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Posted to dev@openoffice.apache.org by TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> on 2011/07/31 15:49:20 UTC
An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Hello all,
My name is Terry Ellison and I am the lead community administrator and
maintainer for the OOo user forums (user.services.openoffice.org). I
was one of the core of community members which set up the forums in
October 2007, and before that I was active on the alternative (English)
oooforums.org. I am also a moderator on the VirtualBox.org forums and a
member of the QA team on phpBB (the forum application used to implement
the forums). My contributions to the OOo development itself are small
(I fixed a couple of memory leaks in the Basic RTS and understand the
code base of this subsystem). I had 30 years service with EDS (now part
of HP) rising through system development, technical mangement to
eventually operations CTO for Europe, before retiring early because of
illness (ME/CFS which I am slowly recovering from)
What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the
four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums
to the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian,
Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000
registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We
have also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but
by guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo
problems and the search engines which index the forum content. We get
roughly 200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images,
CSS, etc. add ~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
I and the rest of the OOo community activists believe that this content
and facility provides a valuable service to the wider OOo user
community, so we are keen to see its continuity and seamless transfer to
part of the Apache.org project.
The technical aspects are a little detailed, but this was my
professional area, so these aren't a risk if I am allowed to support
this. I'll leave these to further discussion and the appropriate cwiki
page. The main issues seem to be of approvals, support, infrastructure
resource allocation, since the technology set used by the forums is
phpBB + OOo-specific customisation, and this is a new service for the
current infrastructure team even though it runs on a standard LAMP stack.
The purpose of the note is to raise this issue with the wider community
and to provide a vehicle for discussing any related queries.
Regards
Terry Ellison
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Terry Ellison <Te...@ellisons.org.uk>.
> Welcome. We have had some discussion about the user forums already, but it was over a month ago.
Yes, I know, I was tracking it, but at the time Oracle hadn't confirmed
the novation of OOo and the Hamburg team that I was working with were
totalling in the dark -- which given subsequent events isn't surprising
-- and suggested that I wait until the situation was formalised.
> We have areas on the Community Wiki for planning transition. [1] [2]
>
> [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Site-PPMC-Plan
> [2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Transition+Planning
>
> Please create a page on the wiki under "Transition Planning" with these and further details. We'll then engage Infrastructure and get forward traction on finding the home for user.services.openoffice.org.
That's what I plan to do. If you look at my user page on the (old) OOo
wiki, you'll see that I am used to working this way.
Regards
Terry
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Dave Fisher <da...@comcast.net>.
Hi Terry,
Welcome. We have had some discussion about the user forums already, but it was over a month ago. We have areas on the Community Wiki for planning transition. [1] [2]
[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Site-PPMC-Plan
[2] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Transition+Planning
Please create a page on the wiki under "Transition Planning" with these and further details. We'll then engage Infrastructure and get forward traction on finding the home for user.services.openoffice.org.
Regards,
Dave
On Jul 31, 2011, at 6:49 AM, TerryE wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> My name is Terry Ellison and I am the lead community administrator and maintainer for the OOo user forums (user.services.openoffice.org). I was one of the core of community members which set up the forums in October 2007, and before that I was active on the alternative (English) oooforums.org. I am also a moderator on the VirtualBox.org forums and a member of the QA team on phpBB (the forum application used to implement the forums). My contributions to the OOo development itself are small (I fixed a couple of memory leaks in the Basic RTS and understand the code base of this subsystem). I had 30 years service with EDS (now part of HP) rising through system development, technical mangement to eventually operations CTO for Europe, before retiring early because of illness (ME/CFS which I am slowly recovering from)
>
> What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums to the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000 registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We have also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
>
> However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but by guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo problems and the search engines which index the forum content. We get roughly 200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images, CSS, etc. add ~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
>
> I and the rest of the OOo community activists believe that this content and facility provides a valuable service to the wider OOo user community, so we are keen to see its continuity and seamless transfer to part of the Apache.org project.
>
> The technical aspects are a little detailed, but this was my professional area, so these aren't a risk if I am allowed to support this. I'll leave these to further discussion and the appropriate cwiki page. The main issues seem to be of approvals, support, infrastructure resource allocation, since the technology set used by the forums is phpBB + OOo-specific customisation, and this is a new service for the current infrastructure team even though it runs on a standard LAMP stack.
>
> The purpose of the note is to raise this issue with the wider community and to provide a vehicle for discussing any related queries.
>
> Regards
> Terry Ellison
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Rob Weir <ap...@robweir.com>.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<de...@acm.org> wrote:
> ooo-dev is moderated and has moderators?
