Enable GitHub Discussions for i3

[ghost]

TODOs:

• Enable discussions
• Announce on reddit + perma-sticky
• Update contact information ("Contact us" turned into a link to /contact/ #4482) (Update docs to Discussions #4503)
• Update FAQ link (Update docs to Discussions #4503)
• Add new button on issue template
• Update contact page on website (Add GitHub Discussions to contact i3.github.io#110)
• Announce this on the next release notes

Original request

I'm submitting a…

[ ] Bug
[x] Feature Request
[ ] Documentation Request
[ ] Other (Please describe in detail)

Current Behavior

Not available.

Desired Behavior

Can you please enable github discussions forum here? So we can use it to discuss i3 not related to feature or a bug?

Impact

[ ] This feature requires new configuration and/or commands

Environment

Output of i3 --moreversion 2>&-:

i3 version: 

- Linux Distribution & Version:
- Are you using a compositor (e.g., xcompmgr or compton):

[Airblader]

Can you provide examples of the topics you want to discuss? We currently already have IRC, a mailing list and a subreddit. I'm hesitant to add further channels to this unless there's a very good reason to do it.

[orestisfl]

Is there a Github functionality for discussion forums or do you just mean to not close/redirect issues that are neither bugs or features? If you mean the second, that would negatively affect our ability as maintainers by adding more noise to our issues.

[Airblader]

@orestisfl There's a separate GitHub Discussions feature.

[orestisfl]

Then it might be a good idea. Out of our options:

1. IRC is very short-term, information is lost and your answers depend on who is logged in at that time
2. Mailing lists are less accessible and ours has less activity
3. Reddit is fine for mid-term however some people don't want to create an account there and threads are locked after 6 months

Additional benefits seem to be that we can convert issues to discussions and there is more tight coupling with github issues for discussions (e.g. by linking between issues and discussions).

I do understand though why farther fragmentation of the community might be a potential problem.

[Airblader]

There's two concerns from my side:

1. Fragmentation – we don't create a better world to find answers to questions by spreading them over half a dozen platforms.
2. Activity – we have good traction on reddit, and I don't know if we would have that in GH Discussions. If that place only gets a question every few months and/or if there aren't people to answer, it's not beneficial to anyone to open it up at all.

If we were to open GH Discussions, I'd probably vote to retire at least some of the other channels. Let's consider this:

1. Reddit is currently by far the most active channel. My overall impression, however, is "eh, it's alright", and the recent change to require accounts is certainly problematic. I'm not much worried about locking old threads, answers are still there to be found. However, we don't actually have control over the subreddit as it wasn't created by us, so even if we wanted to, closing it is not an option (unless we contact the actual owner).
2. The mailing list is the oldest, traditional way. There probably are die-hard fans of this. I don't much care for it – we rarely get traffic there, and there is close to none community involvement in responding either.
3. For IRC I have no clue on the traffic it gets, but as you said, a big issue here is that history is not retained.

Overall I wouldn't mind closing all three of them in favor of one good place, but if we had to pick one to keep, I'd probably pick reddit purely because it is the de-facto community place at the moment.

[Airblader]

Side note, I haven't ever used GH Discussions and have no idea what it actually looks like / what it can do etc.

[Airblader]

Thanks @orestisfl for setting up a quick test. From an initial test Discussions looks quite useful, similar to SE in useful ways. The question that'd remain is on how to redirect traffic there, if we wanted to go with it.

[orestisfl]

I don't see closing as the correct approach. An i3 reddit community is bound to exist even if it is unofficial, there is no point to annoy the community. We would just have to remove the reddit link from i3wm.org and maybe elect new moderators in the subreddit.

An important difference between the two communities is that reddit users are usually anonymous while GitHub users are usually more professional and using their real names. Anonymity can help having more relaxed discussions.

IRC and mailing lists are used by certain people that prefer them and would likely not use the alternatives that much anyway. I see no reason to close them either.

[Airblader]

If we were to keep everything else, I'd vote no to Discussions because I don't see the point in opening yet another communication channel that requires maintenance and would likely receive little to no traffic anyway.

[ghost]

@Airblader, here is an example; https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

You mantioned IRC / Mailing-List / Reddit, not everyone uses them.

But by having GitHub discussions board you can have it all in the same place as Issues/Code.
This can be used as a "Forum" you have "Bugs" on https://i3wm.org/ but no "Forum".
We can discuss everything not related to an "Issue" for example. Like questions/suggestions/etc.

