Hey,
tl;dr: questions about i3 will be answered on
https://www.reddit.com/r/i3wm/ instead
of https://faq.i3wm.org/ in the future.
In June 2012 we started hosting https://faq.i3wm.org/, with the intention
of letting the community answer questions about i3. It was great to see
this idea inviting so many different people with many different opinions,
and the resulting answers often positively surprised me.
While I always liked the community part of it, I never was particularly
happy with the software and operations part. Every upgrade of askbot
brought with it at least some small annoyances (and I don’t want to play
the blame game here, only explain why my experience was tiresome). For
example, with the django 1.8 release, one had to change the cache settings
<https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/pull/442> (I would have expected
compatibility, or at least a suggested/automated config file update). A new
release of a library dependency broke askbot installation
<https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/pull/446>. The askbot 0.9.0 release was
not installable
<https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/commit/f1f49fe4af14d8e904b454a96c71d4d1939d6223>
on
Debian-based systems. In conclusion, for every upgrade you’d need to plan a
couple of hours for identifying and possibly fixing these numerous small
issues. I prefer updates to be routine, boring and somewhat frequently.
Exactly the opposite was the case.
On every upgrade I looked around for possible replacement software and
ended up where I started: askbot seems to be the best around, and yet it
pains me to run it.
In addition to that, the spam problem got worse over time. We’ve recently
had to switch to pre-moderate all new questions. To this day, the
faq.i3wm.org RSS feed contains not-yet-moderated posts, i.e. mostly spam.
From an operations point of view, we’ve repeatedly run into cases where
something broke that only I could fix, but I have been busy with work or
other duties at that point, leaving a broken FAQ site for interested users
for hours.
Clearly, with regards to running faq.i3wm.org, we’d either need to double
down on doing it right, or not do it all. Given that doing it right means
spending significant time and resources on a better production setup
(higher fault tolerance) and better software (contributing a lot more to
askbot, or starting something custom), I’ve decided that we’re better off
not running faq.i3wm.org ourselves anymore. That way, all the time I’d need
to spend on these tedious tasks, I can spend on i3 itself, or rather
managing the many contributions that it receives these days.
We talked a bit about our options, and discussed both Stack Overflow and
reddit as possible replacements for faq.i3wm.org. Both places already,
without any doing of our own, receive questions about i3 (and answers, of
course). In the end, we decided to go with reddit because of its less rigid
guidelines on what can be discussed, i.e. we can have more off-topic
discussions that still relate to i3. Also, the threaded discussion model
promises to be a better fit for the style of discussions that we’re having
— we frequently saw people get irritated/feel limited by the strict Q&A
format that askbot and Stack Overflow have.
I’d like to thank the moderators of /r/i3wm for welcoming us to the /r/i3wm
subreddit that they’ve built.
So, what does this plan mean in practice? I’ll take the following steps to
make the transition as smooth as possible from our end:
• The coming Sunday (2015-12-20), I’ll turn faq.i3wm.org read-only with a
notice that /r/i3wm is the new place to ask questions. The FAQ link on
i3wm.org will also be changed to point to /r/i3wm.
• Afterwards, I’ll replace the askbot installation with a static copy of
the questions and answers, and finally stop running an askbot instance.
• That static, frozen copy will continue to be hosted on faq.i3wm.org
indefinitely
so that the existing knowledge is preserved and discoverable via web search
engines.
Thank you everyone for your contributions to faq.i3wm.org and your
understanding for the upcoming migration. I hope to see you all on /r/i3wm
soon.
--
Best regards,
Michael
