Great news everyone, José and the Elixir team have been so impressed with the forum that they have announced their intention of migrating the Elixir-Lang-Talk Google Group/Mailing list here
I am sure you will agree this is fantastic news, and to reflect our new found status we have made some tweaks to the forum categories.
Firstly, we now have an Elixir News section. This is where all official Elixir News will be posted (by members of the Elixir lang team).
We have also added a much needed Elixir Questions section and the separate ‘Books’ and ‘Videos’ sections have been merged into the Learning Elixir section. Some of the more specialised sections have gone too and for these topics we aim to use tags instead.
As always we will continue to listen to your feedback, so please let us know what you think after living with these changes for a while. With your help we are sure the forum (and Elixir!) will go from strength to strength!
We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank @josevalim and the team for placing so much faith and trust in us - we will not let you down!
Finally, we’d like thank all of our members and moderators for their help with everything, and of course to send a very warm welcome to our friends coming over from ELT - it’s great to have you here and if you need help with anything please just let us know. In the meantime, here are some threads to get you going:
And here’s our list of other popular threads you might want to look at.
###Updates
The off-topic ‘Lounge’ section is now added to all new user’s mute lists by default. If you want to add it to your own mute list please do so via your control panel, under Categories > Muted. Please also see this post for more info.
You can now email in to create a thread. Simply send an email to section-name@elixirforum.com from the email address associated with your account. See this post for more info.
Following feedback on the design, we have removed: 22px in between the post text and post controls, a further 3px in-between each post and 14px from above the thread title (which shouldn’t have been there to begin with). If you still want something as condensed as the ELT Google Group, then we can offer you our mobile view. Click the following links to turn it on (then hit refresh), and here to turn it off. Alternatively, there is a condensed user-style you can use in your browser here.
Great news! I’d like to congratulate everyone on the team for taking the responsibility and being dedicated in offering something to the Elixir community. Being “behind the curtain” I can assure you that the staff is very determined to make this an excellent place for every Elixir user
Also I’d like to congratulate the community for pretty much being one of the best (if not the best) community I’ve ever seen for anything. It’s a great pleasure to be part of it, specially since Elixir is so young and will probably become a big player in the development and programming scene in a couple of years
I was one of the folks resistant to non-ML forum, but I think this forum is going to be a great asset for the community. elixir-lang-talk was outgrowing its medium and the signal to noise was hard to follow for the things you cared about. This new format should be great and with ML-like features for the folks who like the old format it should be a win on all fronts. Great work!
I, like @michalmuskala, am dubious. I’m certainly willing to give it a try. Already this morning I have had a two flags (not necessarily red, but yellow perhaps) arise:
Information density. While the web interface is shiny, the information-to-space ratio is significantly lower than the ML, initially, at least, requiring greater effort to ingest the same amount of info.
Noise-to-signal ratio within relevant topics. Perhaps it’s merely the few topics I started perusing first, but I’ve seen a greater degree of non-value-add posts, exacerbating the issue from 1. (“Non-value-add” posts is the least a-hole-ish way I know to phrase it before my coffee sinks in. Frivolous and/or off-topic are not necessarily appropriate or have the wrong connotation since some have been on-topic but simply don’t further the discussion or have anything to add.)
I commit to trying the forum, both in its web and ML forms. If I see these issues worsening, I will say so.
We are in the process of enabling new topics via email (we just need to determine which sections we want to enable this for). Which sections do you suggest? Currently we are thinking of enabling this for #elixir-questions and #elixir-chat and #phoenix-forum. When enabled you will be able to create new threads simply by sending an email to the relevant email address, e.g., elixirquestions@elixirforumd.com from the email address associated with your account.
I’m glad you have raised this as this is something we have thought about, not just in terms of the forum but for the wider Elixir community via an external app. However since we have not started on that yet we could accommodate this on the forum via any of the following:
You could start a new thread for any announcements you want to make, and either add [ANN] in the subject heading and/or use an libraries announcement tag that we could create here.
We could create a libraries announcements thread where all such announcements could go, such as the ones we have for blog posts.
Currently with regards to blog posts, we are letting the community decide whether they want to create a dedicated thread, or to post it in the blog posts thread. The most notable difference apart from it being a dedicated thread, is that new threads also get tweeted via our Twitter account.
With that said we are actually completely open on this and will try to accommodate your needs best we can. What do you suggest is the best way forward? We could always create a feedback thread about this to see what everyone else thinks too.
José himself actually raised the topic of our ‘off-topic’ section and, we have just this minute, decided to make this opt-in only (so by default it will be added to everyone’s mute list).
We were using that section mainly for community-building topics as I find them to be popular and beneficial on other forums I admin. However I agree that since the ELT migration we need to do more to accommodate mailing-list users who really do not want to be bothered by such things.
With regards to your first point, you will find the forum is much easier to read being optimised for comfortable reading widths. Also the padding and encapsulation of posts is designed to give users a sense of ownership over their post, as well as prevent what they write being lost on a ‘wall of text’. Give it a go for a few days, I am sure you will grow to like the format
José himself actually raised the topic of our ‘off-topic’ section and, we
have just this minute, decided to make this opt-in only [image: ] (so by default it will be added to everyone’s mute list).
We were using that section mainly for community-building topics as I find
them to be popular and beneficial on other forums I admin. However I agree
that since the ELT migration we need to do more to accommodate mailing-list
users who really do not want to be bothered by such things.
Thank you for making this opt-in.
My personal experience with mailing lists is that community
in a professional context develops around the on-topic
contributions of participants towards the goals of sharing and
learning about the subject of the list.
You are very welcome Hassan. I had actually raised the topic myself when we learned of José’s intentions of the migration. He also brought it up himself a few days ago, and now, since you and others have mentioned it I am confident making it opt-in is the best way forward.
Just a note to say that the system will only automatically add the section to the mute-list of new users, so you will need to do it manually for your own account since you joined before the change was made.
We could run a query to add it to all user’s mute lists, but since most people have been fine with it (and enjoying the threads in that section) I figured this would have the least impact on users. Hope that’s ok.
I kind of browsed around a bit, and my first impression is that it looks quite promising! Don’t have anything substantial to add, but just wanted to give an initial Thanks to all that made this happen!
I’ll try out possibility to create new threads by emails.
When it comes to announcements I think the best place could be the Elixir Chat section as that seems to be the most general one. I also think that one thread per announcement is a much better choice, because it allows for easier discussion. Merging everything in just one thread could make it more difficult to follow.
Just a quick update to say that following feedback, we have removed:
22px between the post text and post controls
A further 3px from the bottom of each post (the post separator)
And 14px from above the thread title (which shouldn’t have been there to begin with)
Some of the other updates we’ve made due to your feedback, include:
The off-topic ‘Lounge’ section is now added to all new user’s mute lists by default. If you would like to add it to your own mute list please do so via your control panel, under Categories > Muted.
You can now email in to create a thread. Simply send an email to section-name@elixirforum.com from the email address associated with your account. See this post for a list of which sections this has been enabled for.
As always please keep your feedback coming and we’ll do our best to continue improving things
] (so by default it will be added to everyone’s mute list).
