From time to time things happen that affect many users. We’ll get a deluge of posts asking for help with such a thing, for example the current switch to the dbus broker implementation.
Having explanations for what’s going on split across many threads causes pretty varying degrees of context. Could we do something to funnel users into the same topic, e.g. with a temporary global banner, ideally without requiring too much moderation involvement?
Topics in discourse can get pinned. Issues in GitHub, too.
Also, if discussions happen in multiple topics on discourse, it’s easy for a moderator to move them together, etc.
I only see these features used very rarely though, and usually only for controversial stuff where moderation needs to step in. It’d be nice if we could have this for simply helpful content, too. Presumably this is in part because moderators have too much on their plates.
Can we do something about that?
Note that it’s not about the real NixOS.org moderators. Pinning on discourse can be done by roughly 20 people currently, if I read it right:
https://discourse.nixos.org/g/trust_level_4
There’s Breaking changes announcement for unstable ? If I understand you correctly that seems like a single thread we can send people to for explanations about breaking stuff? I keep it on tracking so I can loosely keep up with it from time to time…
The idea is to give drive-by users who aren’t going to look at a 131-reply topic a heads-up.
It’s also not exclusively about breaking changes, some changes are non-breaking - such as the one about the dbus broker, the new implementation is compatible.
You can just scroll to the bottom for the 3-ish most recent posts, no? All the old ones are irrelevant since you’ve either hit the issue yourself without reading the post, or you didn’t and you just moved on…
Well, it’s up to the package maintainers to decide whether they make an announcement or not. Technically some announcements may be helpful but aren’t about any breaking changes, but I guess one can just make a new topic in the development category for that and link people there from any help requests or bug reports we get.
I can, and would if I was on unstable. Hell, I’d set up an RSS feed for that thread.
New users on the other hand often don’t even know what a stability guarantee is. They don’t know that they should be looking at that thread, or that they should scroll to the bottom of it.
I wouldn’t mind that at all - I think a new announcements sub-category would be more suited, but in either case not burying these things in a thread would help massively with visibility, and as a result hopefully prevent the duplicate post situation we have currently.
This is kind of exactly what I’m advocating for; this would be much more transparent for novice users, already.
But it’s still not just modules, IMO threads like the recent Linux CVE thread would be appropriate in there too, for example. Many “situations” relevant to practically all users don’t end up in the current breaking changes thread.