Thanks for setting up the forum. Glad there’s a place for the Django community to collaborate and share with one another.
To increase community engagement and kind-of reward members for being active in the community and get feedback on badge progress directly from the forum (which in itself can help with engagement), I’d like to suggest that Discourse’s badges functionality be added to the forum.
freeCodeCamp’s forum has a great gamified feel to the forum thanks to the badges.
I’m not really looking for a gamified feel, so I think I’ll pass on that for now - this is more a supplant to the mailing lists as an easy forum for discussion. Thanks for the suggestion though!
GitHub Discussions didn’t exist when we created the forum, and it’s still quite feature-light regarding moderation tools and similar. The GitHub issues question has been looked at several times on the mailing list - I don’t have the link to hand, but you should be able to find it. I believe the summary there is that, again, the Issues feature does not have enough features to help us categorise, filter and label tickets effectively (labels just aren’t powerful enough), and we can’t import tickets and keep the numbers the same.
I completely agree with you. But in the other hand, I am pretty sure that the project will get more contributors with Github Issues and Discussions… all at the same place .
The forum offers much wider perspective than github, mentioned in this thread are events, projects, and so on. It’s also more colorful than email, and has features more focused on discussion than GitHub and tickets.
I was just lurking to find a user question I could answer but got into one that’s been resolved already. Should we have a system to mark topics as solved ?
I can, in general, see the value of that. In fact, my first reaction was “+1”. However, upon further reflection, I’m not sure it’s of particular value here, and so my current feeling is “-0”.
What I have observed over the past couple of months is that roughly half the questions being raised either:
Aren’t completely solved on the first iteration (getting past one problem just gets you to the next problem)
or
Are looking for more detailed information than just the quick fix, for which different people can add additional knowledge
or
Are looking for opinions or advice, in which case there rarely is one perfect answer. Different people working in different environments or under different conditions may have alternative answers that are also valid.
I normally start with just looking for questions that don’t currently have any replies. I know those haven’t been answered yet.
I have been looking for a place to find exchange with other people who use Django. This forum has been a pleasant experience so far. People are friendly and helpful. I prefer a forum like this one to mailing lists.
I checked out this forum after it was recommended in the Django Chat podcast by @wsvincent and @carltongibson. It looks like a great tool and is much more engaging than the django-users Google Group. I’m trying to learn Django and the process has been very interesting, challenging and frustrating at times. It would be great to somehow combine global and local. This forum has global scope / reach, but it would be great if I could connect with other Django users in Copenhagen, and in Denmark via the forum.
Gently nudging the moderators here - @andrewgodwin, @carltongibson, @MarkusH - I’d appreciate a thumbs up / thumbs down on an idea I’ve had.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to say that I’ve gained a reasonable amount of experience answering questions here over the past couple months.
I find myself regularly addressing about a half-dozen issues on a fairly consistent basis with virtually identical responses.
I was thinking about creating a thread for myself to serve as a library of “canned” answers that I can referenced in an answer as a starting point. I wouldn’t be looking to use these in isolation instead of a more (hopefully) thoughtful answer, but as a supplement to add to the specific issue being addressed.
My hesitation about this, and the reason why I wanted to run it past the moderators, it’s that I’m afraid it might come across as too “harsh” or “unfriendly” - or in general, not presenting the type of environment or “personality” that we’re working to establish here. (I can understand where this type of idea probably works better for a mailing list than for an online forum.)
I’m also in favour of pushing common general questions up into the docs FAQ’s - they’re a bit more discoverable there as not everyone checks out the forum.
I’m not so much talking about Django FAQs, or really, even Forum FAQs. More like reminders for things like enclosing posted code between lines of backticks, post the complete traceback for errors, don’t post images of code, etc, etc. So I would find myself referring to these for people who post questions consisting of little more than “X isn’t working, can someone help?”
(Notwithstanding the above, some of my typical responses are to resources outside the Django docs themselves such as Django Packages, Django Girls, and Awesome Django, all of which I would assume to be outside the realm of the official Django docs / FAQ.)
I think a nicely-worded locked thread could serve a good purpose here - a “how to author forum posts correctly” guide that we can give you edit access to, Ken, and then we could direct people to that?
Yea, I think that would work? (Well, I’m sure it would work, I guess the questioning on my part really just comes from a lack of sufficient knowledge as to what the mechanics of that would be.)
I’m willing to give it try if you are, assuming there’s little or no real effort on your part to set this up. (Honestly, this idea just came from me wanting to be even lazier, but I don’t want it at the expense of anyone else’s time.)
