I thought this was an important discussion to archive 
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It’s quite concerning how the users feel left out from the devs & community in the Discuss Forum. What do you devs think about this? Do you use the Discuss Forum regularly? Do you also feel like the community isn’t active there?
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37 replies
I think Slack is more active anyways. Not in a position to comment on this but some forum posts are rising from not following the docs mostly or reposted with same subjects as old topics. Personal opinion so far. (edited)
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Salvatore Marcellini 19 days ago
Personally i’ve joined slack because i saw that the forum was a bit dead. In fact here on slack i have more interaction with peoples and also the answers are faster to arrive
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I rarely check the forum.
Mostly here and github.
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I rarely check the forums because I am busy. I do check slack where I can.We direct people to the forums first, because it is better for searching for historical answers and our history in slack disappears after a while. It would be good if we had an infrastructure that supports both models. I.e. Slack with history, or something else like stack overflow.
Same here, I don’t go on the forum. Mostly github and slack. I think slack is a good entry point: if it’s a simple support question, I can answer right away. If it looks like it could be a bug report, I redirect to github where it’s easier for me to track.
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Of course one thing annoying with Slack is that we lose messages after a while, even the DMs.
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Yes
Also sent to the channel
@Junwoo Hwang In general, if you see a “valid” request that has not been answered for a few days on forum, post a cross link here and then respond that they’ve done the right thing asking on the forums and you’ve reposted on slack asking for help. IF the question isn’t very stupid most of us will have a look if asked by you in this way.This at least filters out a bit of the crap.
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In the case of those specific queries,
- For very heavy vehicles I think you have no choice but to calibrate off vehicles. @bkueng might be able to confirm.
- For the PXFlow question, read the manual. I believe one interface is for the optical flow, and the other is for the distance sensor.
Of course one thing annoying with Slack is that we lose messages after a while, even the DMs.
Which wouldn’t happen if we used the forum more. But I also never look at it
My opinion has always been that we should only have one thing (apart from GitHub): either a forum like Discuss or Slack, not both. I would like to check the forum, but in reality I never do anymore. When I was still answering it felt like the burden was on very few people, so it was a lot of work to keep up. (edited)
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^^^ Yes. We simply do not have enough people to do both. This happens in a lot of communities.@rroche That puts some hard requirements on the infrastructure. ArduPilot use discord, which seems OK.
But ArduPilot also have a discourse, don’t they? But they seem to have a lot more people interacting and helping out, from what I can tell. (edited)
I think they moved from discourse to discord (could be wrong). I think the reason was exactly this - one system for all comms.
Yes, generally they have more people supporting the forums. We need to do better.
But it’s still active: https://discuss.ardupilot.org/
ArduPilot Discussion Server
Then I’m wrong. Most of the time when I discuss things with their team I use discord. It is much like slack but keeps the history.
https://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/common-contact-us.html
→ development questions and coordination: discord
→ community asking questions / support: discuss (edited)
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We have the two mixed
The worst of both worlds.
Given Slack is not searched by Google and disappears after a while, it should only be used for quick dev communication/alignment but not for support, I’d say.
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Then Slack has all these channels which don’t make sense because 1. you don’t know what channels there are and where you should post your question. 2. if you post your question in the appropriate (small) channel, no one will see it, so you might link or double post it to general or issues anyway.
So, Slack could be a small ~100ish people community actually aligning on development, and all the rest should be a forum. And if no one wants to answer questions from the community in the forum, then it just means that we don’t care about the community respectively don’t have time or money to care. (edited)
True. But I think the results of that not caring would be dire.
And then we can state that upfront in a big banner that says the forum is only community maintained, if your problem is important to you or urgent, consider becoming a sponsor on github or email the consultants on the consultants page.
So the first question is deciding whether the community aspects of support add value. I think they do.
Or we could have a dronecode membership for small startups, students, individuals that’s per month, and costs $100 / month instead of $5000 / year
And the minimum dronecode membership gives you up to 2h support per month from a couple of maintainers participating, or something like that. That’s only public support through discuss or github but not private 1on1 consulting. So there is no support for their problem on their private fork but only for some issue that’s arising using the open source stuff that’s out there, latest release or master.
(I’m just thinking out loud how we could 1. provide a way to help people requiring help rather instead of having them wait for an answer and not getting anything, 2. get a way to pay the people doing the support.)
For sure what we are doing now is not optimal.
I agree with everything that Julian wrote
And typically as soon as I answer a question in public on Slack, I start getting 1on1 messages. This is the worst, because now I’m supporing only one person and nobody else will profit form it at all. (edited)
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But even public slack feels like a waste of energy, because within 1-3 months the message will be deleted anyway and the conversation never happened. The longer we have it like this, the more knowledge we waste that we could otherwise have captured.
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Sometimes when I search something online, it does show me results that include the forum, and I actually benefit from Julian’s or Jonas’ answer from 3 years ago. That’s exactly how it should be
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Stackoverflow is the best example. It’s a gigantic knowledge database built on questions and answers. Because you can bet that somebody else had a similar question before you
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True. But I think the results of that not caring would be dire.
But the current structure also does not change this in any way. People who don’t care simply opt out entirely and are not online at all.
@potaito True. I guess I feel that an active free support channel is a sign of a healthy community so I was really commenting on the “mark this as community only and ignore it if you want”. I want us to work on other ways of addressing this.Fixing our infrastructure would be a big part of that, and getting dev team on discussion boards, or paying a few dedicated support people, etc etc.
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