I’ve been saying and enougraging the community to have a dedicated area on this forum for developers, as this is where the vast majority of acitvity, discussion, knowledge, and attention is. Siloing it out to another (rarely freqented) forum doesn’t make much sense. All our existing devs are here, and most new ones will likely start here too.
I’ve encouraged the mods to put it in archive mode, and start the new topics and dedicated areas over here a bunch of times over the past year or so… But there was a bit of decision paralysis. So perhaps the domain (non)renewal is a good a bump to do it as any?
Jim, you’ve been saying one way or another that Autonomi intend to shut it down for months. That’s a decision by Autonomi, not something asked for or agreed to by independent developers.
When you said that, we literally stopped posting over there because what’s the point? Then the domain is allowed to expire and apparently that’s a reason to shut it down too. If you say it is going to die of course it will die. I’m hardly going to send people there in this situation, nor post content there any more.
The run up to launch is the time to get it going again. The points you put forward for shutting down are the same reasons I give for developers needing their own space and are why it was set up - by MaidSafe years ago, and if those earlier launches had happened it would be a flagship full of activity, and a magnet for developers. What you envisage will never be that.
We (and by we I mean the communuity mods + me) did have numerous long chats about the pros and cons of keeping the dev forum content over there on a separate site, or having it in a separate section over here. The agreement fell on the later, but stalled on the migration.
I realise you don’t agree with the decision there—the dev community can thrive in either location—but I think it’s most advantagous to get it rolling where the community already is. And a better welome for new devs — a thriving place with 10+ years of activity and history.
You held a closed discussion without external developer input the of outcome of which I’ve argued against many times.
The dev forum was beginning to get going a few months ago and a much better place for new devs to land at IMO.
I’m fed up with the responses to that being the very the same argument that doesn’t present the situation as third party developers will experience it, but rather a way make it simpler for others who won’t go there often - because it’s not really intended for the them or important enough for them to visit.
That is a plus from the perspective of being focused on the needs of developers.
I’m not sure it will be easier to moderate here either.
Or consider newly arrived developers having to figure out they can’t ask questions in a topic without first being approved. Every single one will be confused and less likely to begin to interact and get interested. Arrive at the dev forum and it it’s obvious you need to sign up to ask a question.
Have you considered the UX flow of that from a developer perspective? Or the impact of leaving it open to every new forum member when this place gets hot? Either will be a mess.
It think it’s an ill considered mistaken decision and I won’t support it.
Absoultely cool for you to have this opinion, and for us to differ in it.
But what happens to the forums is not something MaidSafe has direct control over… they are run by the community.
We have instigated the rebrand from Safe → Autonomi though, and won’t be hanging on to the legacy domains just for sake of it. That’s all being sunsetted.
The community has the autonomi.community domain… it could be put back up there if that’s what is desired. I don’t think it’s the best decision, but that’s ok.
And yes we’ve considered it from a new dev UX perspective, and it’s an odd and confusing experience to land on a multitude of old Safe sites, some of them more than 5 years out of date, and even more since the last update.
And the experience of landing on a developer community site looking for an opportunity (and assessing the size of not just the devleoper ecosystem, but the engagment of the potential user base) and to find it next to dead, and with little to no team input.
And then to contrast it with how things are over here with a rich history, weekly dev updates, much more proactive support, and input from the core team etc.
This is not something I agree with, but that’s somehting to bring up with the mods / @Dimitar
I also think a separate category on this forum would be enough, there is always a possibility to filter out the noise and focus on dev topics with that. Also:
Perhaps that could happen, when we have enough content, and then sub-categories will emerge organically?
I’m not sure what types of questions would go in that subcategories – from other devs, that are curious about a particular project? Or from project devs regarding any dev topic?
I think moving latest topics from old dev forum into the category here would be awesome also, as there are some nice ideas and unanswered questions there, worth saving. @maidsafe , do you have backups that could help?
Though I do agree it needs to be standalone in some capacity, at least exclusive to developers. I would assume there could be a general questions thread for any user level on here and engaging there can get you into making comments in higher user level discussions.
