Announcement | Qubes-community Project has been Migrated to the Forum

[system]

We’re pleased to announce that the content of the qubes-community project has been migrated to the forum. The guides are now in the Community Guides category, and can easily be browsed with Discourse’s doc plugin interface, in addition to the standard search.

Rationale behind the migration

The forum has become the place that the qubes-community project was originally meant to be - and much more. In a recent discussion between Qubes OS “documentation” people - the forum admins/mods, the official qubes-doc maintainers, and qubes-community admins - it was agreed that it would make sense to migrate most of the qubes-community documentation to the forum’s “Guides” section.

The main reasons for doing so are:

• visibility /and as a corollary, avoiding duplication/: there is a significant amount of posts in the forum in which people are asking questions (or providing solutions) that are documented on qubes-community - that for some reason they didn’t find.
• ease of use/contribution: admittedly, Discourse makes it a lot easier to contribute than GitHub/git.
• avoiding document “rot”: with wiki-type guides, an easy-to-use platform, and easy-to-find resources, we hope that people will contribute more frequently to existing guides, even if that means simply posting a short but helpful comment.

Maintaining the documentation’s high level of quality on a more “open” platform

Content quality: we will employ tags to signal high quality reviewed content and selected guides will likely be linked from an index page on the project’s website. Nevertheless the good will be stored in the same place as the questionable and we’ll have to work out ways of signalling to the reader which is which.

Other than that the respective category is just another place to host. One doesn’t have to be logged in to read and if there are some who do not want to create a forum account to contribute I am sure we can find ways to make that work: send the contribution for discussion to qubes-users and I or others can post it then into the forum with proper attribution.

Regarding edits: there is a history of who changed what and mistakes/vandalism is easily detected/mitigated. We might form a group of ‘guardians’ who subscribe to notifications for any changes to those wiki posts, so unwelcome changes don’t stay up very long. If that fails, we can raise the trust level required for edits and have contributors below this level submit their changes as comments to be then applied to the wiki post by someone with trust level 2.

In general we want to trust the positive spirit of the community and hope it won’t be an issue.

Thanks!

[deeplow]

This has been a long term project coordinated by many moderators and community members, particularly @tardiddles who kickstarted the project and did the ground work of importing the guides into the forum and @awokd who had floated around this idea in the past.

Thank you all for making this possible!

[deeplow]

Docs links

Links to the docs can be found on the forum in various pages:

Docs page

[gonzalo-bulnes]

This is really good, thank you all people involved for making it happen!

[gabehcuod]

Awesome.

[deeplow]

Maybe we could even make this more visible by adding a link to the header banner. I can look into this in the future.

[szz9pza]

@deeplow

make this more visible

I don’t think it needs more visibility. It’s already on the forum landing page.
You could not hide it inside the more button if you want to be more visible when we are not on the main page.
It’s also visible (without the search) in the side bar with the section ‘Community Guides’.

@deeplow

by adding a link to the header banner

What would be nice to have in the header banner as links: (e.g.)

• Qubes-OS.org or Website or Official website
• Official docs
• Donate

[adw]

I still see a lot of people linking to pages in the Qubes-Community GitHub repo instead of this forum (recent example). I guess they don’t see the migration notice, because it’s only visible on the README, which they don’t see unless they happen to visit the main repo page.

[deeplow]

Pinging @taradiddles

[qubist]

User feedback:

Currently, there are links in the documentation pointing to GitHub. However, all that one finds on GitHub is a note that the content has been moved here, linking to a forum thread. This is a little bit confusing (+ privacy decreasing, as one has to visit one more website), so it is better to have the links in the documentation link directly to relevant forum threads.

[adw]

@qubist, please see this thread for a more recent discussion about this topic:

What to do with old community documentation on GitHub

For a long time, there was a community-run project for unofficial Qubes documentation here: Recently, all those community docs were migrated to the forum into this new section: You can see the announcement for that migration here: However, I still see people around the Internet mostly linking to the old GitHub guides, which are no longer being updated or maintained. I am wondering if we should take down those old guides or replace them with links to the new forum section. Any opinions?

[ben-grande]

Although it may be too late now, I have mixed feelings about the migration by the outcome it had.

@system

The main reasons for doing so are:

• visibility /and as a corollary, avoiding duplication/: there is a significant amount of posts in the forum in which people are asking questions (or providing solutions) that are documented on qubes-community - that for some reason they didn’t find.

Which metric was used to base that the forums have more visibility over Github? Please note that people can clone and share a git repo offline and this won’t be counted, also the Github analytics page have been decreasing in quality data. Was a discourse analytics/metrics tool used?

@system

• ease of use/contribution: admittedly, Discourse makes it a lot easier to contribute than GitHub/git.

Can’t deny that. What I can say is that everyone else now has to read the pages online while git clone is much easier and the pages were readable locally in markdown.

Many more users have contributed to guides/wikis here compared to the QubesOS-contrib community, but there is no reviwer anymore, there is no obligatory message of why the change was made, there is just a diff with a user name.

I have seen wikis with over 50 edits, if the last time I used the guide it has 20 edits, now I have to see 30 diffs of the whole page (extraneous information) to understand what happened or I just compared against the 20 revision with the 50 revision, making it impossible to understand why some changes were made. The maximum that happens to help substitute commit messages is some small explanation made by the editor to the end of the thread.

@system

• avoiding document “rot”: with wiki-type guides, an easy-to-use platform, and easy-to-find resources, we hope that people will contribute more frequently to existing guides, even if that means simply posting a short but helpful comment.

People have been contributing more frequently to the guides, I have seen good quality and bad quality guides alike. I have seen an increase in contribution by forum users, some from experienced users and a lot by inexperienced users providing bad information.

Guides have been somewhat unified into wikis on Discourse, this compilation helps the visibility pointed above, therefore preventing some documents from rotting.

Has this been great? I don’t know for sure, people really enjoyed doing edits with the Discourse UX, this comes at a cost, not vetting, no maintainer, free for all to edit. Of course these things happened before on the forum, removing the guides from the git repo did not change that, it just reduced a way of contributing as well as getting from from unofficial sources.