[ros-users] answers.ros.org is the hell

Thu Feb 21 00:55:52 UTC 2013

Regarding Q&A:
Half a year ago we already discussed moving the ROS Q&A to StackExchange:
https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/?action=ListThreads&mailman_id=20&_forum_action=ForumMessageBrowse&thread_id=89236
The identified key advantages of AskBot have been: supporting open-source
software, own the data and no tedious and long verification / staging
process.

Personally, I like the StackExchange Q&As and they often seem to be a
serious and professional environment (e.g. moderation, quality of answers
etc.). But I do agree with sticking with AskBot due to the reasons
mentioned aboved. Nevertheless, I also agree AskBot does need serious
improvement, but for doing so ROS users need to get involved on
http://askbot.org/en/questions/ and start asking questions and bringing up
bugs.

One thing I really do miss on the Q&A style forums is a place for
discussing problems. It's great to ask specific questions people know
answers to, but finding the root cause of a new problem together with
others often turns into long lists of comments and/or answers, which do not
really solve the problem. For those situations I would prefer a forum.
Maybe we can find a way to bring both Q&A and forum together.

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:34 PM, Thibault Kruse <kruset at in.tum.de> wrote:

>  I also prefer answers to forum for the purpose of community driven
> support.
>
> However I am not too happy with the split-up of mailing lists. Searching
> Google for "ros mailing list" I get this:
>
> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo (This seems to be an reduced
> version of the next link)
> https://code.ros.org/gf/project/ros/mailman/ (Some lists seem to be dead,
> other still active, but no overview)
>
> And then looking for SIGs as well, I get to:
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning
> with google groups for most sigs, some of which never had any activity.
>
> The splitup makes it difficult to track activity and to search all
> archives, it also discourages users from following activity at a glance.
> A page listing those groups would help fetching the interest of people to
> hot topics.
>

I want to add my thoughts to this:
Our current ways of communicating and collaborating inside the ROS
community is - in my eyes - far from optimal. Even as someone, who has been
using ROS for a while now, it's sometime hard to get to the needed
information. I only can guess, how hard it is for someone new to ROS to get
up to speed nowadays (Thanksx Claudio for your feedback!).
Hence, I would love to see improvements here. Maybe upcoming ROSCON would
be a good place to discuss the main problems and start drafting solutions.

Regards,
Marcus

>
> I don't know though whether any great solution exists that combines the
> convenience of a mailing list with the cohesive properties of a forum.
> Googl groups have categories, so e.g. all ROS SIGs could communicate within
> the same google group but in different categories, not sure how well that
> works via email. Else there are online offerings such as
>
> http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com
> https://onlinegroups.net/,
> http://doc.tiki.org/Forum+and+Mailing+List+Synchronization (open source)
> https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed (opensource)
> and probably more.
>
> The last in the list looks like phpBB, but seems to be quite fast and
> written in D (whatever that is):
> see the dlang homepage for the forum: http://forum.dlang.org/
>
> If there was forums.ros.org that looked like the dlang page interms of
> getting an overview of current activity, I think that would be much better
> than our current mailman/Google-groups combination.
>
> cheers,
>   Thibault
>
>
> On 20.02.2013 10:54, William Woodall wrote:
>
> This is just my opinion, but I feel that QA systems like askbot and
> stackexchange are far superior for this type of community effort than a
> forum like phpbb.  Case in point, I almost never find the answer to my
> programming or system administration problems on a forum anymore, I instead
> find them on *.stackexchange.com.
>
>  I don't think it has to do with owning the data as much as the arduous
> process of getting a stackexchange instance.  The
> http://robotics.stackexchange.com/ has been working towards getting
> vetted for a long time now, perhaps ROS questions/answers could live there
> in the future, but having a dedicated ROS stackexchange is not feasible
> IMHO.
>
>  --
>
> On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 1:48 AM, Claudio Carbone <cla_carbone at tiscali.it>wrote:
>
>>  On 20/02/13 10:24, Claudio Carbone wrote:
>>
>> you can have subforums tailored to the specific argument (eg: building
>> which would cover build systems and package/stack structures;
>> transformations which would cover urdf models, joints, publishers;
>> Communications which would cover the ROS API, topics, services, etc...)
>>
>>
>>  I just remembered that the phpbb.org support forum (phpbb being one of
>> the widest spread free forum platforms) even has sub-sub-<...>-forums for
>> each and every plugin/modification where the creator of the plugin/mod can
>> answer users questions far from the main busy discussion areas keeping them
>> clean.
>>
>> I can't but think this would be much more useful to the community.
>>
>> Although I acknowledge that it's ultimately a management decision from WG
>> or whoever will guide ROS in the future.
>>
>>
>> Best regards
>> --
>>
>> *Eng. Claudio Carbone
>> Embedded Systems Design*
>>
>> P.IVA: 11688471009
>> tel: +393809017424
>> email: Send email
>>  <cla_carbone at tiscali.it>[image: My linkedin profile]<http://it.linkedin.com/in/embeddedesign/en>
>>
>> My Portfolio
>> [image: My portfolio site] <http://www.fusioncoredesign.it/>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ros-users mailing list
>> ros-users at code.ros.org
>> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>
>>
>
>
>  --
> William Woodall
> Willow Garage - Software Engineer
> wwoodall at willowgarage.com
>
>
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>
>
>
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-- 
Marcus Liebhardt
Control Engineer
Yujin Robot
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Phone: +82-70-46577073
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