Infrastructure suggestions, part1: the web site

While contemplating the fork-that-didn't happen, I spent some time thinking about how I'd set things up to avoid some of the problems I've run into supporting deviation. The web site is a major issue, because things are hard to find for a variety of reasons. So...

The forum is the only part of the site that can be edited by almost all users. As such, it's where conversations happen, where tutorials wind up getting stored (if on the site at all - and if not, they become nearly impossible to find), and where things for download get stored. Because it's trying to serve multiple ends, it does most of them poorly. Fixing that is the priority.

Conversations should mostly be ephemeral. Not completely - it's good to be able to find where other people had a problem and got it fixed. But most of them would be better off gone after a while. The "recent topics" tab does that fairly well. But we want tutorials and file storage to be more permanent. This the forum does poorly, because things tend to get lost in the conversational noise. As far as I can tell, the search facility isn't much help for this. The results often don't change as I change setting in it. And there's no thread search, which really hurts given the length of some of the threads. I've generally given up on it, and just past the deviationtx forum url (or possibly a thread or subforum) into a google search box after my search terms. Using that, I can find model files and the like in the forum!

Ok, suggestions: most of the content on the web site should be in a wiki or other user-editable format. Preferably one that keeps history so we can back things out. Much of the initial content should come from the current web site and the existing wikis. Users should be encouraged to put tutorials and the like on it, so that the community can continue to maintain them even if the author has lost interest, which isn't true of the forum or blog posts. This should replace the tutorial section of the forums. It should also include the FAQ.

Some of the content - like the downloads page - is both important and not likely to need changes all that often. I think we want a set of "vetted" users that we trust with more power than most. Everything on the web site that's not directly editable should be in a repository set up for continuous deployment. Those would be editable by these vetted users, with others being able to create pull requests as suggestions.

I'm not sure how to deal with model files and icons. Well, no, I have the ideal solution - we need a library of them curated by somebody with library training. Just not sure who. My retired librarian friend wasn't interested. I think for now, extending the "supported models" database to include links to the model files and icons and moving it into the wiki might be worth testing.

The menu should be organized around what the user is trying to do. So the "Home" link stays, but after that we might have links for "Get started", "Get help", "Contribute code", and "Contribute other things". "Get started" belongs in the menu because it's a critical part of getting people to use deviation. Experienced users won't use it, but almost everyone will use it at least once. We do have such a page, but it needs more depth. Or at least links to more depth. There are a number of tutorials/intros/etc. to mixer programming, maybe a link to one of those rather than the manual. Yes, a link to the manual is important, but it's more a reference than tutorials, and is liable to confuse people. "Get help" needs a better name, but includes links to the forum, more advanced programming, hardware mod links (and we need pages for the supported 7E and 6S extra mods) other things one commonly find in tutorials,and bug reporting.Contributing should have instructions on how to contribute - a tutorial on using the repo hosting service and pointers to intros on those. Might also have links to bug reporting! And so on. Finally, the template might include a second set of menus of important shortcuts for people who already know their way around. Better yet, let them configure it as part of their profile.

The Links & Articles links should go away. IIUC, one is just pages that don't fit anywhere else, and the other is pages that aren't on the web site. I think this is reaching for an important distinction, but doesn't quite make it. The distinction should be between things the community can (and hopefully does) maintain, and things that are beyond our control so may well not be fixed except by unlinking even if the problem is recognized. As noted, the former should be organized better, and the latter should be linked to in places where people are looking for those resources and might need more than the ones we provide.

The "Bug Tracker" link should go away. Having done triage on the bug tracker for the last six months or so, I'd rather bug reports be restricted to people we've vetted. Other users should report bugs on the forums, where the community can triage them. Once that's been done, someone with privs can submit an appropriately triaged bug report if it's needed. Instructions on how to triage might go on the "Contributing" pages.

The forum - I'm not sure how much good having subforums does once much of the rest of it is gone given the level of traffic we have. Especially with a good search facility, which is a must.

Finally, the home page is interesting. It's critical in that it's the first thing most users will see, so needs to sell them on the software. The one we have is ok. Maybe more emphasis on the power you get and the advantages over RTF and proprietary transmitters, but right now I'd say its' the strong point of the site.

PhracturedBlue wrote: One of the things that will be very hard to address is the search capabilities. Kunena does not appear to support a 'search this thread' capability, and as I mentioned previously, I'm not interested in changing the forum software. Moving data to the Wiki may alleviate this to some extent, but you may be stuck with Google for fine-grained searching.

Does this forum SW not allow a embedded google search bar? With that you could make it an advanced search with the site ( www.deviationtx.com ) already pointed out...

You may well be right - this community may be to small for the wiki to work really well. On the other hand, if it doesn't get much work, we haven't really changed things much by going to a wiki. We could encourage that by turning off posting to the tutorials section with a note that such should go to the wiki instead. Given that it's my idea, I'm willing to go through that section and move anything I think is still relevant as prep work for removing it.

I don't think the bug tracker should go away. Not without a partial replacement. I expect a lot of reports will never turn into bugs - either a user error, a problem with the users transmitter, or something that gets fixed while the user is engaged. But having a place to store known bugs (& suggestions) once they've been vetted is important.

For the search issue - how about we just make the forum search go away, and add a site search that uses the google search facilities? if things start moving out of the forum, that'll be more important.

The builds & build system are the subject of part 2.

Cereal_Killer wrote: ...

Does this forum SW not allow a embedded google search bar? With that you could make it an advanced search with the site ( www.deviationtx.com ) already pointed out...

Lots of sites do that and it's a nice way to improve things a bit.

Only takes a line or two of code.