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== Ask Fedora Retrospective == | == Ask Fedora Retrospective == | ||
Around this month in 2019, we moved the Ask Fedora user support web site to a new platform. We | Around this month in 2019, we moved the Ask Fedora user support web site to a new platform. We archived the old askbot instance and we moved to Discourse. | ||
=== Goals set === | === Goals set === | ||
The goals of such move were various. Technical ones were important, but the least decisive | The goals of such move were various. Technical ones were important, but the least decisive, since similar to Askbot, the plan was to use a deployment that was hosted and supported for us. Askbot, while worked well enough, lacked certain features and a modern user interface that we thought was necessary for a good user experience. The main objectives were related to a new way to communicate and share knowledge. Discourse fit the bill very well for this. Similar to Askbot, where upstream hosted the instance for us, Discourse also allowed paid hostage. This freed up community resources that would otherwise be spent on non-trivial tasks of packaging, deploying, and maintaining the software ourselves. | ||
Usually, when | Usually, when a user has a problem, they ask a question and await an answer. Generally, we notice that on support forums the questioner expect precise and concise sets of steps leading to the solution of their issue---somewhat like a support service of provided in industry. Since Askbot was a question and answer platform designed for questions to be answered, it did not lend itself well to discussions. It was designed for questions and solutions---not for discussions and troubleshooting that enabled users to converge on solutions. | ||
Nobody in the community is expected to serve as a help desk operator. Similarly, it doesn't quite work when users act like costumers of a product, either. That's not how Free/Open source communities work. They work on a voluntary exchange of knowledge and ideas. No end user is a 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 really be demanding an answers from them: we are all here to learn and share experiences, knowledge and to help each other. | |||
So | |||
In short the new Ask Fedora | So, we imagined something different---discussions instead of questions that expect answers. The main goals of the new forum platform were the discussion, involvement, and 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 is much more than a support forum, it is a channel for discussion based troubleshooting. | |||
=== The beginning === | === 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. | 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. These concerns were valid, but with the limited resources at our disposal, it was not possible to migrate the information. Given how fast Fedora moves, while some general queries and solutions remain relevant across releases, a lot of release specific information gets outdated quite quickly. So, it was decided to put all the available man-power toward the setting up of a new, fresh platform instead of spending it on the maintenance and migration of a lot of generally outdated information from an older platform. | ||
A lot of time was spent evaluating the categories of the forum. Within the possibilities that Discourse allowed, we ended up with the smallest set of categories that would enable organisation of information without adding complexity that would confuse users. We preferred to cover the main areas: for each language there are two categories Install/Upgrade and Fedora Usage. A more detailed organisation of posts is mandated to the tags. In addition, another category is the Community related one (with the "On contributing to Fedora sub category"). | |||
To ensure that information that remained relevant to current releases, we, with the help of numerous forum users, identified and moved the most common and still up to date issues to the Fedora quick docs. Additionally, to ensure that there was no single point-of-contact (point-of-failure), we spent some time documenting necessary bits into a series of standard operating procedures (SOPs) https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/ | |||
Since the Fedora community is global, the current category structure allows the splitting of the forum into smaller bits each dedicated to a particular language. It was important that all these languages have community members actively looking after and moderating them. So, with help from the community, we set up a few initial languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese. More languages can be supported through new categories, but we do make sure that the volunteers that step forward to maintain them are able to commit the necessary time and resources to the forum. | |||
For more information on the discussions and process that we followed, 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 === | === How it is going === | ||
The forum is running | The forum is running very well. There are new topics every day, and plenty of active polite and welcoming discussions. Flagged posts (posts reported by the users because not respecting the CoC or the common sense) are extremely rare. The English category is most active, with the "on using Fedora" perhaps receiving most posts. An active team of moderators help when needed. The Discourse trust system rewards active users, so we have a much larger team of moderators on the forum that when we had started---a good sign! | ||
=== Some data/statistics === | === Some data/statistics === | ||
An important feature that attracted us towards Discourse was the possibility of gathering data on usage. This was not straightforward in Askbot. Here, we have some data from around May 2019 to December 2019. | |||
There are 659 active users. With an average of 50 new users every month. (Note: the authentication system is | There are 659 active users. With an average of 50 new users every month. (Note: the authentication system is limited 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). | 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). Finally, 21 spammers took the time to create FAS accounts to spam the forum. These were all detected, deleted from Askbot, and the FAS accounts reported to the infrastructure team as well. | ||
Here the number of topics (posts) created under each category: | Here the number of topics (posts) created under each category: | ||
| Line 50: | Line 47: | ||
** 262 in the "On installing or upgrading Fedora" subcategory | ** 262 in the "On installing or upgrading Fedora" subcategory | ||
* 73 topics in the whole "Community related discussions" category | * 73 topics in the whole "Community related discussions" category | ||
* 36 topics in the "Site feedback" category | * 36 topics in the "Site feedback" category | ||
* 20 topics "Lounge" category | * 20 topics "Lounge" category | ||
* 12 topics "staff" category | * 12 topics "staff" category | ||
These are the numbers of each language category: | These are the numbers of each language category: | ||
* 19 topics in the Spanish categories | * 19 topics in the Spanish categories | ||
* 24 topics in the Persian categories | * 24 topics in the Persian categories | ||
| Line 62: | Line 60: | ||
These are the Totals: | These are the Totals: | ||
* 1199 topics | * 1199 topics | ||
** 169 | ** 169 marked as solved by staff | ||
** 396 | ** 396 marked as solved by members (the user who asked the question) | ||
As we can see, even non native English speaking people, prefer to ask questions in the English category. | As we can see, even non native English speaking people, prefer to ask questions in the English category, possibly because its more active. | ||
Revision as of 08:33, 7 May 2020
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 archived 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, since similar to Askbot, the plan was to use a deployment that was hosted and supported for us. Askbot, while worked well enough, lacked certain features and a modern user interface that we thought was necessary for a good user experience. The main objectives were related to a new way to communicate and share knowledge. Discourse fit the bill very well for this. Similar to Askbot, where upstream hosted the instance for us, Discourse also allowed paid hostage. This freed up community resources that would otherwise be spent on non-trivial tasks of packaging, deploying, and maintaining the software ourselves.
