Importing qubes-users discussions

That’s very strange. I quoted your post in my last post above, and it appeared in the edit window, but it disappeared once I actually posted my comment.

2 posts were split to a new topic: Removing 20 character minimum limit for replys

I’ve moved this discussion to Removing 20 character minimum limit for replys

Im for skipping, the effort in porting and redirecting is high. docs can be updated to here and user migration will organically happen over time. there will be some duplication and im sure us mods will end up linking people who cant use a search box but thats just an inherent risk of any migration of a user facing system

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@michael it seems the consensus is building toward skipping this. What are your thoughts? (I couldn’t really tell from this post)

yeah let’s not try this for launch – thanks so much for looking into it.

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I’ve found something related that seems way easier to implement: mirroring qubes-users discussions.

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This is an interesting option, especially in light of google’s interface requiring login now. It would be an alternative to mail-archive.com, and would allow (I think?) to easily search and reference threads on a mailing list.

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Pretty much :slight_smile:

I’ll play around with this in a private category to see how it works and report back.

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I agree with @marmarek’s assessment. Thanks for testing it, @deeplow!

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You’re welcome!

I’m having a bit of trouble though with confirming the account with qubes-users. Some discussion is following up on discourse’s meta forum:

Updated the first post to reflect the new discussion.

I decided to follow up the discussion though a support ticket on discourse. So let’s see if we can get it working.

Update: The qubes-users mailinglist seems to be mirrored perfectly to the hidden category of #mailing-lists-read-only-mirrors:qubes-users

Some notes:

  • I have made the qubes-users mirror category be muted by default to avoid mailing_list subscribers suffering double-spam (from the live one and the discourse mirror)

So in theory we’d be ready to open the mirror for anyone to see, if you agree. But before we might be able to also add the archives of past discussions there (read the next paragraph).

Found a way to easily import past qubes-users discussions

I’ve found a simpler way than this one for importing old conversations. But I need your help @marmarek or @adw – or anyone who has access to the full qubes-users archive.

Basically we’ll be remailing all the past discussions of qubes-users onto a particular discourse email (essentially simulating the mailinglist).

Here’s how we can move forward with this (two options):

  • option a) sending me a zip of all the qubes-users past emails (into .mbox or .eml – thunderbird or gmail and (then I do option b with them)

  • option b) remailing all the emails yourself with MailRedirect (for thunderbird) for example – with some precautions

Shall we move forward with this? I would do it all myself but unfortunately I don’t have the full archive. If any of you doesn’t mind sending me the archive, then I can do the rest – as not to take so much time from you.

Does this mean that people wouldn’t be able to reply to ML threads and generally use them in the normal way that other general forum posts work?

No objections from me, but I’d like to see what @marmarek thinks.

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In short, we can make it read/write, but it only works qubes-users -> discourse. In other words, we can allow people to reply, but that will stay only in the forum and not get forwarded back to the mailing list (thus risking some user confusion). So I think this better implemented as a read-only archive of the mailing list.

The value of having this read-only archive would be:

  • yet another publicly available copy of the mailing list
  • through searching people would be able to find previous threads on the mailing list.
  • people being able to reference mailing list discussions without leaving the forum (as mentioned before)

I have a setting that should tell warn people when they try to reply to mailing list thread that it is read-only. And we can change that message.

:+1:

Personally I dont see a huge benefit in this, particularly if forum
users cant reply to messages, but it should be obvious that I’m not a
“forum” user. Turning the mailing list in to a read-only resource will
just hasten its decline.
I guess it depends on how referencing to mail threads is done: if it’s
a somewhat opaque link its no use to me, or users like me.
As to the benefits of searching, I fear that the forum may end up like
Reddit - a first resource for people who dont seem to know how to search
online, or cant be bothered. There are already two searchable archives,
and good(ish) documentation.

I’ve set the still hidden mailing list read-only category to be muted by default so hopefully users like you don’t get two copies of the mailing list.

Decreasing the barrier of entry has potential to do that, but I think the discourse software does enourage users to look at previous discussions. One particular example is the following:

The only difference is is the convenience for forum users. It’ll make it easier to find and link to those past and current discussions.

Any updates on this?

We’re trying this new initiative where we avoid overloading Marek as much as possible, part of which means not letting every last thing get blocked on his sign-off (only the most important stuff). Especially if something is reversible, removed from the core of Qubes OS, and/or won’t cause major damage if things turn out badly, then we can just proceed initially based on our own judgment.

So, I say let’s try it.

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