[chef] Re: What if we killed the mailing list altogether...

[Roland Moriz < >]

Am 26.11.2014 um 19:06 schrieb Lamont Granquist 
<
 >:

> On Wed Nov 26 10:03:36 2014, Brad Knowles wrote:
>> On Nov 26, 2014, at 11:16 AM, Daniel DeLeo 
>> <
 >
>>  wrote:
>> 
>>> With this group, I think you’re gonna get a fair bit of survivor bias. 
>>> That said, I like email as an interface, and I think GGroups has decent 
>>> enough usability for a casual user (subscribe to a single thread, etc.).
>> 
>> I have friends who work at Google, including the former Gmail SRE.  While 
>> some of them use Google Apps For Your Domain, none of them use Google 
>> Groups, and they all recommend to avoid it.  It's unsupported.  Use at 
>> your own risk, and be aware that if/when it dies, they most likely will 
>> not even notice that it's gone, much less likely to be bringing it back.
>> 
>> IMO, RFC28 is misinformed and misguided.
> 
> 
> That still sounds like better support than we're giving to 
> lists.opscode.com.
> 

Yes!

After some years of abstinence I re-subscribed to this ML but didn’t get any 
response mail. Turns out you have at least two systems that send an 
lists.opscode.com hostname while EHLO-ing but only one has the right 
reverse-delegation. 

I guess you already lost many users who have a decent anti-spam mx 
configuration at this stage. I reported that through various channels 
(twitter, irc) but didn’t get an answer. 

E.g.
https://twitter.com/rmoriz/status/512553752482807808 ;
https://gist.github.com/rmoriz/b36849c90cb6c8c756c5



(Beware, lots of OT following:)

Despite the decision you are going to make, please consider providing more 
love to it. Many chef users I saw in the last couple of months don’t even 
know that there is a mailing list or irc channel (or couldn’t get a 
response/use out of it). IMHO chef has an adoption/community problem: If you 
know the ecosystem, the right cookbooks, the good parts: it’s brilliant!  If 
you don’t know what’s going on/where to look for best practices and support, 
you’re lost.

Take - for example- the strategy of the cheap hosting provider DigitalOcean - 
They provide lots of nice and easy tutorials that not only rank quite well in 
Google but also slightly tie the users to their (commodity/kvm-vps) services. 
When someone searches for „chef best practices“ or „chef tutorials“, he will 
find https://learn.getchef.com/ which is just a tutorial about chef, not ;
about solving real world problems (e.g., install and maintain a decent 
mailing list service in the cloud). 

You’ll only reach people that are already sold to chef (or forced to use it) 
but not the unbiased user that want’s to level up in DevOps. Such users 
usually have a „real world problem they need to solve“ and will find 
„copy+paste“ tutorials  or trending „how I solved everything in 5 minutes 
with docker, go and nodejs“ blogposts somewhere else and will never learn the 
benefits of chef and its toolchain.

IMHO this is an excellent occasion to write a real-word application-cookbook 
for a mailing list/discourse-combination and use it as an example in your 
tutorial/docs/blog ;)


best
Roland