User Forums

aethelwulffe wrote on Monday, August 01, 2011:

I lied.  I just can’t stay away….this is too important to many of the folks that depend on me.

Elegant solutions:

“Web forum must die”…

How about  “I request a feature that will allow me to avoid communication by anything other than e-mail subscriptions, and allow me to post to the same message base”.   I feel that is an approach that you could live with, despite the horror of knowing that someone else has different values and uses for the information and is accessing it in a different manner?

Otherwise unless you intend to gather up all your e-mails, rolls of papyrus etc… catalog and sort them all so that someone other than yourself can make sense of them…filter and sort the wandering topics and details of your conversations into meaningful discourses, then perhaps someone other than yourself can make use of them.  Have you noticed the following issues?:

1.  Documentation for the software stinks.  The best of it is some well written stuff that gives an overview of some work processes.  Of course it is not very extensive, all the screenshots are from ancient versions…oh, I could go on…  Believe it or not, Coders are not automatically “Developers”, and “Developers” are not automatically Coders.  Developers are systems engineers.  Systems require modularity and documentation in order to serve in the short term, and to evolve in the long term.  Coders of this software have not, and possibly could not document it’s use.  Code is not very useful unless it is used, and quality documentation addresses features and shortfalls of the program.  An integrated forum that is organized by a DEDICATED technical writer is invaluable in achieving a finished product.  Have you been publishing lately?  Perhaps you do not feel this is a real issue/concern at all, and we have no common ground for discussion.  Myself, I use mailing lists on my projects, but if I had to visit the forum to ensure that important topics of discussion, tutorials, codebits, and all the manifold elements of communicated ideas of the whole community (not just code writers) are used to advise developers, writers, base programers,  code/form contributors and all persons of different levels of involvement so that when someone looks at OpenEMR they don’t decide to use it because the price is so cheap that they can afford to spend a few thousand hours figuring it out.  (Cheap stereo…complete with stereo instructions).

2.  Using a forum does not mean that you have to visit it!  It is an elegant solution.  It avoids destroying the benefits of the forum to the community to accommodate your individual workflow with a select patch of isolated coders.

3.  The codebase and database are…organic.  At some point, the project will need a complete renovation.  This type of re-development needs widely accessible white papers, editable project markups, outlines and graphics for the backbone+modules association, lists of naming conventions, commentation  guidelines, project and org charts, and organized discussions of topics to suit the modular OBJECT ORIENTED approach.  You can’t achieve that by swapping twitter feeds or piling up shit in everyone’s inbox.  If you have no experience with well run organized approaches like this, that’s because they are rare.  So are exceptional products.

Art Eaton
Sailor/Engineer/Adventurer….and  OEMR board member deus ex machina.

aethelwulffe wrote on Monday, August 01, 2011:

EDIT:  Please mentally correct the above post to an informal third person anonymous format and present tense.  Oh, and take out all the pointed sarcasm and destructive commentary.  I would be doing that for real myself…but…It seems I can’t.

sunsetsystems wrote on Monday, August 01, 2011:

Art, if you want a posting deleted, let me know.

Rod
www.sunsetsystems.com

julialongtin wrote on Tuesday, August 02, 2011:

Art/Brady,

I’m fine with a forum thats useful via email. its too bad we’ve chosen one thats ‘read only’ for the time we’ve had it.

as for the rolls of papyrus… while i understand that from time to time, i can seem like a ‘stick in the mud’, its only because I’ve been doing it differently, and in a way that OTHERS seem to believe is correct for quiet some time. I have yet to see any technical reasons things are this way, it meerly seems to be the preferences of those who make their voice heard.

I realize I don’t make my voice heard often. I’m just used to different communication.

The changes in the project recently have been exciting… and i have a few in store myself. I realize this is a stressful time for all. Lets just not forget what we’ve accomplished together, and how much better each of us KNOW it can be.

It doesn’t quite take being on eactly the same page… but it does take not burning one anothers notes. :slight_smile:

aethelwulffe wrote on Tuesday, August 02, 2011:

Book burners suck, no matter how “unholy” the writing.  You are right.  SOOOOO much HAS been achieved.  We must all work on preserving momentum as a gang of brother geeks.

  Writing on rolls of papyrus is fine.  You just need to make sure that the scrolls make it to the library, and that someone has a chance to get them into project Gutenberg before the right-wing fundamentalists burn down the library.

As an admission, I am not sure how the phpbb module works insofar as >creating< a new topic via e-mail.  Replying, yes, but I have not used this particular mod.  I have been investigating Brady’s links in ref to forum systems.  Ultimately, I need to set one up on my server and check it out from one side to another before I weigh my opinions.  I am most interested in phpbb3 due to the fact that it has plenty going for it, and the code is well organized.  After all, if we need something badly, and it can’t otherwise be had, I sure as hell can just make it.

bradymiller wrote on Tuesday, August 02, 2011:

Rod,
Placed a Developer Demo link in the Production demo page on the wiki.
-brady

bradymiller wrote on Monday, August 15, 2011:

hi,

Bumping this thread to see if there’s been any more work/thought towards getting a phpbb3 forum.

-brady

jcahn2 wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Ahoy all.

This is a clarification answering two off-forum questions from Brady to the oemr board.

1. I am already seeing links to all features of the open-emr.org site from the home page at oemr.  They appear to be embedded so that they always show oemr.org in the address bar.  The link back to oemr is available from each of the open-emr.org pages in a couple of clicks.  Brady, I think that you are asking for a direct link instead that would say open-emr.org in the address bar?   If so, my response is:

Immediately: change from the embedded display to a direct link in the interest of moving forward.  I see this as one part improved interface for the project and its partner and one part territorial pride appeased (my opinion of course).

