[Sugar-devel] Regarding Social Help project

[Frederick Grose]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 8:12 AM, Prasoon Shukla <prasoon92.iitr at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Sam,
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Sam Parkinson <sam.parkinson3 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I agree, Discourse looks amazing! Just a few ideas to chuck around:
>>
>>    -
>>
>>    I think it would be nice to try to make the forums automatically
>>    login when using sugar. This could be done by storing a uuid and a key on
>>    the computer. When you go to the forum it could automatically log you in
>>    with your sugar username and uuid (but let you use a different account if
>>    you wish). I think this would be useful since:
>>     - Users probably want help quickly and this would mean less hoops
>>       - Keeping a uuid or key of some sort would still allow
>>       communication with the user. This could be just a little script that used
>>       the upcoming notification system
>>
>> Yes, exactly. I was thinking of developing a python-ruby authentication
> bridge for discourse. We will need to get an account created though. This
> could be done the first time the user accesses social help. From then on
> however, we can save the session (much like a browser) instead of writing a
> script to log them in - so that we don't actually need to log them in -
> they'll already be logged in when they open the the help. I'll ask around
> the discourse community for the viability of this idea.
>
>>
>>    -
>>        -
>>
>>    Also is Discourse real time / do you instantly get the updates
>>    without having to refresh? That would be cool
>>
>> Yes. See this thread from a year ago (when discourse was still beta) :
> https://meta.discourse.org/t/real-time-updates/5151
>
>>
>>    -
>>
>> I am really interested in this and would love to help.
>>
> Why, thank you! I'll let you know if anything comes up :)
>
>>  Sam
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 3:30 AM, Prasoon Shukla <prasoon92.iitr at gmail.com
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> *Note : I sent this message once before but it was moderated because it
>>> was too large. So, I'm replacing the inline images with links to the
>>> images/links to pages. I hope that this will be enough of a reduction in
>>> size.*
>>>
>>> Hi.
>>>
>>> I talked to Walter on the IRC a few days ago regarding the social help
>>> project. We decided that I should explore FOSS forum software that is
>>> actively maintained for the social help project. So, I tried looking at
>>> some popular alternatives. The ones I found worth exploring are *phpBB*
>>> , *Discourse* and *bbPress. *I selected these specific forums because
>>> of their ease of use, functionality and the ease of getting a forum up and
>>> running.
>>>
>>> To summarize things, Discourse *appears* to be clearly ahead of the
>>> other two in all things except in terms of the ease-of-installation.
>>> However, it has became much easier to install discourse now than it was a
>>> few months ago. In fact, they now provide a docker image that can be used
>>> to install discourse with relative ease. That said, bbPress wins in terms
>>> of ease of installation with a WordPress like setup process. phpBB is easy
>>> just as easy. Nevertheless, I think that this is a minor disadvantage in
>>> the bigger scheme of things.
>>>
>>> Now, once installed, phpBB and bbPress are quite similar in
>>> functionality - so I'll just compare Discourse with phpBB instead of
>>> comparing with both.
>>>
>>>
>>>    -  phpBB is *very badly cluttered. *This, I think, is especially bad
>>>    when we're talking of getting children to use this software.  A single line
>>>    posted by a user is presented together with a whole bunch of useless
>>>    information :
>>>
>>> See http://picpaste.com/pics/forums1.1394467977.png
>>> That's one single line of information with quite a lot of clutter.
>>> The topics page is even more cluttered. See this popular phpBB forum:
>>> http://forums.gentoo.org/
>>>
>>> Now I know that with years of use, most of have gotten used to tuning
>>> out the uninformative parts but that won't be the case with children.
>>> Discourse does much better at this. See a sample discussion here:
>>> http://discuss.atom.io/t/custom-atom-icon-with-packages/2341
>>> That in itself is good enough reason to use Discourse. But, I'll point
>>> out few more.
>>>
>>>
>>>    - The one time registration is much *much* simpler in Discourse.
>>>    Just take a look at this:
>>>    - *phpBB*  :
>>>       http://forums.gentoo.org/profile.php?mode=register&agreed=true
>>>       - *Discourse*: http://picpaste.com/pics/forums4.1394468652.png
>>>
>>> Of course, we'll need to modify core Discourse according to our needs as
>>> well. But in any case, the registration will be much easier with Discourse.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>    - Making an actual post is much more difficult in phpBB. Again, this
>>>    is because of too much unnecessary information - dealing with tags, bunch
>>>    of miscellaneous options at the end and posting permissions. This causes
>>>    much grief when your long written post just refuses to go through.
>>>    Discourse is simpler. See this:
>>>    http://picpaste.com/pics/forums5.1394468781.png
>>>
>>>
>>> Aside from these three very fundamental things, there are few other good
>>> parts:
>>>
>>>
>>>    1. No arbitrary page breaks, which I think is quite nice. Often I'll
>>>    be immersed in reading a thread and the page just abruptly ends, which I
>>>    quite dislike.
>>>    2.  A great reply system - where you don't have to strain yourself
>>>    to read that 6 level deep nested comment. More reading by Jeff Atwood here:
>>>    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/12/web-discussions-flat-by-design.html
>>>    3. Active development ongoing so we're likely to see some great
>>>    upgrades in the coming out in the near future.
>>>
>>> So, I'll vote for discourse.
>>>
>>> Anyway, if we're willing to discuss proprietary options, then Moot (
>>> https://moot.it/) seems *really *nice. But then again, it's not open.
>>> However, Moot does provide both free and non-free options with a very easy
>>> setup. So ...
>>> You can explore Moot here: https://moot.it/prasoon2211/ (it's my
>>> personal forum).
>>>
>>> Anyway, that's my take on the social help feature. Comments are welcome.
>>>
>>> Prasoon Shukla
>>>
>>> PS: While proofreading this, I realized that this post reads like an
>>> advertisement for Discourse.
>>> Oh well.
>>>
>>
There is a Sugar Network,
http://network.sugarlabs.org/context?page=1

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Network

that can provide social help and other services.

It would be good to consider how any new social help development could
join, integrate with, or improve this ecosystem.

       --Fred
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