>
> Who are the moderators, pray tell?
>
I am one, for example. If an email is posted from an address that is
not subscribed the list, and is not an alias of a committer subscribed
to the list, then it gets sent to the moderators for approval. Each
day we get 3 or 4 emails like this. We also get the occasional notes
offering cheap supplies of generic viagra. We reject those.
-Rob
> - Dennis
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rob Weir [mailto:apache@robweir.com]
> Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 12:05
> To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Subject: Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
>
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 9:49 AM, TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>
> Hi Terry -- Welcome to ooo-dev. Your note got caught in the
> moderation queue and was delayed. This typical happens when you post
> from an address other than the one you are subscribed with.
>
> [ ... ]
>
>
RE: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Gavin McDonald <ga...@16degrees.com.au>.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org]
> Sent: Monday, 1 August 2011 5:52 AM
> To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Cc: 'Rob Weir'
> Subject: RE: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User
> Forums
>
> ooo-dev is moderated and has moderators?
>
> Who are the moderators, pray tell?
What does 'pray tell' mean?
Sounds like you are hacked off for not knowing who regulates the spam from
coming in to the mailing lists.
That is all a moderator does here, has no relation to a forum moderation duties
whatsoever.
That said, you are one of the busiest names around here and so a good candidate
for an extra moderator. Currently there are three (who randomly stuck their hands
in the air to be moderators at the formation of the lists). Three is a good figure and
four is not over the top for a list of this traffic.
Let me know if you'd like to help in this glamorous position and filter through the
genuine queries from the medical treatments and I'll make it so.
Gav...
>
> - Dennis
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rob Weir [mailto:apache@robweir.com]
> Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 12:05
> To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
> Subject: Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User
> Forums
>
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 9:49 AM, TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
>
> Hi Terry -- Welcome to ooo-dev. Your note got caught in the
> moderation queue and was delayed. This typical happens when you post
> from an address other than the one you are subscribed with.
>
> [ ... ]
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk>.
On 31/07/11 20:51, Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> ooo-dev is moderated and has moderators?
>
> Who are the moderators, pray tell?
>
> - Dennis
>
Dennis there are nine forums, one per major language, though we support
variant languages such as EN-US and ES-AR. (Most OOo can't speak
English, BTW). All have been running for a lot longer than ooo-dev and
have long established procedures. Yes they have both moderators and
administrators as wide as a wider group known as the "Community of
Volunteers" or just Volunteers for short. All are actively policed.
The admins and moderators are consensus appointments by the mods, admin
and more importantly the Volunteers.
In the case of the EN forum, the moderators are:
* Hagar de l'Est
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=62&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(17,882 posts)
* acknak
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=67&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(11,539 posts)
* Villeroy
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=107&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(10,921 posts)
* TheGurkha
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=4040&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(6,135 posts)
* DrewJensen
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=2&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(1,607 posts)
* foxcole
<http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/adm/index.php?i=users&action=edit&u=86&sid=b1bad2621c120d0cf6e0c123e0174f30>
(1,507 posts)
Forgive my if I don't list off them moderators for the other 8 forums,
but you can register for any forum and its member lists / group. Just
remember to set the language to English first or you'll get lost. :-)
Regards Terry
RE: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by "Dennis E. Hamilton" <de...@acm.org>.
ooo-dev is moderated and has moderators?
Who are the moderators, pray tell?
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Weir [mailto:apache@robweir.com]
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 12:05
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 9:49 AM, TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
Hi Terry -- Welcome to ooo-dev. Your note got caught in the
moderation queue and was delayed. This typical happens when you post
from an address other than the one you are subscribed with.
[ ... ]
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by C <sm...@gmail.com>.
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 01:01, TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> wrote:
>> How do the User Forum and MediaWiki handle webpage templates? How many are
>> used?
> As far as the wiki goes, this template has been more heavily customised
> again using standard MediaWiki hooks and facilities. Switching logos and
> banners would be reasonably straight forward, but alas the guys that did the
> bulk of the content management are history.
The Wiki skin is basically a modified default Monobook Media Wiki
skin... other than some CSS wizardry, there is little else that has
been changed. The majority of the work on the CSS was done by IvanM,
JZA, and myself. I haven't spotted IvanM yet, but JZA and I have
shown up here once or twice.
>> (3) Legal - IP, Copyright and Licensing
>> We will need to make sure that we have clear documentation of the
>> copyright and license for the content on the wiki and user forums. We'll
>> need to make sure that the Migration does not infringe on anyone's copyright
>> and/or inadvertently change any licenses. If we are clear about what we are
>> planning for these sites on an openoffice.org domain then it *might* be
>> possible to take everything.
