Meshroom: Gitter/Slack/Discord Chatroom?

[ChemicalXandco]

The Issues section is getting full of duplicate issues and issues asking for advice on settings and general techniques, which isn't very relevant to the software itself. I think it would be much easier if we offloaded all of the discussions that aren't related to bugs and feature requests/suggestions etc. to a discord server. This will make the Issues section more concise with the things that actually matter for the development of the software. I am well aware that there is already a Google Groups but this is basically just the same thing as this GitHub issues. (full of duplicate issues and issues asking for advice on settings and general techniques) And so doesn't do anything other than spreading the load. On this discord server, people would be able to give specific advice/help for any questions people have and help people verify that the problem they are experiencing is a bug or not if they are unsure. As Discord is instant messaging, the people who need guidance will be able to get answers to their questions much quicker then GitHub Issues or the Google Groups. The reason I am proposing Discord is that it is free, modern (shame on you, IRC) and supports code blocks, like GitHub and you can easily share files in the chatroom (photo datasets, screenshots, log files etc.). A server is free and easy to set up (discord hosts it btw). Even though it's primary focus is gaming, people use it for all kinds of things, especially open source projects. It is very widespread, 150,000,000 Users and it is all-around robust. You use it on the web app or download clients for Windows, MacOS and Linux. So I think a discord server is a necessity for this kind of project, where some Issues are very specific and so it doesn't make sense to put them in the GitHub Issues or Google groups as they are just making the actual bugs and feature requests etc. harder to keep track of. If you do decide to make such a setup, it would be good to point people who have things not to do with bugs, feature requests etc. to the discord before they turn to GH Issues/Google Groups. What are your opinions on this proposal?

[fake-name]

Discord is horrible.

If you must, use a plain old simple (HTML) forum system.

[andybak]

I second the bafflement about Discord. Chat has it's place but it's not
found to solve housekeeping issues with a forum or big tracker. Surely it
just spreads the problem wider and with less structure?

On Tue, 4 Sep 2018, 21:43 Connor Wolf, [e-mail] wrote:

Discord is horrible.

If you must, use a plain old simple (HTML) forum system.

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[ChemicalXandco]

@fake-name well that would be a solution, but I don't know how efficient that would be, personally, I find forums hard to get proper answers. Also, this and Google Groups are forums anyway so...

@andybak possibly, but the 'theory' is that: all the technical stuff is on the forums, well organised and categorized and all the nitty-picky stuff like "what does this slider do?" and "best settings for this scene I have?" are asked in some sort of instant messaging service, not necessarily discord but maybe Gitter or Slack if people prefer those.

What really annoys people is when they don't know enough about something to use it properly, and can't get the answers quick enough. Of course, they could just ask on GH Issues or Google Groups but that can take some time. Apparently, documentation is on its way - but most documentations are not concise and tend to be too general to know how to apply specifically or too specific to work all the time. In other words, the instant messaging will make people quickly ask relativity simple questions/advice and get the help to use it. This will make people use meshroom more often and use it to it's full potential because nobody wants to make 100s of threads asking different nitty picky questions. I know 3DFLow (Zephyr) has a discord server and even though they are only ~150 users, It is very active and helpful.

[fake-name]

If you're looking for a Q&A style thing, Discord is still a horrible option.

• It's completely unsearchable. Most of my issues are resolved by finding someone else asking the question, and seeing what they did. Discord is completely invisible to search tools.
• Discord does not work without javascript.
• Discord has no paid option. This means you are the product, and their only mechanism for profit is data-mining you.
• No one has a discord "server" aside from the actual discord company. You might have something akin to a subforum, but it's not a "server".

A stack-exchange-alike might be of some value, but discord is garbage.

[andybak]

It's not even a "get off my lawn" thing with new fangled SAAS apps vs old-school forums. I never fathomed why people found IRC any good for support. Same questions asked multiple times because finding old answers was too hard. People talking over each other because there's no threading. I've never really succeeded in getting good answers from any chat-based system. I think it's possible if you're prepared to - you know - hang out and chat - but usually when I want an answer being sociable is the furthest thing from my mind.

Having said that - I've seen Stack-style sites fall apart because people don't enforce the social conventions needed for them to work. You need someone to tidy up and edit and keep questions on track or it devolves into a "sort of forum but not quite". I think for niche topics and small communities there's just not enough people around to maintain things properly.

There's also a danger with having more than one system of any kind. There's already a mess of stuff in the Github issues that would be better in the Google groups. I think the separation should be "Actual bugs in the issue tracker. Questions/discussions in the forum" with polite messages closing down any issue that should really be a forum post.

Like this one. :-)

[ChemicalXandco]

Ok, so we think that discord/instant messaging service is not the answer, then what is? just look at #179, alicevision/AliceVision#500, alicevision/AliceVision#491 and https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alicevision/1CMyhsQZ0PI all asking the exact same thing. With these forums, sometimes they don't search before posting new issues. It's all well saying discord is bad and should not be used, so what do you propose to do? I agree with @andybak about separating google groups and GH issues, that would solve some of this. Surely it is better to ask same question over and over in chat then have 5 duplicates of the same question on GH or something? So the discussion continues... Maybe prompt people to search thoroughly before they post their issue? I mean I'm out of ideas really. I'm sure the devs will come up with something...

[zvrba]

The solution? Probably a FAQ. "Sensor not found in db" is a perfect fit for the FAQ. Issues that are answered in the FAQ should get closed immediately.

[ChemicalXandco]

There is a very old Issue (#19) that has 'FAQ to explain the common errors' but that was never done.

[fabiencastan]

Hi @ChemicalXandco,

Thanks a lot for making propositions and also for your answers to multiple questions. I don't know what would be the best setup for the support. We were discussing about creating a gitter, but that's probably too early for us to deal with that. The idea would be to do things progressively. So FAQ is obviously a good starting point and help is welcome!
We apologize if we can't answer all the questions, but we are a small team and we need to keep focus on the developments to make new releases.
We are reading them and we will publish a tutorial that should answer most of the questions and will come back to the more specific questions later.

Thanks for your help!

[slate0]

I would suggest the following options to help your team control the flood:

• start using standardized labels to mark issues ie: "things for faq", "troubleshooting tip", etc

• make it so that only primary devs have permission to assign tags (then you can separate developer accepted issues from user Q&A. There is a label filter, right?).

• You could also remove permissions for new issue creation, and direct users to another place if you find one.

• GitHub's Wiki looks too basic to fill the need (it would be cool if someone hacked it into a forum). But if you direct people to the wiki, you might at least get some random folks to contribute what they know to it. I would just create a basic skeleton of categories like "tutorials" "howto" "photo tips" "reference videos" Scratch that, it's such a basic wiki engine maybe just invite users to keep adding onto the main page like some giant billboard and later some contributor can curate it a bit.

• You could just create a new project and direct users to that ("See the 'FAQ Project' for Existing Answers or to Post a Question"). Basically, hack a new project's issue tracker into a forum.

• Having some sort of template for Questions/Bug Report issues would probably help as well ie: "what is your OS, version of Meshroom, etc..."