It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.
Ask Fedora Retrospective
Around this month in 2019, we moved the Ask Fedora user support web site to a new platform. We freezed the old askbot instance and we moved to Discourse.
Goals set
The goals of such move were various. Technical ones were important, but the least decisive. Sure, the askbot site looked old (even if rich of resources), it was ---------- not well maintained ???------ and Discourse is one of the most modern open source web forum platform, however the main objectives were related to a new way to communicate and share knowledge. -------- ? mention outsource to eliminate the effort to maintain the platform and focus on something more important ? ------------
Usually, when people have a problem, they ask the question and they pretend an answer, then someone will answer with a solution. And who ask the question would really want that some developer or long aged contributor pops in with the precise and concise set of steps leading to the solution of their issue. Like a support service of a big company. And that attitude was somewhat encouraged by the askbot platform.
But we imagined something different. Nobody in the community is an help desk operator. And Fedora users shouldn't act like costumers of a product. Free and Open Source communities shouldn't feed such approach. Even the newbie user is not an end user in the commercial sense of the term. Obviously there are system rock stars, experts, developers and maintainers: such people has more experiences and knowledge than novices. But nobody should pretend an answer from them: all we are here to learn and share experiences, knowledge and to help each other. Nobody should pretend an answer from other people. One of the power of Free and Open source software and communities is that you have the possibility to learn a bunch of things, if you want it. Encountering bugs and issue is a valuable source of knowledge.
So the main goals of the new forum platform were the discussion, the involvement, the encouragement to learn and to participate in the community life. In Ask Fedora, we share tools and techniques to diagnose the problems, we invite people to file bugs instead of ranting, we push people toward the right documentation on docs.fedoraproject.org and if a document is outdated, we invite them to contribute. We also share community events where people could be easily involved (i.e. test days). In short the new Ask Fedora was not planned as a support forum only.
The beginning
Initially, many people raised various concerns about the value of information contained in the old platform and a series of concerns about search engines pointing to the old platform. But, without diminishing years of contributions, we were very committed to refresh the whole platform keeping in high consideration the limited workforce we have. Again, we preferred to spend our limited volunteer time in more productive tasks instead of maintain or develop legacy stuff.
Various time has been spent evaluating the categories of the forum. Also due to Discourse limitations, we ended up with the most limited number of categories. We avoided to chop a forum in dozen of categories, preferring to cover the main areas: for each language there are two categories Install/Upgrade and Fedora Usage. A more detailed categorization of a post is mandated to the tags. In addition, another category is the Community related one (with the "On contributing to Fedora sub category).
A big effort has been devoted, with the help of some forum user, to identifiy and to move the most common and still up to date issues to the Fedora quick docs.
We also wrote a series of standard operating procedures (SOPs) https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/
People that are able to look after can ask to create and translate the forum categories in their language. The forum started with these language specific categories: English, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese. An initial effort to start a German category suddenly stopped due to lack of manpower.
You can read all the tickets related to Ask Fedora on pagure ----------- https://pagure.io/fedora-join/Fedora-Join/issues?status=all&tags=C%3A+AskFedora
How it is going
The forum is running pretty well. There are new topics every day, and the discussions are usually polite and welcoming. Flagged posts (posts reported by the users because not respecting the CoC or the common sense) are very rare. It didn't happen so far any flame or bad behaviour that required the strong intervention of the moderators.
Some data/statistics
Hear we have some data from around Feb 2019 to Dic 2019.
There are 659 active users. With an average of 50 new users every month. (Note: the authentication system is linked to FAS).
Discourse is equipped with its own reward system. Like Fedora Badges, but it is not integrated with them. There are 4 levels called "trust levels". The more the users interact with the forum, the more they gains trust so they can level up. While more than 50 people easily reached level 2, the ones that reached level 3 are just two couple (users can loose their trust level if they don't maintain their activities over time).
Number of identified spammers: 21 (reported to infrastructure team as well).
Here the number of topics (posts) created under each category:
- a total of 995 topics in the English category
- 723 in the "On using Fedora" subcategory
- 262 in the "On installing or upgrading Fedora" subcategory
- 73 topics in the whole "Community related discussions" category
- 36 topics in the "Site feedback" category
- 20 topics "Lounge" category
- 12 topics "staff" category
These are the numbers of each language category:
- 19 topics in the Spanish categories
- 24 topics in the Persian categories
- 18 topics in the Chinese categories
- 2 topic in Italian
These are the Totals:
- 1199 topics
- 169 Solved by Staff
- 396 Solved by Members
As we can see, even non native English speaking people, prefer to ask questions in the English category.