>
> The forum content was all under the Sun then Oracle terms which roughly
> mirror CCA but with OOo retaining full rights to use. All bar a few dozen
> of the wiki pages likewise. But the lawyers will know doubt find reasons to
> charge their fees :-)
The Wiki was generally under the Sun and the Oracle TOU. Some
segments of the Wiki are under explicit licensing - PDL and/or CC-By -
where this is the case (for example in the Documentation Project
subpages), this is clearly noted in the specific footer.
Clayton
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk>.
On 31/07/11 23:20, Dave Fisher wrote:
> <snip>
> Different categories of information will need to be gathered:
>
> (1) Infrastructure - which we are discussing now.
>
> (2) Branding.
> We will need to be co-ordinate branding between the user forums, wikis, openoffice.org website and the project website (and much else). One part of this is the overall framing of the content. It would be good to handle the Oracle to Apache rebranding of the sites with a simple set of choices while attempting to avoid "bike shedding". I could go and take screenshots of the two, but would prefer to understand how those templates are defined and then work to design those to plug together properly.
>
> How do the User Forum and MediaWiki handle webpage templates? How many are used?
The Forums are simple. All 9 language forums use a common code base
which includes a single style template which is supported by the phpBB
team. There are common header and footer templates within this which we
have customised for OOo. I imagine the move from Oracle to Apache.org
will be of similar complexity to that of Sun to Oracle unless the Apache
team require us to move from this phpBB "Prosilver" look and feel, then
it would involve a lot of work.
As far as the wiki goes, this template has been more heavily customised
again using standard MediaWiki hooks and facilities. Switching logos
and banners would be reasonably straight forward, but alas the guys that
did the bulk of the content management are history.
> (3) Legal - IP, Copyright and Licensing
> We will need to make sure that we have clear documentation of the copyright and license for the content on the wiki and user forums. We'll need to make sure that the Migration does not infringe on anyone's copyright and/or inadvertently change any licenses. If we are clear about what we are planning for these sites on an openoffice.org domain then it *might* be possible to take everything.
The forum content was all under the Sun then Oracle terms which roughly
mirror CCA but with OOo retaining full rights to use. All bar a few
dozen of the wiki pages likewise. But the lawyers will know doubt find
reasons to charge their fees :-)
Regards
Terry
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Dave Fisher <da...@comcast.net>.
On Jul 31, 2011, at 2:35 PM, TerryE wrote:
> Dave,
>
> Some specific replies on points
>>>> On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
>>>> patches as well?
>>> See http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
>> This is great information!
>>
> There was a supplementary point here. After 30 years in EDS, what you are asking for is in my DNA and this is how I work! :LoL:
>>> I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked likely to happen. The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and 11.338 uploaded files. These form a critical service to the end-user community. Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
>> Supporting a MediaWiki like supporting phpBB is something that can certainly be considered. What's required is that the Apache OOo community provide enough support to infrastructure so that the job can get done.
>>
>> Do you feel a MediaWiki transition is a larger or smaller project?
> This is something that I'll cover in depth on the specific migration planning wiki page, but the challenge here is that the cwiki markup grammer is different to that of mediawiki and largely a functional subset. Worse, mediawiki supports extensions to allow you to extend this. The OOo implementation currently uses *42* such extensions. One of these was custom-developed by the German OOo team. With over 10,000 pages of content, sentencing this lot and even if we establish a migration ruleset to map 90% of the non-conformities, we still looking at a MAJOR project.
>
> Setting up a mirror of the current system on a standard LAMP stack is a low risk low effort continuity alternative, until the project works out its medium term strategy. BTW, I have just spent the last few days setting up my own VM copy of the production wiki (standard Ubuntu 10.04-3 LTS LAMP over VirtualBox) so I know what's involved here.
+1 - That should take us very far towards getting support from infrastructure. The key will be for there to be several individuals who both enabled by documentation and have time to help Infrastructure support the stacks that we request.
Different categories of information will need to be gathered:
(1) Infrastructure - which we are discussing now.
(2) Branding.
We will need to be co-ordinate branding between the user forums, wikis, openoffice.org website and the project website (and much else). One part of this is the overall framing of the content. It would be good to handle the Oracle to Apache rebranding of the sites with a simple set of choices while attempting to avoid "bike shedding". I could go and take screenshots of the two, but would prefer to understand how those templates are defined and then work to design those to plug together properly.
How do the User Forum and MediaWiki handle webpage templates? How many are used?
