Kojo" date="1392318885"]
I agree about the pictures. The community is big enough to find inappropriate pictures and remove them (I want something where the community can moderate more).
[/quote]
As you might have seen my post from of the year you know that there are at the moment not a lot of moderators active in the forum. AFAIK those non-Digia guys are Andre and myself. However, when new moderators are active, it is typically very fast to spot and remove inappropriate pictures. I can remember times when spam did not last than half an hour. When the forum becomes as vital, there will be no problem.[quote author="Tero Kojo" date="1392318885"]
Versions on questions would make a lot of sense. Most questions are with regard to the latest release, but I see a lot of small corrections and questions about for example 4.8 still. Easy way to tag the thread would probably work?[/quote]
Completely agree, An easy way to give versions for Qt libs and tools, but also the actual OS and memory model might be good. Certainly the list should be too complex, because it would useless then.[quote author="Tero Kojo" date="1392318885"]
I would at some point like to see jira and the forum use the same userbase, that way opening a bug would be simpler than it is now. Also I hope it would get more people involved with bugs.[/quote]For most people it is not obvious that a post with their problem is not equal to a bug report. Some of them are not happy to use another account on jira.
When coming to wishes. Any overview of an entered topic has a simple list of entries based on criteria. However, especially over time the number of votes to make posts as most relevant has grown out of use. When the old concept remains a date for first and last contribution to the thread in the list would really helpful. Clicking through 20 or 40 threads just to when started is frustrating.
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[quote author="Tero Kojo" date="1392191739"]I haven't looked at the local Gerrit guide. Gerrit isn't so complicated... Maybe I should go and take a look.[/quote]I remember being frightened by this page: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Gerrit-Introduction
However, it looks like a better one is in place: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Setting-up-Gerrit
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I have recently moved to Wordpress on all of my current site development projects and have to agree that it is amazing. I've been using phpBB and MediWiki for a very long time and agree that you have made a set of solid coices. The only place where I don't use MediaWiki for a wiki interface is on Sourceforge with their highly restrictive memory limits. I haven't looked in to single sign on when using WordPress as the main CMS but it should be fairly easy to implement.
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Hi,
And sorry for being silent for a while.I've been looking at options a bit, and find myself torn between phpbb and using bbpress inside wordpress. I set up a virtual machine to test what each platform can do, and wordpress with bbpress is really impressive in ease of use.
MediaWiki has a very good catalog of plugins, I'm pretty sure it can use pretty much anything for accounts.
I promise to set up the wiki pages this week, and post links here.
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[quote author="Tero Kojo" date="1393829334"]
MediaWiki has a very good catalog of plugins, I'm pretty sure it can use pretty much anything for accounts.[/quote]MediaWiki is my favorite wiki project :) I attended a "FOSDEM talk about comparison between MediaWiki, TWiki and XWiki":https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/wikicomparison/attachments/slides/374/export/events/attachments/wikicomparison/slides/374/slides.pdf and the statistics showed that the community and the active developers of MediaWiki highly exceed any of the other projects. Additionally there are so many plugins for it, including several for gamification about contributions scores. So if you decide to change the wiki engine at Qt Project it will be definitely good idea to bet on MediaWiki :)
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As you are already know, yesterday qt-project were under spam attack and and it took many hours until someone had cleared them. However some of them are still here.
Tero Kojo@it may be helpful to appoint moderators from different time zones?
I'm sure there will be many volunteers. -
Banned the spamming accounts.
I'll take a look at the registration page.
It does have filters in place to identify spammers, but apparently they don't catch everyone.Thank you everyone who cleaned the posts.
Would you have suggestions for moderators from other time zones than Europe? We need better worldwide coverage. -
I nominate "sierdzio":http://qt-project.org/member/12548, even though is is from Europe. He is a veteran and a very helpful member in these forums.
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[quote author="JKSH" date="1395319499"]I nominate "sierdzio":http://qt-project.org/member/12548, even though is is from Europe. He is a veteran and a very helpful member in these forums.[/quote]
True, I'm in the boring Central European Time. Thanks for nomination and the new rights, I'll use them well.
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As was already mentioned, the licenses for the docmarks and the Wiki content need to be brought into line with the documentation and example code licenses. It surprised me back in the day that the developer site was launched with a license mismatch - I don't think the developers properly considered how the documentation team would merge contributions from the site into the main docs.
Unfortunately, it may be difficult to relicense existing content now, unless you get contributors to explicitly agree to it. I don't think it would be impossible - perhaps just a click to agree form, or get them to resubmit their work via the contribution model - but someone has to implement that.
I'd encourage migration of existing Wiki content to MediaWiki. The ExpressionEngine thing might be OK to use now but using a different markup syntax is not a compelling feature these days. It wouldn't surprise me if MediaWiki had better support for anti-spam measures and access controls, too.
