I voted for a different CMS/forum engine.
Definitely not Reddit please. It’s an untrustable third party based in the US, with a nasty track record of closing down subreddits where there was the slightest trace of “thought crime”.
(And I suppose it carries a lot of ads, too, but I don’t see this because of Ad Nauseam. )
Is it possible there yet another option available?
What about asking for paid support for just the upgrade to the latest version of Discourse? If it’s a one time only support request you might be able to get some people to chip in to help cover the cost.
The people at Discourse should be very efficient in doing or helping with an upgrade, and if they don’t have that support option they might know somebody willing to help that actually knows what they are doing.
I think it would be at least worth looking into just to know what it might cost and to be sure the upgrade goes smoothly. The big question is how much it might cost and do we have enough people who might pitch in to help defer the cost.
Pro: Efficient upgrade of Discourse to the current version
Con: Need to have some way to pledge/collect support to cover the cost. (e.g. published PayPal account)
Reddit is in the US, is not GDPR compliant and it is not Free Software, so that may eschew Free Software people or Privacy-minded people
And is it really the current priority for the Turris team?
You are right. They should stop supporting community discussion and they would have more time if there were no annoying users.
I think there isn’t anything wrong with admitting that we are short-handed, and we were even before, but we are still hiring new people. We don’t have anyone dedicated to the forum or improving the relationship with the community. It is one of our priorities as anyone in our team is involved in a different area. Keeping software and server updates up-to-date is one thing related to DevOps, right? If there is anything vulnerable related to a current version of Discourse, anyone can exploit it, and that’s what it could be fixed in newer version, and exactly that’s what we want to prevent.
Also, what is currently bothering is that the forum is the last remaining thing which needs to be solved to do a physical server swap.
What is it that you miss so many people?
I’m willing to help staying with current forum (i.e. to study, learn and understand its possibilities). I can’t judge other CMS, but I’m affraid that reddit is not (good) option.
Lack of human resources is quite natural, especially in open source projects… I wonder that you don’t understand this. You’ll better to refrain from (such and similar) comments.
Where is the job offer for community manager advertised?
You have to read (any) topic more thoroughly… There was no (in)direct job offer, only stating of fact of lack of (human) resources. Anyhow, it’ll not prevent anybody from offering help, even you…
You have to read (this) topic more thoroughly.
I would guess that:
https://www.nic.cz/page/321/kariera-v-cznic/#support_turris
might be relevant, IFF team turris actually wants to go in that direction and interpret forum support as part of general support. However I did not read @Pepe’s post as a specific request for a “community manager”. His argument was/is that team turris is not in decline but that they are actively looking for adding members to their team (or replacing members that leave).
That said hiring a “community manager” will not solve the operational issue that apparently makes discourse a bad fit for the turris forum.
Side-note: Germany’s largest ISP has its own share of support catastrophes at hand (like first level support with too little training and assigned competence), but they do have a quite decent high level mop-up team that is active in several fora and directly helps users running into problems and frustration with the normal (not very impressive) support, as far as I can see, that team alone regularly convinces users with real problems with that ISP to still consider the ISP responsive and helpful (convincing them to stay as customers in spite of that ISP being relatively expensive).
So having people cruising the forum and steer users with problems into the desired support channels seems like a good idea (especially since I believe turris support being smaller and hence less affected by the traditional problems with first level hired tele-center support that essentially is forced to always repeat an identical list of diagnostic steps eve when it is clear these will not help).
OK, this time you are right… But you answered your previous question by yourselves, making both of them pointless.
Unfortunately choices are XOR, my personal preference would be
Before I continue: I understand the cons regarding the current solution and appreciate your effort to keep it alive. However, I would like to add, that this forum (Discourse) is a great source of information (despite the fact that you have to search forever or ask). Any other solution would require a data migration. Pros for “Stay with this current forum” should contain this.
Reasoning for choice (as mentioned above):
Pfff. I bet all of you use Fb, IG, Twitter, YouTube, Google Chrome, Windows 10 etc which is much more privacy invasive than Reddit. On a browser level, Firefox enables very good protection in strict mode (no need to use containers for the purpose anymore)
No, why? Am I missing something?
Me neither. No time, no interest.
What’s “IG” by the way?
Have you considered switching to a federated privacy-friendly alternative to Reddit, e.g., Lemmy? You’d have an option to self-host if that’s what you want, or use a hosted instance, e.g., lemmy.ml?
FWIW users of Mastodon, Pleroma or Lemmy would be able to use their existing accounts as these services can interoperate.
OK, how about you migrate the Discourse instance to its own VM, then you can test new versions while the old is still running and solve your DevOps issues by using a stripped down server install with the sole purpose of running Discourse? Sure this will put some additional load on the DevOps team but in a compartmentalized fashion where you can actually do a diff of the VMs from before and after the update to catch at least persistent effects of “unknown magic”?
As you can tell I am quite happy with Discourse…
Maybe you can enable the “reply as linked topic” feature to work around Discourse conscious avoidance of threads/sub-threads, that way users could steer sub discussions to new topics while leaving breadcrumbs how to find those new topics automatically?