Github Discussion forum

[thomaspaulb]

Wow, so many nice features here. But does everyone think the same? Hence a poll.

[amh-mw]

I didn't get a notification when this poll went up. Is there any way to subscribe all? (Not just to this specific thread.)

[yajo]

Yes, go to https://github.com/OCA/odoo-community.org and subscribe to discussion notifications.

[Shide]

I think using mailing list and Github discussions is not a good idea because having 2 systems to do the same may be confusing.
I think Github discussions is more centralized and everyone can "See and reply" threads in the same screen.

[etobella]

But it has a problem, no notifications are received... Or at least I don't know how to do that 😭

Let's try with @yajo option....

[rousseldenis]

@etobella I can say I have this thread notifications, so, maybe a github profile setting ?

@Shide Mailing list is better to announce something, and discussion better to do the ... discussion on the particular subject to not pollute mailing list.

[yajo]

See https://odoo-community.org/groups/contributors-15/contributors-269341?mode=thread&date_begin=&date_end=

This is just an experiment for now. So we can have both options and see if it makes sense to keep both, or dump one of them.

Mailing list is better to announce something

You can see that the forum has an announcements category:

[Shide]

Just in case something don't find subscribing to Discussions:
Go to Watch button in top right corner > Custom > Check discussions > Clic Apply

[yajo]

You can find those options in https://github.com/OCA/odoo-community.org

[sbidoul]

@yajo these are for the discussions in the odoo-community.org project. But how to subscribe to these OCA org-level discussions only?

[yajo]

It's really the same. The ORG-level discussions are just a mapping for one selected repo discussions in that ORG. See https://docs.github.com/en/discussions/quickstart#enabling-github-discussions-on-your-organization

[rvalyi]

hello, a concern I have with GitHub discussions is: many people will obviously use it to get free support.

At some point this is OK, but for the long time Odooers, you probably noticed our market already suffers some kind of "prostitution", specially with the recent years reshaping of the Odoo SA partner network around "money only" EE sale figures criteria. In more specific terms this is called a "market for lemons" https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_introduction-to-economic-analysis/s19-01-market-for-lemons.html#:~:text=The%20market%20for%20lemons%20refers,certification%20mitigate%20the%20lemons%20problem. and this is this typically how markets use to collapse when customers have less information about the product or service quality than the sellers (eg the Odoo experts).

Well obviously, having forums were people will expect free support will accelerate even more this "market for lemon" transition even in our OCA niche.

Are we prepared for this? The answer may be yes and this might be the price to pay for scaling the OCA. But people expecting free support (and soon very low quality free support) on these forums will be the new normal like in any Magento or WordPress forums. And of course if you are the bad guy closing free support questions, you will be the one bad guy with a bad reputation...

So I'm not telling we should avoid GitHub Discussions, but I'm just making sure everybody is aware what will be the long term consequences.

[pedrobaeza]

AFAIK, we can't model that in GitHub.

[legalsylvain]

It is a good point, but isn't it easy to solve by requiring OCA membership in order to be able to start new topics?

👍 If the idea is to move some discussion from mailing to github discussions. (and i think it's a good move, because all the mail regarding PSC with a lot of 👍 are not optimal), indeed, we can define the rule that only oca members can open new discussion.

If people are agree with that point, developping a little new feature in ocabot that closes automatically discussions from non members with a nice message like "this forum is currently reserved for OCA members. Feel free to join the association to support it and have the possibility to post!" looks feasible.

[rvalyi]

+1 for such a measure at least temporarily.

Pedro, as for certifications and other market for lemon counter measures, well we can have them sure. But, open source projects also already carry a good deal of "quality signaling", like who makes the code, who fixes the bugs etc, all done in the open.

The real shoot in the feets of Odoo SA partnership system is to take all this and fake it's worth nothing vs being a good short term reseller telling any lie required to make a sale. It's also worth mentioning that many certified Odoo SA partners use fails projects massively despite their useless certification. So we can certainly have some serious OCA certification but it would also be good to avoid the same pitfalls...

[yajo]

IMHO think this proposal is an overkill.

many people will obviously use it to get free support

This is an assumption, but not really a fact yet AFAIK. Even if it were a fact, is it a real problem?

to have hundreds of unanswered threads

This is a forum, not an issue tracker. Open threads harm nobody. There's no need to close them. Just, don't answer energy suckers.

requiring OCA membership in order to be able to start new topics?

Bad idea. Entering this community is hard enough already. And asking people to pay for making questions without any warranty on getting answers is like telling them: we only care about your money, not your contributions.

OTOH, if we make the forum more accessible, it'll be easier for other people to answer the questions we don't want to. That'd mean less weight in old contributors' shoulders.

A better idea, though, would be for OCA to start a program where contributors can subscribe either as support providers or as support customers. Then OCA can act as an intermediary providing the platform for such support. That would be better handled at OCA's own Odoo and something completely separate from being or not a member or being able or not to post a thread in a forum. It would be a way to finance the association and share that profit with the support providers.

[legalsylvain]

Hi thanks for your answer,

Open threads harm nobody.

Well, for me it can harm.

• if the forum is reserved to OCA members, I will subscribe to it, and thus be kept informed, (via the github notification system), of new topics, and I will answer them.
• if the forum is open to everyone, it is very likely that many irrelevant topics will be opened. (See other odoo forum : https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1) This will bring a lot of noise in the notifications, and I will unsubscribe from github notifications for this forum. As a result, I will be less kept up to date on topics that are relevant to OCA.

I had understood that the use of this forum was to replace the mailing lists, which are not very adapted to certain subjects, like :

• "I would like to be PSC of repo X". "+1" / "+1" / "+1" / "+1" / "+1"
• "split server repos into server-env / server-auth / ... . "+1" / "+1" / "-1" / "+1"

The fact that non-OCA members participate in this topic does not seem vital to me.

[yajo]

El mar, 21 de mar de 2023 a las 02:40:50 AM, Sylvain LE GAL ***@***.***> escribió:

if the forum is open to everyone, it is very likely that many irrelevant topics will be opened. (See other odoo forum : <https://www.odoo.com/forum/help-1>) This will bring a lot of noise in the notifications, and I will unsubscribe from github notifications for this forum. As a result, I will be less kept up to date on topics that are relevant to OCA.

There are better forum alternatives, such as discourse, which notify you with a digest of hottest topics. The digest can be weekly, monthly... depends on your taste. It also features gamification and other stuff. However, that means an extra financial or maintenance burden, and that's why I suggested the github backend, which is plug and play. We can hope some day they improve this thing, or move to a better alternative. Personally, I have that problem you mention already with issues and PRs. I have a specific filter in my inbox for threads that mention me, where I pay more attention. It works for discussions too FWIW.

[l-arnold]

A bit late to the discussion, but it seems pertinent.
If this is the place for "discussions" I don't see the harm at all. If there is another place, perhaps it should be anounced.
Deciphering info, usage, and methods on OCA is often difficult and the "Community" word in OCA would benefit from just such a central discussion/forum space.
+1 from here.