1309226 - Update /about/forums/ to include Discourse forums

Status: NEW

(www.mozilla.org :: Pages & Content, defect)

Description

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

Hi,

We should include all the existing discourse forums in /about/forums/ to give a better picture on where the community and some functional areas are right now.

Current discourse forums (aka categories) can be automatically fetched from:

https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/categories.json

Including name, url and description.

Also /about/forums/ includes some mailing lists that are not longer active or that where migrated to discourse. It would be good to do a clean up there too.

Thanks!

Comment 1

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

Adding Henrik and Yousef in case there are questions about how to fetch the API for category names.

Comment 2

[Henrik Mitsch [:hmitsch]]

ParSys work is being tracked here: https://tree.taiga.io/project/pierros-mozilla-particiaption-systems/us/143

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

(In reply to Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] from comment #0)
> We should include all the existing discourse forums in /about/forums/ to
> give a better picture on where the community and some functional areas are
> right now.

That sounds like a fine idea. /about/forums/ is autogenerated so we'd need to fix the autogeneration script, which I maintain.

> Current discourse forums (aka categories) can be automatically fetched from:
> 
> https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/categories.json
> 
> Including name, url and description.

But not the section of the /about/forums/ list where they should be included. So, for example, "Mozilla Mexico" should go in "Regional", whereas "Reps" would go in "Mozilla Reps" and "B2G OS" would go in "Applications and Projects". Any suggestions for how to fix that? Is there a metadata field we can use to set categorization?

> Also /about/forums/ includes some mailing lists that are not longer active
> or that where migrated to discourse. It would be good to do a clean up there
> too.

If there are forums no longer used, file a bug to get them deleted, and then they'll be removed from the list. Removing them from the list but not deleting them properly just means people who discover them by means other than the list will get very confused.

Gerv

Comment 4

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #3)
> But not the section of the /about/forums/ list where they should be
> included. So, for example, "Mozilla Mexico" should go in "Regional", whereas
> "Reps" would go in "Mozilla Reps" and "B2G OS" would go in "Applications and
> Projects". Any suggestions for how to fix that? Is there a metadata field we
> can use to set categorization?

Unfortunately there is no other metadata on top of their names/description. If we sort them alphabetically most communities start with "Mozilla CountryName".

> If there are forums no longer used, file a bug to get them deleted, and then
> they'll be removed from the list. Removing them from the list but not
> deleting them properly just means people who discover them by means other
> than the list will get very confused.

I see, but what to do with lists that it's not clear who owns them? Some are no longer in use, some are duplicating existing supported channels elsewhere.

For example I see some lists created by teams that no longer exist at Mozilla. (mozilla.general is an example that I've just discovered a few days ago after 12 years at Mozilla :P)

Cheers.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

(In reply to Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] from comment #4)
> Unfortunately there is no other metadata on top of their names/description.
> If we sort them alphabetically most communities start with "Mozilla
> CountryName".

Is there a field we can put some sort of categorization in? Or have a convention to use the first or last word of the description? It would be a shame to just have to dump the entire Discourse forum list into one big pile at the bottom of the page.

> For example I see some lists created by teams that no longer exist at
> Mozilla. (mozilla.general is an example that I've just discovered a few days
> ago after 12 years at Mozilla :P)

mozilla.general is, or was, a particularly special flower, filled with people who would just have invaded other forums if not left alone. A quick peruse suggests this is still the case. Leave well alone.
 
Gerv

Comment 6

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

Yousef, Henrik, is there something we can do from discourse side to help fetch these groups?

Comment 7

[Yousef Alam [:yalam96] (use NEEDINFO)]

This is something Leo can look into, my guess is that it should be simple enough to add some metadata (or a new API call) for this.

However, it will rely on the CORS configuration which isn't on our roadmap for the next week, so I can come back with a better idea soon.

