Discussion: Use of google groups for support for users/devs.

[tkknight]

📰 Custom Issue

On our Iris documentation there is a SUPPORT section in the sidebar with links to:

• Users Google Group
  • 14 topics posted so far in 2020
• Developers Google Group
  • 1 topic posted so far in 2020 (Iris 2.3)
• Stack Overflow for "How do I?"
  • Total of 54 questions

For discussion

1. Are all groups still active and have value?
   • The Developers Google Group clearly is not being used, and I suspect not monitored much.
2. Could we retire/rationalise these groups? If so how? and what alternatives to use?

[trexfeathers]

@lbdreyer has in the past suggested Discourse as a possible alternative to Google Groups, and @pp-mo recently reviewed how several other dev teams use it - looks quite impressive.

[bjlittle]

Question is, who will fund that?

[rcomer]

A quick glance down the subject lines in the developers' Google Group suggests to me that a lot of those threads could have been GitHub issues instead.

I think the Users' Google Group still has value. While not very active, it is still getting some use. It's more flexible than StackOverflow which is fairly prescriptive about what you can ask. In an ideal world, I'd like to persuade more Met Office colleagues to use it, so the wider user community can benefit from questions that have been asked and answered. Not sure how realistic that is though.

[bjlittle]

napari uses https://zulipchat.com/... there are a lot of options to choose from

[rcomer]

I guess a key advantage of Google is that most people already have a Google account and many will already use Google Groups for other things. So it's incredibly easy to get started.

[tkknight]

Cartopy uses gitter, see https://gitter.im/SciTools/cartopy. Appears to be free.

This is not a suggestion - just seeing what options are out there.

[dennissergeev]

From my (mostly user-side) perspective, I find google groups really clunky and prone to overflow your inbox with conversations you're not necessarily following.

One option you could consider is a separate empty SciTools repository for asking "How do I..." questions like the one for pyvista: https://github.com/pyvista/pyvista-support/issues. The downside of course is that people would have to have github accounts to raise issues.

[rcomer]

Hi @dennissergeev, the Google Group has an option under "My Membership Settings" to turn off email alerts. I have "Subscription" set to "No email" but have ticked "Subscribe me to email updates when I post to a conversation" so I only see updates for threads I have contributed to.

I can see a couple of advantages to using a GitHub repo for questions/support:

• The jump from asking a question to reporting an issue would be smaller for new users.
• Support questions that mistakenly get posted on this issue tracker could be moved over by core devs.

[rcomer]

For dev discussion, there is also https://github.com/orgs/SciTools/teams/iris-devs/discussions, though possibly this is only accessible to core devs.

If we are serious about retiring the user Google Group, we should maybe post the question on there and see what the other users themselves think of the idea.

[rcomer]

I noticed that Cartopy also links the Google Group from their README, so we should probably talk to them too if we want to retire it.

[lbdreyer]

I'd like to revive this discussion.

As far as I was concerned, google groups was dead so I was quite surprised yesterday when a user mentioned that they sometimes look at google groups. I think it would be much easier to have support all in one place as it is easier to monitor questions being raised, and it is also easier for users to search through a "knowledge base" of past questions.

I propose we;

• retire iris-dev and replace it with Github Issues/Discussions
• retire scitools-iris and replace it with Github Issues (and maybe stack overflow?)

I have raised a conversation about this on each of the google groups as per @rcomer 's suggestion (see post on scitools-iris-dev and on scitools-iris)
If no objections are raised within the next 3 months. I'd like to push ahead with retiring.

Importantly, when I say "retire" I mean we close the group such that no one can create new posts, but we keep a record of the old conversations in case anyone finds those solved problems helpful in future. Instead we direct people to the appropriate location, e.g. Github. It looks "Stop members from posting to a group" on this answer may do it.

[rcomer]

May also be worth noting that on Luke Abraham's latest Google Group thread, both he and I couldn't post further updates (they just got deleted). Seems a bit flakey.

[trexfeathers]

(and maybe stack overflow?)

Note that internal discussions within the main Iris development team have explicitly agreed that we don't have the resource to monitor Stack Overflow, although we would like to if it becomes possible in the future.

[lbdreyer]

The google groups have now been retired and archived as readonly so this issue can be closed