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Re: [Gimp-user] Discontinuation of mailing lists and moving to Discourse

Hi everyone!

I received 2 off-list emails. Please do not send me off-list emails. I am
exhausted 😩 and cannot do private support in addition to public support,
code development, news writing, website making and everything else in GIMP.
😛

This is even more true as I don't really see anything private/sensitive in
the 2 emails I received. Really no need to make them private, except for
making me work double (whereas as public emails, someone else could have
answered). I generally advise contributors to preserve themselves from
overworking by not answering to private messages.

Anyway, regarding unhappiness about the new platform, I will mainly answer
that there is not much we can do. We are heavily relying on GNOME
Infrastructure (which we thank for this) and they have their own reasons
(one of them is that mailing lists are apparently one of the elements in
their stack which prevent them from dropping Python 2; we can relate!). Cf.
the link in my original email.

Now we could always try to fight against the current and persuade GNOME
infrastructure team, but we made a small opinion tour among the current
core team and nobody really had particular love or use of our mailing
lists. Also we realize it's very low volume these days (barely a few
threads per month, counting all mailing lists together). Myself I barely
look at mailing lists every once in a while and make a random answer
sometimes. And there were several mailing lists I was not even subscribed
to (I did for the sake of this announcement). So that's probably why none
from the core team is really trying to fight this change.

There is one more thing to take into consideration: more infrastructure
means more work. I said it above, I am exhausted by this all. I was only
managing one of the mailing lists so far (the gimp-gui one, the most
recent) and still had to regularly handle spams. I am personally thankful
that this work goes to GNOME admins now. Moreover I would not try to find
alternative mailing list providers either. Now, same as hundreds of
third-party forums discuss GIMP out there, people are welcome to create
third-party mailing lists to discuss GIMP if that's really what you are
into. I won't be such a person; and apparently it looks like nobody else
from the core team is so far.

One last thing: I am aware that Discourse is not perfect. I also spent some
time today to try and understand how to efficiently transform it into a
mailing list equivalent.

For questions about only receiving emails for the "gimp" tag, I think that
you should not try to use the "Enable mailing list mode" option. Instead
just go to the "gimp" tag page (https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/gimp),
click the bell icon on the top-right and set to "Watching" mode. This way,
you will be notified of absolutely all messages for this tag. Then in your
"Emails" preferences, set "Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my
@username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched
categories, tags or topics" to "always". This should transform every
notification into emails, in other words you will receive an email for
every message added in the "gimp" tag. You can even directly reply to a
notification email from your mail client without going to Discourse.
At least, so far it worked for me (I tried today, and I only received
emails for the 2 messages which came in with the "gimp" tag, no other
emails). So it's probably the right setting.

Anyway please understand that it's really not about comparing the Discourse
and mailing list technologies. GIMP is not a discussion platform, we only
provide these channels on the side because it's a cool community tool, but
we cannot spend all our time managing these. This is why we need to go with
the flow of what GNOME is proposing (as long as it's not completely wrong;
e.g. if they had proposed to go for some walled garden proprietary network
for the main discussion channels, I would have questioned the choice). I am
not into gamification, infinite scrolls or such things either. Us accepting
this platform is not about us wanting these. It's really about having a
limited core team and nobody highly interested into maintaining complicated
infrastructure for a different system than what GNOME does. That's about it.

Also for the 2 people who sent private emails, forgive me for not answering
directly and privately to you. It's not against you, I just hope you will
understand I am trying to preserve my mental sanity here. Someone was even
apparently "shocked" that I used a gmail account. The reason is actually
exactly the same (avoiding private emails): historically I wanted to avoid
spreading my main email address too much (even though I now realize it was
a vain wish, I was young back then! 😜) so I created this account as a
trash email, maybe 15 years ago, and that's the address I historically used
to subscribe to mailing lists. I am still receiving uncountable numbers of
emails daily.
And now you'll understand why I am doing a single and hopefully last answer
on this topic. I'm just tired and don't want to paste the same email twice
(or more).