Comment 8

[Henrik Mitsch [:hmitsch]]

For sake of transparency and traceability:

* CORS topic: https://tree.taiga.io/project/pierros-mozilla-particiaption-systems/us/143
* Metadata topic: https://tree.taiga.io/project/pierros-mozilla-particiaption-systems/us/197

Both currently not slated for delivery in our next sprint. But keep your faith, please!

-H

Comment 9

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

We don't need CORS for this; the list is not generated dynamically, but statically on a regular basis and checked in. So the script which generates it can fetch the data without the need for CORS.

So if you can find some metadata or even conventional way of indicating a category for each forum, then I'm happy to enhance the generation script to fetch them and add them in to the list.

Gerv

Comment 10

[Henrik Mitsch [:hmitsch]]

Hi Gerv,

with Leo on the ParSys team until the end of the year, I am very confident we can get this delivered during Leo's contract with us.

Best regards,
   Henrik

Comment 11

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Great :-) When Leo is ready to look at it, get him to ping me and we can discuss the best implementation strategy.

Gerv

Comment 12

[Graham Perrin]

Context: <https://www.mozilla.org/about/forums/>

Cross reference post 5 <https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/-/15785/5?u=grahamperrin> under 'Incorporate discobot into our instance 

Comment 13

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

Hello,

Are there any updates about this one? :-)

Thanks!

Comment 14

[Henrik Mitsch [:hmitsch]]

No update from my side. Leo, do you have any thoughts to share?

Comment 15

[Leo McArdle [:leo]]

Not really. Gerv and I had a discussion about this where he indicated his support for Bedrock fetching the data directly from Discourse, rather than manually entering the Discourse data into the list. [1] But other things took priority.

With revamping the Discourse homepage being the next major item of programming I'm planning on doing, and since /about/forums is rather outdated (it still suggests filing a bug to set up a mailman-google groups-nntp trifecta), might it be a better use of resources to incorporate the list of mailing lists into Discourse's homepage, and redirect /about/forums to discourse?

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/community-data/blob/master/forums/raw-ng-list.txt

Comment 16

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

I'm doing a bit of this work now, and have recently pushed up a first pass at pruning the forums list here:

https://github.com/mozilla/community-data/pull/21#issuecomment-426662333

So: Hi, Henrik! I'm taking this bug and welcome further suggestions.

Comment 17

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

Hi Mike,

What's the current status of this? is there anything we can do to help you?

Thanks!

Comment 18

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

At this point, I'm inclined to take the suggestion to replace the Forums page with a link directly to our Discourse instance. Individual-project newsgroups (newsgroups at all!) are probably not the best place to get involved with the Mozilla community.

Rubén, what do you think?

Comment 19

[Rubén Martín [:Nukeador] ❌ [away till Aug 31st]]

I agree with the proposal and I would probably include a quick comms to active newsgroup owners letting them know about this change. There is probably just a few super active ones that might want to consider how to get more visibility from mozilla.org or even migrate to discourse as others have done in the past.

Comment 20

[Leo McArdle [:leo]]

@mhoye, do we have any metrics on what level of traffic /about/forums receives?

And do we have a sense of when this change might be made? The homepage of discourse.m.o is in dire need of a redesign anyway given the number of categories we now have, it would be great if we could get this done before the redirect.

There is probably just a few super active ones that might want to consider how to get more visibility from mozilla.org or even migrate to discourse as others have done in the past.

We can always, with this Discourse homepage redesign, include links to a few newsgroups if they don't want to migrate.

Comment 21

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

There is probably just a few super active ones that might want to consider how to get more visibility from mozilla.org

Agreed. And things like the governance list are probably important to link to from somewhere on mozilla.org. So perhaps the page becomes a link to Discourse with a short explanation of what to expect there and then a few links to important Mozilla Project mailing lists?

Comment 22

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

Now that mailman is shut down, this page is not useful at all. Is there a wiki page that outlines what is planned for this page?