POLL: Keep Developer forum separate? (developer poll only - NOW CLOSED)

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  • Keep Developer forum
  • Merge into Dev category in Main forum

0 voters

Poll closes automatically at 8am UTC on Monday, 18 Feb

Sorry for the replicated poll but there’s been some (justifiably) negative feedback to the way I handled the original. For background see the link but I think it’s a clear enough question (esp if you are answering for the 2nd time).

I’ll close the other topic off tonight at 5pm (It’s currently sitting at 50-50).

Once again, sorry for the repeated poll but I think that the concerns given justify going back to the voters once again (and I didn’t even use a battle bus).

David.

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I’m in favour w/ some strict moderation of those topics (to avoid de-railing) , and assuming that it NOT be a default category on the home page. As long as things are on topic to an issue etc, it’s all good (IMO). Though with that there’s consideration of mods (and perhaps increased modding needed?) Is that likely to be an issue? Are there the same mods here as on the main forum?

But aye, I’m all for streamlining / increased visibility (as opposed to needing to check another forum [sometimes I miss things here :expressionless: ]).

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Mods/admins of this forum: https://forum.safedev.org/about
Mods/admins of the safenet forum: https://safenetforum.org/about

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Merge them!

Both forums have spoken, there is no argument against these hard numbers in both OP’s :slight_smile:

We have enough data from this one to test the merge results against, to objectively track progress as time goes on.

Perfect step forward :+1:

“No conversation left behind!” :rofl::joy:

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David, can you confirm that we won’t lose the topics and posts on this forum during the merge? I’ve been assuming we won’t, but want to be sure.

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Hi Mark,

Pretty sure we would retain all the topics on doing the merge. I wouldn’t be in favour if we lost the existing chats.

Merge two Discourse sites into one - sysadmin - Discourse Meta

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The sequence (poll before proposal & discussion) two topics in this forum with almost identical titles, one with a second poll, have not been a good process. Here’s a late post on this forum, posted in the ‘wrong’ topic: so it isn’t clear if @circ has been able to vote in this topic, and there may be others. We’ve only had 25 votes so far, so a handful of missed voters would be significant.

I’m not sure the process is a good basis for changing something that works, and which none of the developers using this forum have raised as a problem AFAIK.

We don’t know what it will be like when masses of new people start flocking to the community forum, but some of us were moderators in the past when things were much more lively there, and we had many attempts to sabotage the forum and the community. Decentralising helps protect against this, and it seems ironic for us to be centralising unnecessarily.

I think we may well regret the change later, when it will be hard to change back with so much else going on. Things are quiet now. Do we really need to spend so much time on this?

I think we may have missed devs here too - only 25 voted so far - because many will come only when they need to, so maybe a much longer poll duration would be wise. A lot prefer to spend time developing rather than checking in here regularly.

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For reasons mentioned in my post above, some here will not have seen my response in the community forum so I’ll post it here too. I should have done it earlier, but frankly I just wanted to get on with my code. Here it is:

I think we should prioritise the needs and views of developers in any decision about the Dev forum, so any poll should be in the Dev forum rather than here [on the main forum].

I voted against the merge because I think what we have works well for developers, certainly for me. I would be interested to hear if anyone who has been doing development for SAFE disagrees.

I find it easy to visit the Dev forum and keep up to date with and engage in focused discussion without clutter and non devs jumping in to ask about stuff. I love the discussions on the community forum and still read most of the posts, I just don’t post as much because I’m busy developing.

I hardly ever have to log in, so that’s not an issue, and I have two bookmarks so I visit both forums several times every day. Plus each forum links to the other in the header.

Pros & Cons

I don’t agree with any of the Pros, though I see why non devs might prefer one forum.

From my point of vote as a Dev, it is helpful for me to have some control over when to expose what I’m working on to the wider community, whether announcing, updating, asking for feedback, ideas, help etc. There is some scope for duplication and overhead involved, but for me the benefits have been well worth it.

Being able to find things quickly is important during development, and while categories and tags help forum searches in theory, in practice I will usually know which forum I need to search, but am unlikely to remember whether something was in a Dev category or not. So I think when searching a single much larger forum it will be harder to locate what I’m after.

I suggest we have a poll on the Dev forum as well, otherwise its like the UK having a vote to decide whether to merge with Iceland.

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Thanks to everyone that took the time to contribute to the poll.

Looking at the results, I personally don’t think that we’ve got a clear enough mandate to merge the devforum in with the main SAFE Network forum. So, my suggestion would be to leave things as they are for the time being. Perhaps we can re-visit the concept again in the future.

I’ll change the title on the forum topic to show that the poll is no longer live but keep the thread open in case anyone wants to continue commenting. I’ll close the first poll on this forum though as maintaining two discussions… I’ll stop there.

Thanks again,
David.

1 Like