Here is a live example from "ungoogled-chromium";
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/discussions

[Airblader]

You mantioned IRC / Mailing-List / Reddit, not everyone uses them.

But everyone can. I doubt that there's any i3 user who doesn't have an email address. There's certainly significantly more people who have any of those options than GitHub accounts.

I don't want to spread this over half a dozen communication channels, because solutions given here aren't discoverable on the other channels and vice versa, and it fragments the overall community rather than having one big one. Not to mention that all of these need to be administrated as well.

But by having GitHub discussions board you can have it all in the same place as Issues/Code.

Which indeed is a major benefit. I'm definitely not against GH Discussions, it looks great; I am against just adding a new channel to all the existing ones, though.

[ghost]

Okay fine.

[Airblader]

Maybe this came across wrong, but I don't think this discussion was decisive yet. I'll reopen this.

[Airblader]

OK, so we internally clarified that I wasn't clear enough on what I meant previously – apologies. I didn't mean to say we'd shut down the subreddit altogether; we don't even have the access to do so. Instead, I meant to remove it as an official channel by "rebranding" it to be non-official and pinning a post redirecting users to GH Discussions instead.

This seems to be agreeable with @orestisfl as well. So the question now is what @stapelberg thinks about it.

[stapelberg]

Does reddit really require accounts? Opening /r/i3wm in an incognito tab seems to work fine.

I’m okay with trying out GitHub discussions. That’s the only way to see how the community reacts :)

We should probably have a trial phase, where we see for a few weeks (1 month?) how GitHub discussions works before rebranding everything.

[Airblader]

Does reddit really require accounts?

It seems that this is a mobile-only thing, but on mobile if I open reddit incognito, it forces me to either log in or use the app (which presumably requires a login as well). Why they're doing this for mobile only – I don't know.

Reddit does have a bunch more disadvantages, and overall GH Discussions seems much closer to what we were looking for when we migrated from AskBot. We were also never actually given ownership of the Subreddit, but rather just some moderation/administration rights.

We should probably have a trial phase

Yes, that makes sense, of course. I'd be happy to announce that on Reddit as well.

[thiagowfx]

It seems that this is a mobile-only thing, but on mobile if I open reddit incognito, it forces me to either log in or use the app (which presumably requires a login as well). Why they're doing this for mobile only – I don't know.

Reddit mobile site version has one of the more egregious design patterns concerning how they try to get you to install their app.

More context of the dark pattern: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18723583

[stapelberg]

Yeah, I have in the meantime noticed this as well (when not logged in).

A friend of mine mentioned GitHub discussions works well in practice, so I think we should give it a shot!

[orestisfl]

@stapelberg Do you want to enable them and then we can slowly start using them? It doesn't have to be final from the start.

[stapelberg]

Done (I think?)

[Airblader]

I'll take care of the Subreddit now.

Edit: Done in https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/comments/pleu32/psa_were_moving_to_github_discussions/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[Airblader]

@stapelberg Maybe you can delete the "General" category on Discussions? At least IMO we don't need a generic non-Q&A chat. I don't seem to be able to delete categories.

[orestisfl]

@stapelberg Maybe you can delete the "General" category on Discussions? At least IMO we don't need a generic non-Q&A chat. I don't seem to be able to delete categories.

I don't think it will hurt to have a "decompression valve" to keep other categories topical.

[stapelberg]

@stapelberg Maybe you can delete the "General" category on Discussions? At least IMO we don't need a generic non-Q&A chat. I don't seem to be able to delete categories.

Done.

We can always re-add it, or perhaps a more focused off-topic (anything around i3, for example).

[Airblader]

I could imagine questions looking for recommendations which aren't exactly a "Q&A" kind of material (since there's no correct answer), but I would rather prevent Q&As ending up in General where they cannot be marked answered. So I'd also like to start small and re-add if necessary.

[Airblader]

@stapelberg Can you maybe also take care of #4512 (comment)?

[stapelberg]

Fixed with i3/faq.i3wm.org@35426aa

[stapelberg]

• Announce this on the next release notes

The recent 4.20 release didn’t have anything about this.

Should we even bother to include a note, or can we just close this issue? :)

[Airblader]

I would vote to just close. Discussions have already seen quite nice traffic.