Chat plugin activated, and adding more site categories

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Following the discussion in Synchronous discussion channel for compiler contributors , I’ve activated the chat functionality on this site, with one new channel ( Chat #General ). Join in and experiment with it, and give feedback on this thread!

We’ve also not refreshed the site categories here for some time. Back in about 2019, we experimented with a private maintainers category, but others are possible:

  • Discourse has RSS/Atom auto-posting support. We can add the OCaml Changelog to this, which seems like a good place to make that more visible. I propose a new category “ChangeLog” for this (other names welcome).
  • I’m also knocking up a script to do weekly reports from the opam repository, which was originally for my own use, but I could make this public. Would others be interested in a weekly digest post here about “new and updated packages”?
  • Any other categories you’d like to see? I can’t see an easy way to bridge GitHub discussions with this forum, unfortunately, but please do poke around the Discourse docs and see if you can find something.
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Synchronous discussion channel for compiler contributors
Announcing the OCaml Zulip at ocaml.zulipchat.com
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Hello,

First impression with chat isn’t great on my side:

  • Threads can be named but appear on a special side and you can only see threads you are a part of
  • Chat cannot be linked and viewed without a discourse account. One can quote from a chat, but not link to the chat, so it can only be done without context.
  • Interface is pretty cramed with large margins, I’m having difficulties imaging it scaling
  • Threads cannot be created “after the fact”, messages cannot be moved.

So, in conclusion, I don’t see much of an improvement over discord, and I don’t think it helps centralising discussions much :confused:

1 Like
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You need to think about this chat feature in its context as an add-on to a sophisticated forum.

If you have a long-form conversation, then the whole point is to convert that into a forum post and not leave it as a sequence of chat messages.

The chat should be used for short-term, low-latency conversations that ‘disappear’ or get promoted to forum posts.

5 Likes
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I like this, and the name seems fine!

I’m also knocking up a script to do weekly reports from the opam repository, which was originally for my own use, but I could make this public. Would others be interested in a weekly digest post here about “new and updated packages”?

Yes!

I can’t see an easy way to bridge GitHub discussions with this forum, unfortunately, but please do poke around the Discourse docs and see if you can find something.

You could automatically post about the existence of new discussions though?