Where have the language-specific communities gone?

Communication
1

Hi,

prior to switching to dicourse, there have been several language/county-specific mailinglists. Where are theses communities now? I can’t find them here in the forum.

2

Hi Hartmut,

All the language specific mailing list are now joined in discourse. Posting in english is prefered but we have a translation plugin so you can post on your own language an other community members will read it using their prefered language.

3

This discouraging. Not only because of English (why discuss country-specific stuff in a foreign language? What about thos not firm in English?), but also since the persons have disappeared. No chance to lean who is active in my country. Where to discuss country-specific topics like e.g. “vorübergehende Ust-Senkung wg. Corona”?

4

There is almost no country specific topic. Tryton is built to be a general purpose software so we always discuss features and problems all together to find a global solution.

5

By the way this has already been discussed: New VAT rates (#9423) · Issues · Tryton / Tryton · GitLab

6

Of course, one can abstract most topics to no longer be country specific.

But often it is quite a hurdle, if one must first explain the country-specific requirements (which exist) to foreigners. In a language/country-specific group I would expect more user knowing the requirements. In an English group I not only need to explain much much more, but also translate into English terms - which might have a different meaning.

Anyhow, I understand there is no interest in reviving country-specific discussions. This is very sad and discouraging.

7

You understand wrongly. We welcome any discussion about requirements.

8

Hi Hartmut,

welcome back, nice to see you again!

The move to discourse was discussed quite contrarily and indeed it is also one important reason for me to not participate more frequently in discussions. But nevertheless: I am not gone, but still here even if not that visible ;). I must say that even when I dislike discourse a lot I find still better to no more depend on google groups. That said there is still #tryton.de on IRC to talk on german. Perhaps see you there?

9

It’s a pitty that we lose some active members of the comunity.
Coudl you share the issues you have with discourse?

10

I think I did already extensively when the move away from mailing lists was discussed. I will try to summarize shortly the main problems coming to my mind:

  • Discourse is generally used as an online platform, other offline usage is practically impossible. As a consequence I am forced each time to be online and use a browser if I want to write something. That is indeed absolutely contrary to my email centered work style. Furthermore it may be kind of given in so said developed countries to have constant online access, but even there it is not a matter of course to be connected in trains etc… All this is a severe regression compared to true mailing lists.
  • The so said mailing list feature in discourse is one of the worst I have ever seen.
    • Email threading is broken
    • The format you get for reading is the raw message format of discourse which remembers something between html and markdown. This format requires some special science and training to be able to read something meaningful especially in long threaded conversations. I don’t know how it shall be possible to even answer properly by email (the feature was disabled on the Tryton discourse instance for probably good reasons).
  • The format you get via email violates important points of mailing list netiquette i.e.
    • top-down posting
    • html (or sort of) messages instead of plain text messages
  • This all boils down to the summary that email integration in discourse is not even a second class citizen but something it rather wants to avoid.
  • Next point the trust system
    Everyone should read about Discourse Trust Levels and make their own opinion.
    • Briefly: the trust given to users is handed over to the system instead of a dedicated and transparent moderation team.
    • The trust system is built on more or less random assumptions
      For example they say:

At Discourse, we believe reading is the most fundamental and healthy action in any community. If a new user is willing to spend a little time reading, they will quickly be promoted to the first trust level.

Unnessary to say that someone like me reading by email will never reach Trust Level 1 — Basic, because the system measurements are based on pure online activity. So discourse contradicts their own goals by their crooked implementation.

  • Intransparency of the system: The flagging and thus moderation of posts is made in a complete intransparent way. Once it happens you never know who was the responsible, if he was just in bad mood, if he had different interests in letting vanish a post. This is totally inadequate for an OpenSource community that wants to be accountable in every and each respect.

  • Big brother is watching you. I dislike fundamentally messages like “User Miller was not seen for a long time. Give him a welcome…” User tracking is simply evil, I even don’t know if it is compliant with GDPR and building a trust system on it is futile.

  • To summarize: The trust system in discourse gives me no trust at all, rather the contrary.

Those are just some main reasons coming actually to my mind. Discourse has severe deficiencies compared to true mailing list software. I don’t need a toy system with all kind of badges that give a wrong impression of the real competence of a user, I need a system to work efficiently. This is not discourse.

11

Probably I am simply too stupid to handle the discourse interface. When I want to read Filtros en Context in English how should I do that?

12

I’m not arguing about discourse, but I’m missing the language/country specific areas here.

@ced So my requirement/proposal is to offer language/country specific categories (or how ever this is done in discourse). I suggest starting with those which had a mailinglists. Even if theses categories might not be used at first, having them available this would be an offer for those demanding them (like me).

@yangoon Yeah, another start-up (with no money, but me responsible), another possible need for Tryton :wink: For me IRC is not a “serious” communication channel: Another program is required run, if you close it, you are cut of from communication - you need to use the web-archives to read/check for misses messages - and there you can not answer. Also #tryton.de seems to be quite silent (last time I checked).

13

Usually, when I have country-specific question, I am simply using native language (french here), and eventually with minimal english introduction. One example could be this French VAT declaration topic.

if you don’t speak french, you should have enough elements to know what it is about, and decide if you want to push the “translate” button or not on the post.

Yes. Here I am using a small awk script to restore proper thread support.

awk script 
BEGIN {
	hasReferences = 0
	topic = 0
	inHeader = 1
}

# Extract topic from Message-ID.
/^Message-ID: / {
	split($2, msgid, "/")
	topic = msgid[2]
}

# Mark if References header was found.
/^References: / {
	hasReferences = 1
}

# End of headers. If no previous References header, add a new one based on
# topic from Message-ID.
/^$/ {
	# only the first /^$/ marks the end of headers.
	if (inHeader == 1) {
		inHeader = 0

		# show References if not already showed and has a valid topic (Message-ID is optional)
		if (hasReferences == 0 && topic != 0) {
			hasReferences = 1
			printf "References: <topic/%d@discuss.tryton.org>", topic
			print
		}
	}
}

# Quote quotation.
/^\[quote=/,/\[\/quote]/ {
	print "> " $0
	next
}

# Remove value-less informations.
/^You are receiving this because you enabled mailing list mode\.$/ { next }
/^To unsubscribe from these emails, / { next }
/https:\/\/discuss\.tryton\.org\/email\/unsubscribe\// { next }

# Set footer correctly for mutt.
/^---$/ {
	print "-- "
	next
}

# Output all lines by default.
{
	print
}
1 Like
14

Thanks for sharing your thougths @yangoon!

Indeed those are some changes from the previous workflow and this are right because they added some benefits:

  • The interface is more user friendly for non techical users, which for me is an audience we should attract here.
  • Users pots can be edited to properly format code and fix typos. This makes the conversation easier
  • Users can write from mobile phones (as I’m doing right now.
  • We can create wiki pages and howtos and add discussions on them.

Because discourse is not a mailing list but a discussion forum. The mailing list feature is just an email for every post in the forum. Personally, I had the mailing list feature enabled since some days ago. Now I read the forum when I want and I just get notifications following my preferences.

For me it’s very good improvement to get a notification on the browser when I’m online and somebody replies to my threads.

15

It’s been a while since this thread was alive, but there was no answer to this, and to be honest, it’s not totally obvious how to use the built-in translation.

When the system detects that the text is not in English, it shows an additional icon
in the row of the Reply button, which is like a globe, to the left of the heart (Like) icon. That’s the “translation button”.

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