(3) Legal - IP, Copyright and Licensing
We will need to make sure that we have clear documentation of the copyright and license for the content on the wiki and user forums. We'll need to make sure that the Migration does not infringe on anyone's copyright and/or inadvertently change any licenses. If we are clear about what we are planning for these sites on an openoffice.org domain then it *might* be possible to take everything.
Before we discuss this with legal we need to specific about what we plan along with questions that have a concrete example.
Regards,
Dave
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk>.
Dave,
Some specific replies on points
>>> On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
>>> patches as well?
>> See http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
> This is great information!
>
There was a supplementary point here. After 30 years in EDS, what you
are asking for is in my DNA and this is how I work! :LoL:
>> I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked likely to happen. The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and 11.338 uploaded files. These form a critical service to the end-user community. Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
> Supporting a MediaWiki like supporting phpBB is something that can certainly be considered. What's required is that the Apache OOo community provide enough support to infrastructure so that the job can get done.
>
> Do you feel a MediaWiki transition is a larger or smaller project?
This is something that I'll cover in depth on the specific migration
planning wiki page, but the challenge here is that the cwiki markup
grammer is different to that of mediawiki and largely a functional
subset. Worse, mediawiki supports extensions to allow you to extend
this. The OOo implementation currently uses *42* such extensions. One
of these was custom-developed by the German OOo team. With over 10,000
pages of content, sentencing this lot and even if we establish a
migration ruleset to map 90% of the non-conformities, we still looking
at a MAJOR project.
Setting up a mirror of the current system on a standard LAMP stack is a
low risk low effort continuity alternative, until the project works out
its medium term strategy. BTW, I have just spent the last few days
setting up my own VM copy of the production wiki (standard Ubuntu
10.04-3 LTS LAMP over VirtualBox) so I know what's involved here.
Regards
Terry
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Dave Fisher <da...@comcast.net>.
Hi Terry,
On Jul 31, 2011, at 1:52 PM, TerryE wrote:
> On 31/07/11 20:05, Rob Weir wrote:
<snip>
>>
>> But so far no one has stepped up to migrate the forums or start something new.
> Not quite correct. I have previously discussed my supporting the rehoming both the forums and the wiki on Apache infrastructure with you and other project members off DL
I think that you have now clearly stepped up, and before on this mailing list we were hearing information indirectly.
> Migrating this knowledge to another application which does not preserve logical data models (viz any other application) would be a project beyond the capability of this team.
So far, it seems.
>> On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
>> patches as well?
>
> See http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
This is great information!
>> Apache has a "menu" of services it makes available to projects,
>> including wikis, mailings lists, Subversion repositories, etc. If we
>> want to get something added to that "menu", like phpBB, then we need
>> volunteers to work with Apache Infrastructure to get it supported.
>> This would require a critical mass of admin volunteers able and
>> willing to support phpBB.
> I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked likely to happen. The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and 11.338 uploaded files. These form a critical service to the end-user community. Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
Supporting a MediaWiki like supporting phpBB is something that can certainly be considered. What's required is that the Apache OOo community provide enough support to infrastructure so that the job can get done.
Do you feel a MediaWiki transition is a larger or smaller project?
Regards,
Dave
>
> Regards
> Terry
>
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk>.
On 31/07/11 20:05, Rob Weir wrote:
>> What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the
>> four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums to
>> the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian,
>> Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000
>> registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We have
>> also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
>>
>> However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but by
>> guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo problems
>> and the search engines which index the forum content. We get roughly
>> 200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images, CSS, etc. add
>> ~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
My reason for providing this volumetrics is to put the forums' usage
into context: quite possibly higher than all of the Apache incubator
projects combined.
> Right. This was discussed on this list in the early days of the
> project. The typical Apache way to handle user support is via a user
> mailing list. But I think it was generally acknowledged that this
> would not be sufficient for Apache OpenOffice. The traffic would be
> very high and that in itself would deter both users from subscribing
> to ask questions as well as experts from subscribing to answer them.
> Forums handle that kind of usage pattern better.
>
> It was also brought up that we might want to try a specialized Q&A
> service, like StackExchange, for support. Systems like these have
> mechanisms for rating questions and answers, and earning points for
> giving good answers, etc. So there is an aspect of crowd moderation
> to it.
>
> But so far no one has stepped up to migrate the forums or start something new.
Not quite correct. I have previously discussed my supporting the
rehoming both the forums and the wiki on Apache infrastructure with you
and other project members off DL
Migrating this knowledge to another application which does not preserve
logical data models (viz any other application) would be a project
beyond the capability of this team.
