[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] RFC: Moving toward Discord and Discourse for LLVM's discussions

[Renato Golin via cfe-dev]

On Thu, 21 Nov 2019 at 04:11, Zachary Turner <zturner at roblox.com> wrote:
> I’m still not totally sold on needing extensive moderation capabilities.  As mentioned earlier, Chromium — an open source project with more developers than LLVM — has a code of conduct similar to LLVMs and manages to get by with a Slack server while still maintaining their code of conduct.  It’s possible we’re fundamentally different than Chromium in some way, but I’d like to understand what those are before we decide it’s impossible to have a professional and welcoming environment, because there seems to be an existence proof to the contrary.

There's a truth to it. The problems we had in Bugzilla was spammers,
not "unreasonable people". Back in 2008, I heard stories that a couple
of people got banned from the list/IRC, but nothing since.

But forums, being a web platform (like Bugzilla), make it more
vulnerable to spammers and trolls, which may need more moderation.

We need to be aware of the functionality available, but I agree, I
wouldn't use lack of good moderation as a strong reason not to use a
particular tool.


> FWIW, imo the best way to be welcoming to be new people and/or outsiders is to use tools that they probably already have some exposure to.  Being open source is a nice-to-have, but I think it’s a mistake to weigh that heavily in comparison to usability, familiarity, and feature set

If we went with popularity, we'd choose Facebook or WhatsApp. That
can't be the most important criteria. We really need to think about
accessibility, diversity, privacy and security.

With open standards and platforms, in the worst case scenario, we can
modify ourselves to fix whatever is broken and make it as
secure/accessible as we need it to be. We've done some of it with
Phabricator, for example.

We also need to make sure our data (history, threads, control) belong
to us. It would be a deal breaker if we couldn't download a dump of
our mail history, especially for llvm-dev/cfe-dev, in a format that we
can actually consume with other tools.

Finally, we really cannot force developers to sign troubling terms and
conditions or user agreements that they're not comfortable (or able)
to. Unfortunatelly, the world of closed source software nowadays is a
minefield of T&Cs and EULAs and it's almost impossible to actually
know what's going on until after you lost control of your
data/access/rights.

--renato