2. The phpbb3 forum board should be the only forum board.  It is superior in many ways already discussed to the sourceforge forum board.  They should not exist side by side - way too confusing.
It matters not which site hosts phpbb3, even if you want it on cahnderosa.com.  It does matter that we agree on who administers content.  Art has demonstrated his skill and energy at maintaining the overall forum.

Very soon: transition the sourceforge forums to the phpbb3 forums.
a. This should not take a month if we devote the manpower to it, this should happen much sooner.
b. Topics in the forum are moderated by the best qualified volunteer - Brady should continue to moderate the content of the developers’ forum, and so forth - several moderators.
c. Temporarily suppress the oemr forums until the transition occurs.

These are my opinions today; I reserve the right to change my opinions when appropriately persuaded.

Jack Cahn MD
oemr.org BOD

sunsetsystems wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Got two different issues involved here:

1. Desire to “modernize” the forums.

We can do this with SourceForge hosting as well… it can easily host phpBB3 for example.

2. Desire to create a seamless user experience.

This needs to be balanced against the fact that the OpenEMR project and OEMR.org have different (though overlapping) history, goals and management.  Sadly, sometimes we disagree.  Thus separate forums will have to do for now, and Brady has been doing a fantastic job of making all that work with minimum confusion.

Rod
www.sunsetsystems.com

jcahn2 wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Brady has asked me to clarify my response under “1.” 

Immediately: We need an ‘external’ link to open-emr.org at least in the menu and even a direct link by an icon on the home page.

I trust the community to respect forum decor and feel it is appropriate and even useful to discuss matters about the future of oemr.org and OpenEMR in the “open”.  I will therefore try to post in both forums in a way that hopefully does not increase the entropy.

@Rod
2. We already have an embarrassing duplication of many items.  I believe if we confront our codependency and then agree to minimize the duplication, we will have a better presentation to the community and the opportunity to improve our sometimes dysfunctional communication.  Disagreement is certainly acceptable at many levels in the bazaar.
3. If the phpbb3 can be done at sourceforge.net, why hasn’t this happened?  The interface is clearly superior.
4. Would you support using different moderators for different topics, i.e. freeing up the current appearance of a monarchy?

Jack Cahn MD
oemr.org BOD

sunsetsystems wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Minimizing duplication is good.

Implementing phpBB3 at SF seems very likely… there’s been a great deal of discussion already about switching so I won’t repeat all that here.  Suffice it to say everyone seems to like the idea now, so I see no reason not to move forward.

Yes I would support multiple moderators.

Rod
www.sunsetsystems.com

tsvas wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Just got up from sleep :)  I don’t understand why do we need to move forums away from Sourceforge?  What’s wrong with it?

jcahn2 wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Ahoy tsvas.
Would that “sleep” make you Rip Van Winkle?  This thread from the beginning has part of your answer.  I am not experienced in this realm to answer beyond that.  You might visit http://www.oemr.org/phpBB3 for your own comparison.        
Jack

tsvas wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

Doesn’t sound like the answer I am expecting.  I hear from people what’s good with some other “forum software”.  I don’t understand what’s wrong with Sourceforge?  Is our concentration on EMR software and is Sourceforge good enough to maintain forums?

sunsetsystems wrote on Saturday, August 20, 2011:

SF does the job, but some (mostly developers) want more features.  Fortunately SF can host other options as well.  The concern about it taking away resources from OpenEMR development is valid, but hopefully that won’t be excessive.  I’d certainly like to see the 4.1 release get out first.

Rod
www.sunsetsystems.com

stephen-smith wrote on Sunday, August 21, 2011:

I don’t want the bug tracker and the forum to have separate authentication mechanisms.  If they do, I’ll probably just use the bug tracker and ignore the forums.

I would like to be able to receive forum post and bug tracker items via email.  SF does this already, but I want anyone exploring solutions to keep this in mind.  I would like the email that I receive to have proper References or In-Reply-To headers so that my email client can properly group discussions.  I would like to be able to reply via email; I am absolutely fine with my reply only being accepted if it has a valid, trusted GPG signature.  I would like the forums themselves to be threaded so that it is clear when a two topics that started from a single post have diverged.

I will not read HTML-formatted email.  If the choice is between HTML-formatted email and no email, I will choose no email all the time.  I am comfortable with multipart/alternative messages with a text/plain part and a text/html part, as long as the contents are essentially the same; some people consider it a waste, but bandwidth is cheap enough for me.

I would like the bug tracker to have some method for providing clickable links in comments (and preferably in the description, too).  Linking to a gist or a git branch on either GitHub or Gitorious is beyond common and while Chrome makes it pretty easy to follow URLs that aren’t hyperlinks we should make it easier for all devlopers.

I agree with Rod that getting 4.1 to be a high-quality release should definitely be priority over the forum issues.

bradymiller wrote on Sunday, August 21, 2011:

Hi,
Would be nice to keep the users and developers forums integrated which seems to improve support for users. Also agree to wait until after release.( At this point still a lot of work to get done to get release out in 2 weeks)
-brady
OpenEMR
www.openemr.org

bradymiller wrote on Monday, August 22, 2011:

Also nice to be able to edit regarding erroneous link above; it should be:
OpenEMR

ajperezcrespo wrote on Monday, August 22, 2011:

Hi,
  While on the topic of forums.  Any chance of an Internationalization forum with sub-forums for different languages (ie Spanish, Dutch, Papiamento, etc)

Thanks

bradymiller wrote on Monday, August 22, 2011:

Hi ajperezcrespo,

Agree this should also be on the list of requirements. The Spanish language is especially active and I generally have to send out emails to the spanish translators with specific question (to about 20 spanish translators) every couple months.

-brady
OpenEMR