It might not be what everyone was thinking but the community GitHub @loziniak shared (and looks like @southside created?) was along the lines of what I was thinking. A place for several open source projects, examples, basic how to and discussions.
Managed to get sick this weekend so I’ve got some pretty bad brain fog, don’t @ me too hard folks if I’m off base, have some mercy.
Get well soon @nigel
GitHub is not everyone’s cup of tea. But until we get (various flavours of) a Autonomi-based forum, nothing will be.
For now I need to invite members to safenetforum-community · GitHub. I bet if I actually RTFM, I can delegate that to some others better placed to decide who is and isnt to be granted access.
Need to thank @nigel for reminding me, for last few months, I have left this as @aatonnomicc 's playground.
Well he’s going to have share … if this is deemed an acceptable solution.
I will still run a Discourse server on a Hetzner VPS if there is a preference for the old dev forum on our own host.
I’m interested in making an app in my spare time and could perhaps help as a bit of a bridge to the dev work on the API. I don’t think I am scheduled to be involved in the API development itself, but it could be useful for me to be following along closely.
I know in the last couple of months or so, I haven’t been involved as much with the community as I used to be, but would like to change that.
There are mechanisms in this CMS to earn your way into developer status, ie read the docs, fix some bugs, then contribute, earning badges along the way.
That said, there needs to be a git function added to control protottype source and a voting mechanism on proposals within the community to move things forward on such additive capabilities.
Adding those add’l capabilities here should be possible, the question is, who is going to take the bull by the horns and volunteer to add them? I have a bit of time to help, ie review code and help improve documentation, after my day job of course.
I really don’t understand why folk are ok with killing the separate place of the dev forum (owned by us/Autonomi), which is a much better separate place than github, but think a separate place on github (owned by Microsoft) is a good move. At least no-one is suggesting Discord
Much better just to keep the existing dev forum.
@Nigel Jim hasn’t addressed any of my points. He and Josh have both put forward arguments that I disagree with (and which if you agree with them, would work against using GitHub too). Hope you get well soon.
I’m being stubborn because there are no proper rational arguments here which stand up against keeping the dev forum, and that annoys me! I’ve been pointing this out for a long time but always its just the same it will be better here because there are more people here, we can use subcategories etc. None of that stands up but nobody has said what is wrong with my points.
If it is shut down I want a dump of my content. Jim has not said whether they are going to renew the domain so we don’t know what is going to happen to everything there.
Can we take it off Autonomi? How much is that to run? @JimCollinson is this an option for the community?
Just to finally get over this discussion and have something decided frankly. Unfortunately, an earlier discussion/arguments went offline together with the dev forum.
It would be nice to be able to collectively decide based on arguments, like in Kialo (example). Perhaps there is a plugin for Discourse for that?
For me the main argument is absence of team members there. They had problems with checking that place, which I can somewhat understand, because I hat the same problem. With GitHub it will probably could be the same.
The best would be to move that content into Dev category on this forum. Is that doable, @JimCollinson@neo@Dimitar?
@JimCollinson Ok, then please arrange for me to have a dump of my content.
Jim, again you haven’t answered my other questions.
Not announcing that you weren’t going to renew the domain, or telling me when I reported it had expired etc is one of many examples of how engagement with and respect for the community has changed this year IME. I’m not the only one noticing this or unhappy about it. We’ve all just been crossing fingers, keeping quiet and hoping launch would happen as promised. Now, I’m seriously worried that an October launch is going to go badly, and again I’m not the only one.
I could write a lot more but frankly I’m fed up with the way things are being handled and don’t want to make it personal.
My concerns go to the what is being done as well as the change in the relationship with the community. I’m extremely concerned about the apparent obsession with launching this network in less than nine weeks. So perhaps the dev forum is moot, but after so many years working to help this project it matters very much to me, as I know it does to so many here.
So, the dev forum is a particular example of something much bigger really.
I kept quiet the last few months because some change was inevitable and of course necessary for this phase, but also because I assumed David was there in the background and hadn’t realised he was so out of it.
I may step away from this for a while. I’ll probably continue my work but these issues are taking the fun out of it and I may well reconsider. I only do what I enjoy now.
