[tor-bugs] #33115 [Webpages/Blog]: Migrating the blog to a static web site with Lektor

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#33115: Migrating the blog to a static web site with Lektor
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 Reporter:  hiro           |          Owner:  hiro
     Type:  defect         |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium         |      Milestone:
Component:  Webpages/Blog  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal         |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                 |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                 |         Points:  10
 Reviewer:                 |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by arma):

 Replying to [ticket:33115 hiro]:
 > I propose to migrate the blog to a static website with lektor and have
 comments running from discourse.org.

 I like this plan in theory. I agree that our current situation is not
 really sustainable.

 I have two concerns that I want to make sure we address well enough with
 the new plan:

 > Moderation on discourse is much easier than on drupal comments (another
 pain point for the blog), and we would get a forum that we could use for
 other purposes too.

 Do we have anybody on our side with real in-depth experience in managing
 discourse communities? I ask because with both the stackexchange case and
 the reddit case, we had plans for real Tor people who actually understand
 Tor things to engage, and it started out working that way, but then those
 people got distracted or burnt out or otherwise didn't keep up, and the
 platforms (for better or for worse) have a mechanism for random people to
 become highly trusted if they just stick with it -- so the result was that
 all the moderators are now random people whose primary property is that
 they have free time and they're stubborn, rather than that they are people
 we know and have some relationship with.

 I no longer engage much with Tor's stackexchange, because some of the
 recent times I did, some random person stepped in and told me I was wrong
 about my answer and changed it to an answer I didn't want it to be. The
 original plan there was to pick a better platform for building our FAQ...
 but if we can't choose the answers on our FAQ, that's not so helpful to
 us.

 So: do we have a plan for how this time will be different? Delegating our
 community moderation to a third party platform means giving the control to
 steer topics to...whom exactly?

 At least with the current blog case, it fails closed when we spend a while
 not giving it attention, rather than failing open by going off in some
 surprising and unhelpful direction.

 > What we will lose:
 >  - Old comments. I see no value in migrating old blog comments to
 discourse to be honest. It would be a lot of effort and the old comments
 will be archived anyways in the blog archive.

 I agree that migrating old blog comments to discourse seems like a bad
 step. But are the only two choices 'migrate to discourse' or 'drop'? For
 example, another option might be to migrate them to the static html blog
 entries.

 Many of our old blog posts have real content that would be a shame to
 lose. For two examples,
 https://blog.torproject.org/comment/224125#comment-224125
 and
 https://blog.torproject.org/comment/78918#comment-78918
 but there are many many more.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/33115#comment:6>
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