<tl;dr>: Make
discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org read-only by end of
August. See and comment on
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247010
Hi everyone,
In January 2018, an experimental instance of the Q&A platform
"Discourse" was set up for developer support at
https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org .
See
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180854 .
Since its launch, the usage of this instance has declined:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247010#6270883
On average, there are two users who are engaged daily.
Other support venues which exist in parallel are much more active, such
as IRC, mailing lists, [[mw:Project:Support_desk]], [[meta:Tech]],
local technical village pumps, newsletters, Zulip for outreach
programs, or other third-party sites such as
mwusers.org,
StackExchange.com, or Reddit.
Discontinuing the least frequented venue (which unfortunately is
Discourse though it seems to be a great communication platform) would
keep us from further fragmenting our conversations and efforts.
Planning, implementing, establishing and running a centralized
Wikimedia developer support venue on production infrastructure
(puppetization, data backups, uptime, etc) would require significant
technical and "social" capacity. If Discourse was to be further
evaluated,
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678 and its subtasks
list part of the remaining needed work.
I propose to make
discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org read-only by the end
of August 2020.
Please comment on
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247010 if you have
thoughts to share instead of replying to this message.
Because keeping conversations in one place. ;)
Thanks a lot!
andre
--
Andre Klapper (he/him) | Bugwrangler / Developer Advocate
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/