Actually sending private emails, you kind of made a counter-argument
against mailing lists where it is indeed quite common that people feel they
can just continue discussions in private. But there is a reason why it's
public: anyone can join in, help and contribute to the discussion. No need
to involve a single person only (forbidding others to help by going
private). In GIMP, we work in full transparency, with public
infrastructure. We don't want private discussions, and unfortunately as you
showed, this is often what some people believe they can afford to do with
emails. So you both shot your opinion in the foot by telling me that
mailing lists are better while deciding not to use these to tell me this. 🤣

So yes, bottom line: mailing lists will be gone. It's not a private
decision from anyone in GIMP team (I got notified today myself of the
end-of-month deadline), though clearly nobody fought against it either.
It's not really something we can or want to control so there is really no
need to give counter-arguments here. If you really wish to do so, you are
welcome to ask the GNOME Infrastructure team. If they back down from their
decision, we'll happily comply and keep the mailing lists.

Jehan
GIMP team


On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 10:00 PM Jehan Pagès <jehan marmottard gmail com>
wrote:


Hi!

On Mon, Oct 17, 2022 at 9:48 PM Rick Strong <rnstrong primus ca> wrote:


So if I want to ask a question about using GIMP, or respond to a
question,
how do I do it?



Well basically same as you always did, except that now it will be on one
of the Discourse instances, such as the pixls.us one or the GNOME one.
Instead of being subscribed to a mailing list, it's on Discourse (which is
basically a modern-time forum, as I see it), on which you'd have a
login/account. :-)

Jehan

Rick


-----Original Message-----
From: Jehan Pagès via gimp-user-list
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2022 12:38 PM
To: gimp-web-list ; gimp-developer ; GIMP User List ;
gimp-gui-list gnome org ; gegl-developer-list ; GIMP Docs
Subject: [Gimp-user] Discontinuation of mailing lists and moving to
Discourse

Hello everyone!

The GNOME Foundation has been moving all its discussions to a Discourse
forum, progressively:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2022-September/msg00018.html

We were informed today that they are on the last stage of this migration
and that all the mailing lists will be fully retired by the end of
October.
This implies also all of GIMP and GEGL mailing lists.

Instead, people wishing to discuss about GIMP are expected to use GNOME's
Discourse instance. In particular 2 tags were created for us:

* "gimp" tag for GIMP-related discussions:
https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/gimp
* "gegl" tag for GEGL-related discussions:
https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/gegl

We don't have as many tags as we used to have mailing lists, just these 2,
but since all our lists are quite low volume these days, I didn't think it
was worth asking, at least for now. GNOME admins confirmed that it would
not be a problem to add new tags in the future if we ever decided we
needed
more (e.g. having a "gimp-dev" tag or whatnot).

By the way, noteworthy information: GIMP has had already an official
presence on pixls.us Discourse: https://discuss.pixls.us/gimp/
We discussed among the team if it was worth having presence on both
pixls.us
and GNOME discourse and we came to the conclusion that the audience is
different, therefore it is interesting to stay on both communities. For
discussion with existing GNOME contributors, translators and various GNOME
users for instance, they might be already on the GNOME Discourse. On the
other hand, pixls.us is a much more specialized forum/community on
Photography in particular, and is also probably more platform-independent
too.

Last but not least, as I expect that some people might prefer interacting
by email, I tried to look up what are the possibilities. This thread
"Interacting with Discourse via email" is of interest:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/interacting-with-discourse-via-email/46

It didn't have the ability to create new threads easily, especially tagged
with the "gimp" keyword. Discourse has a way to create a topic on a
specific category but we couldn't find for tags, for instance you can send
an email to community @ discourse.gnome.org (note that it doesn't work
for
every category, e.g. it didn't work for infrastructure; I haven't tested
others). With Andrea Veri, GNOME Infrastructure admin, we came up with a
special email hook: any email with "[GIMP]" in the subject will be tagged
"gimp".
Nevertheless you need to have level 1 trust level for this to work. We
aren't sure exactly what it means other than having participated enough
(whatever "enough" is) to the Discourse first. 🤷

See:

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gimp-how-to-send-emails-to-discourse-tagged-for-gimp-forum/11535

So I guess, let's continue discussing there everyone! 🤗

Jehan
GIMP maintainer

--
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--
ZeMarmot open animation film
http://film.zemarmot.net
Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/ZeMarmot/
Patreon: https://patreon.com/zemarmot
Tipeee: https://www.tipeee.com/zemarmot




-- 
ZeMarmot open animation film
http://film.zemarmot.net
Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/ZeMarmot/
Patreon: https://patreon.com/zemarmot
Tipeee: https://www.tipeee.com/zemarmot
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