> On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
> patches as well?
See
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:TerryE/phpBB3.0.7_Upgrade/Closed_Issues_and_Actions#Forum_Customisation
> Apache has a "menu" of services it makes available to projects,
> including wikis, mailings lists, Subversion repositories, etc. If we
> want to get something added to that "menu", like phpBB, then we need
> volunteers to work with Apache Infrastructure to get it supported.
> This would require a critical mass of admin volunteers able and
> willing to support phpBB.
I agree. The alternative to getting this support within Apache.org is
to discard the knowledge in 300,000 posts across the 9 forums. The user
community forums would probably explore alternatives if this looked
likely to happen. The OOo wiki contains 10,521 content pages and
11.338 uploaded files. These form a critical service to the end-user
community. Note that the cwiki markup format doesn't support many of
the MediaWiki specific markups in this content.
Regards
Terry
Re: An introduction and a discussion about the OpenOffice User Forums
Posted by Rob Weir <ap...@robweir.com>.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 9:49 AM, TerryE <oo...@ellisons.org.uk> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
Hi Terry -- Welcome to ooo-dev. Your note got caught in the
moderation queue and was delayed. This typical happens when you post
from an address other than the one you are subscribed with.
> My name is Terry Ellison and I am the lead community administrator and
> maintainer for the OOo user forums (user.services.openoffice.org). I was
> one of the core of community members which set up the forums in October
> 2007, and before that I was active on the alternative (English)
> oooforums.org. I am also a moderator on the VirtualBox.org forums and a
> member of the QA team on phpBB (the forum application used to implement the
> forums). My contributions to the OOo development itself are small (I fixed
> a couple of memory leaks in the Basic RTS and understand the code base of
> this subsystem). I had 30 years service with EDS (now part of HP) rising
> through system development, technical mangement to eventually operations CTO
> for Europe, before retiring early because of illness (ME/CFS which I am
> slowly recovering from)
>
The important thing here, I think, is contributions to the OOo
project. This comes in many forms, and contributions to user support
are just as critical as contributions to the source code.
> What I would like to discuss here is what we do with the forums. In the
> four years since their creation, we have added another 8 language forums to
> the original English one: French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian,
> Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Across all forums we have some 75,000
> registered members, who have created 300,000 posts on 78,000 topics. We have
> also gone through 5 phpBB version upgrades.
>
> However, the main use of the forums is not by the posting members, but by
> guest users who browse these topics to find answers to their OOo problems
> and the search engines which index the forum content. We get roughly
> 200,000 page requests / day (that is web pages -- the images, CSS, etc. add
> ~4 x in terms of Apache requests).
>
> I and the rest of the OOo community activists believe that this content and
> facility provides a valuable service to the wider OOo user community, so we
> are keen to see its continuity and seamless transfer to part of the
> Apache.org project.
>
Right. This was discussed on this list in the early days of the
project. The typical Apache way to handle user support is via a user
mailing list. But I think it was generally acknowledged that this
would not be sufficient for Apache OpenOffice. The traffic would be
very high and that in itself would deter both users from subscribing
to ask questions as well as experts from subscribing to answer them.
Forums handle that kind of usage pattern better.
It was also brought up that we might want to try a specialized Q&A
service, like StackExchange, for support. Systems like these have
mechanisms for rating questions and answers, and earning points for
giving good answers, etc. So there is an aspect of crowd moderation
to it.
But so far no one has stepped up to migrate the forums or start something new.
> The technical aspects are a little detailed, but this was my professional
> area, so these aren't a risk if I am allowed to support this. I'll leave
> these to further discussion and the appropriate cwiki page. The main issues
> seem to be of approvals, support, infrastructure resource allocation, since
> the technology set used by the forums is phpBB + OOo-specific customisation,
> and this is a new service for the current infrastructure team even though it
> runs on a standard LAMP stack.
>
On the customizations, are they purely UI, or do we have functional
patches as well?
> The purpose of the note is to raise this issue with the wider community and
> to provide a vehicle for discussing any related queries.
>
Apache has a "menu" of services it makes available to projects,
including wikis, mailings lists, Subversion repositories, etc. If we
want to get something added to that "menu", like phpBB, then we need
volunteers to work with Apache Infrastructure to get it supported.
This would require a critical mass of admin volunteers able and
willing to support phpBB.
Does anyone know, is there a good Apache-wide list that we could put
out a call to other projects, to see if any of them would benefit from
phpBB support as well, and especially if any of them have experienced
phpBB admins able to volunteer to help get phpBB supported at Apache?
> Regards
> Terry Ellison
>