should the qiime forum move to BioStars?

[gregcaporaso]

Starting at the Biocore 14.10 summit, we've been discussing the future of the QIIME Forum, and whether we should migrate from Google Groups. There are a few core motivations for this:

• The Google Groups searching functionality is surprisingly bad, making it hard for users to find posts related to their questions.
• Because there is no up-voting/down-voting functionality (as is present e.g. on StackOverflow) it is very hard to find the "right answer" in long discussion threads. The threads are effectively chains of email discussion, which is very inconvenient.
• Because it's hard to see or show-off individual contributions, there is less incentive for users to answer each others questions. If users had some page that they could point people to that highlighted their contributions (again, like StackOverflow does, for example), this could be linked from their websites, LinkedIn profiles, etc to "show off" their QIIME knowledge and support contributions.

We discussed three options for doing this. The first was just pointing users to StackOverflow to ask their questions there. This isn't really the intended use of StackOverflow, and the maintainers frown upon that. The next was to use Biology StackExchange, but that is more for general biology questions, not bioinformatics technical support. Finally, we discussed using BioStars (web, paper), which is more directly intended for this purpose.

I've been discussing using BioStars with the site admin and senior author on the paper, @ialbert. He prefers that we don't just direct our users there as that could overwhelm BioStars since we have such a large community. He suggested two options by email - I'm paraphrasing here:

1. That we run our own BioStars (this is done for Galaxy and BioConductor), and could probably be done with an AWS instance fairly easily.
2. That we (quoting @ialbert) "wait for Biostar 3.0 (I plan to release that by March 1st) - one of the goals is to turn it more into like Reddit - where there are different communities (groups) and one has the option of subscribing to communities instead of using tags. For example groups would be using subdomains where linking to say: qiime.biostars.org". @ialbert, is there a prototype of this anywhere right now that we could start looking at?

I think both of these sound like good possibilities, and it sounds like we may even be able to export previous discussions from the Google Group to initially populate the forum (is that accurate @ialbert?). With respect to option 2, I would think that instead of using qiime.biostars.org, we would start by using qiime1.biostars.org, which would give us a natural way to separate out support for QIIME 2, which will be very different. @ialbert said that this would work fine.

Opening this up for developer and community feedback, there are a few specific questions that would be good to get input on.

• Does using BioStars (either option 1 or 2) seem like a good move forward for the QIIME Forum (i.e., do you think it would help us get around the specific issues I noted above)?
• Which of those options (1 or 2) do you prefer, and why?
• What specific features would you like to see in the next iteration of the QIIME Forum (regardless of whether we were to use BioStars or not)?
• Any other thoughts on this?

Thanks for the input!

[colinbrislawn]

I support @rob-knight's idea as well. A clean start matches the QIIME 2.0.0 design philosophy.

Edit: The more I think about this, the more I like it. This will ONLY be populated by issues related to the new qiime. No seeding == no outdated issues. As people start to use the qiime 2.0.0 release candidate, they can ask questions on biostars, letting us test both, then go live concurrently.

[jairideout]

:+1:

[gregcaporaso]

Ok, I agree that this probably is the way to go (i.e., wait until QIIME 2).

[gregcaporaso]

And in the meantime, we can start using the new BioStars for other projects, such as scikit-bio, biom, Qiita(?), etc?

[rob-knight]

Sounds good…

On Mar 27, 2015, at 11:46 AM, Greg Caporaso notifications@github.com<mailto:notifications@github.com> wrote:

And in the meantime, we can start using the new BioStars for other projects, such as scikit-bio, biom, Qiita(?), etc?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/biocore/qiime/issues/1926#issuecomment-87049859.

[gregcaporaso]

Thinking more about this...

Since we get support questions for many of our different tools on the QIIME Forum, maybe we should create a general biocore forum on BioStars, and start directing the non-QIIME questions there. We can tag questions based on software package, and if any QIIME stuff does come up there we can tag as QIIME1 (ultimately vs QIIME 2).

Google Groups is just so bad. Since it's so hard to find answers, we are just answering the same questions over and over. And we do need forums for skbio (SO probably isn't the most appropriate for this as we've learned by investigating it as an option for the QIIME Forum), Qiita, BIOM, etc.

So in this case we wouldn't actively transition the QIIME Forum now, but start directing new non-QIIME questions to BioStars. We'd then colocate all of the biocore forums in one place using tags to differentiate, which ultimately would reduce effort because it's less to monitor, easier to link questions or tag as related to multiple projects, and it's not just dense threads of email discussions where it's impossible to tell correct answers from garbage (i.e., Google Groups).

[antgonza]

:+1:

[gregcaporaso]

Quick follow up on this. I got an updated ETA from @ialbert on BioStars 3, and it should be available later in the summer. He said that it's ready for release, but he's waiting until he gets back from vacation in August to release. I think that timing is fine for us.