Usually, when a user has a problem, they ask a question and await an answer. Generally, we notice that on support forums the questioner expect precise and concise sets of steps leading to the solution of their issue---somewhat like a support service of provided in industry. Since Askbot was a question and answer platform designed for questions to be answered, it did not lend itself well to discussions. It was designed for questions and solutions---not for discussions and troubleshooting that enabled users to converge on solutions.
Nobody in the community is expected to serve as a help desk operator. Similarly, it doesn't quite work when users act like costumers of a product, either. That's not how Free/Open source communities work. They work on a voluntary exchange of knowledge and ideas. No end user is a 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 really be demanding an answers from them: we are all here to learn and share experiences, knowledge and to help each other.
So, we imagined something different---discussions instead of questions that expect answers. The main goals of the new forum platform were the discussion, involvement, and 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 is much more than a support forum, it is a channel for discussion based troubleshooting.
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. These concerns were valid, but with the limited resources at our disposal, it was not possible to migrate the information. Given how fast Fedora moves, while some general queries and solutions remain relevant across releases, a lot of release specific information gets outdated quite quickly. So, it was decided to put all the available man-power toward the setting up of a new, fresh platform instead of spending it on the maintenance and migration of a lot of generally outdated information from an older platform.
A lot of time was spent evaluating the categories of the forum. Within the possibilities that Discourse allowed, we ended up with the smallest set of categories that would enable organisation of information without adding complexity that would confuse users. We preferred to cover the main areas: for each language there are two categories Install/Upgrade and Fedora Usage. A more detailed organisation of posts is mandated to the tags. In addition, another category is the Community related one (with the "On contributing to Fedora sub category").
To ensure that information that remained relevant to current releases, we, with the help of numerous forum users, identified and moved the most common and still up to date issues to the Fedora quick docs. Additionally, to ensure that there was no single point-of-contact (point-of-failure), we spent some time documenting necessary bits into a series of standard operating procedures (SOPs) https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/ask-fedora-sops/
Since the Fedora community is global, the current category structure allows the splitting of the forum into smaller bits each dedicated to a particular language. It was important that all these languages have community members actively looking after and moderating them. So, with help from the community, we set up a few initial languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese. More languages can be supported through new categories, but we do make sure that the volunteers that step forward to maintain them are able to commit the necessary time and resources to the forum.
For more information on the discussions and process that we followed, 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 very well. There are new topics every day, and plenty of active polite and welcoming discussions. Flagged posts (posts reported by the users because not respecting the CoC or the common sense) are extremely rare. The English category is most active, with the "on using Fedora" perhaps receiving most posts. An active team of moderators help when needed. The Discourse trust system rewards active users, so we have a much larger team of moderators on the forum that when we had started---a good sign!
Some data/statistics
An important feature that attracted us towards Discourse was the possibility of gathering data on usage. This was not straightforward in Askbot. Here, we have some data from around May 2019 to December 2019.
There are 659 active users. With an average of 50 new users every month. (Note: the authentication system is limited 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). Finally, 21 spammers took the time to create FAS accounts to spam the forum. These were all detected, deleted from Askbot, and the FAS accounts reported to the 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 the Italian categories
These are the Totals:
- 1199 topics
- 169 marked as solved by staff
- 396 marked as solved by members (the user who asked the question)
As we can see, even non native English speaking people, prefer to ask questions in the English category, possibly because its more active.