[Olpc-open] Going forward with the community forum

[Michael Burns]

Hi Peter. Thanks for posting your thoughts here. I've gone ahead and added
some of my thoughts inline.

On Jan 10, 2008 11:36 PM, Harrison - Schaaffe <peter.harrison at bigfoot.com>
wrote:

>
> It's good to hear servers can be donated.
>
> If ads can be used to donate a token sum to laptop.org, I think it should
> be considered, even if they are only partially effective. I agree that
> horizontal real estate can be an issue on the XO, but ads oriented
> horizontally on the page should be OK. A final decision on this can be
> delayed till after the union is completed. Now is really not the time.
>

If users don't mind, I don't either. I'm tending towards a "too little to
bother" end of the argument. Am curious to hear what others think...


> This does bring up creating a process going forward on making decisions
> that affect the community. There needs to be an arbitration process or else
> flame wars can easily erupt to the detriment of the group. Please take a
> look at this thread http://www.olpchelp.org/forums/showthread.php?t=54.
> Change will a part of constant debates and figuring out an easy and fair way
> to implement it, while also being nimble, will be really important. I think
> time should be spent to discuss such a process.
>

Agreed. This is a  wonderful idea, whether we adopt it verbatim or tweak the
general policy, having a formal way to account for and request change is
great.

>

> I agree vBulletin isn't open source and is therefore against many
> principles of the philosophy. I tried running forums on many different
> platforms, phpBB being one, but was left wanting. It was the management
> features of vBulletin that make it really attractive.
>
> Using the mass mailing feature of phpBB chokes at more than about 1000
> users. It just stops sending. I tried integration with packages like
> phplist, but it wasn't seamless.
>
> Modifications to phpBB require you to edit PHP template files directly in
> the OS. Updates in any forum software package are common, often overwriting
> PHP modifications.
>

For those just joining at home, the OLPC support forum currently uses phpBB
version 2 (there is a version 3) for its unique support of a script called
mail2forum. This was a neat design requirement in December, now after a good
month of use, we can evaluate how helpful it has proven to be. The
usefulness of mail2forum really ought to be a separate thread (trying to
keep things manageable!). We can assume it is not a deal breaker for the
time being. I would hold that there is not an immediate need change forum
packages, but if we can find a better way to peel an apple...

The phpBB group actually put together a feature comparison of version 3
with, among other, vbulletin:
http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/compare.php

OLPC has taken a fairly strong open source stance, and the Support-Gang
volunteers have (at least initially) echoed their interesting in keeping
with that license. Frankly, I want the growing XO hackers to be able to run
local forums if they want, and having the same (open, shareable) codebase
can help us facilitate that.

The way phpBB handles SPAM is another feature that needed improvement. I
> recently noticed that within the month of December 2006, spammers using
> various email addresses from cashette.com and mail.com were signing up,
> staying dormant and then spamming the forums a few months later.
>

This was before I installed the reCAPTCHA (thanks, Phil!) tech from the
great guys at the Internet Archive for the registration and the anonymous
post pages. Since then, we have had no SPAM since.

The CAPTCHA is actually part of the IA's program to digitize books (which is
why you transcribe two words, one they know for sure and one they don't!).
This pool of digitized books are then made accessible for free, and could
even be among the books included on the School Servers. The cleverness of
the design alone was worth adding it to the site. That it happens to
eliminate automated SPAM is just an awesome side benefit. :)


> Many popular Linux forums use vBulletin, possibly for these reasons.
> Linuxquestions.org and Ubuntuforums.org come to mind. Please get Redhat's
> written opinion on the matter, if it is really important to the group. I
> don't think it should be from RedHat's perspective given this precedence.
>

Redhat is not setting the precedence, OLPC is. The use case I mentioned
above (XO users setting up their own forum) is a very probably case. Our
mission is to support them technically, but also more generally to empower
them intellectually. This might be called the View Source Key Requirement.
Their ability to read, modify and deploy a version of software that we are
familiar with allows us to do both.

I will open up the admin console for olpchelp.org to anyone on this mailing
> list, based on a list of olpchelp.org usernames (max 5 to make it
> mangeable) provided by Michael Burns, as long as they promise not to change
> anything. Take a look and compare vBulletin to phpBB.
>

Thank you for the account, it will be useful to get a visual tour of
vBulletin as well as a technical one. Provided the same look-but-don't-break
policy, I'd be more than happy to give you an account to view the
olpc.osuosl.org forum for some of the tweaks I've done to the base software.



> I think the differences between the two sites can be overcome and a loose
> alliance isn't necessary. The full integration can be a quick reality.
>

Agreed. Once we get a plan of attack and decide what, where and how, the
actual pull together should be the easy part. :)

I think it is fair to say the Community Support Forum is tier 2 on the OLPC
support chain. Tier 1 is faq and related Support documentation on the wiki
and the Getting Started guide. Tier 3 is RT tickets and direct follow-up
with one of Adam Holt's growing army of Support Gang volunteers. With that
in mind, a strong stance toward i18n and scale should be considered. We have
hundreds of thousands of donors and users coming online everyday.
Especially for languages that the SG volunteers doesn't speak as readily,
providing the community tools to become self-sufficient is all the more
important. Pootle, Wiki translations and localized forum pages are a good
goal to set for countries we deploy to.

-- 
Michael Burns * Student
Open Source {Education} Lab
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