This forum is switching back to 100% French!

News
1

Hello everyone!

As you know, I tried to create an English category on the forum so that new international users would feel welcome… and it was a failure :joy:

Often, users from the US/EU outside of France come to the forum, ask a question (so far so good), but over time, as they keep receiving forum emails, all in French, they end up disabling email notifications / deleting their account, simply because they don’t feel at home (and that’s normal!).

Imagine signing up for a forum in Italian and receiving 99% of notifications in Italian; after a while, you would leave the forum.

This is why the « international » forum category is dead and not thriving…

I discussed this privately with an English-speaking user (who doesn’t speak French), and he told me himself:

Yeah, in retrospect, there is a very strong (overpowering) French presence, which could be a deterrent. BUT, whenever I had a question or posted anything, there were a few (quick) answers, in English - and very friendly too!
You might want to separate English and French communities (to the detriment of knowledge sharing)

From the French users’ perspective, I think this category even harms French users:

  • Some create topics by mistake in the « international » category, but in French
  • I no longer displayed the « Latest Topics » view as before on the right to avoid mixing FR and EN content
  • The site is entirely in English by default to suit « by default » everyone

In fact, I think we had the worst of both worlds, and it was hindering both international growth and French growth.

So, I decided to create a completely English Discourse server to address this issue.

The idea is to fully embrace that this forum (this one here) is 100% French, we switch the forum back to French and remove all English content.

I created a new forum (not to be shared yet, it needs to be filled, seeded), available here:

With @VonOx, we started recreating the forum over there (categories and some content). It’s still in its infancy; we need to fill this forum to make it attractive.

Finally, we will officially launch this forum!

What do you think? :slight_smile:

2

For my part, I have never been there, not even for a curiosity visit.
I already have trouble understanding everything on the French forum…
The distinction does indeed seem more efficient.

3

Great idea!

4

Good idea because in the end, everything is in English on GitHub, so it will be the rallying point for bugs and developments. However, this will create more work for you as you will have to juggle between the two.

Otherwise, for the French forum, I think a bugs/errors category and one about hardware are missing.

I also think a post summarizing ongoing developments and their progress is missing (only the major milestones (definition, development (back-end dev, front-end dev), testing phase…)).

5

For bugs/errors, the « Configuration » category is very good, and then we create bugs on Github (in English, however)

On this, it’s already the purpose of the « feature requests » category, but you would like a place where we can « see » the ongoing developments :thinking:

In fact, it would be an aggregated view between the « PR » view of Github which corresponds to what you say, and the « feature requests » category, I’m not sure how we could integrate that!

6

Yes, the configuration handles errors, but that’s not all. You might miss a bug report if there are many topics created (which is not the case currently, but possibly in the future. It could also be a subcategory or, more simply, add a « bug » tag in « optional tags » and specify to use it for bugs.

7

I don’t think creating so many categories is beneficial, it confuses the user.

Configuration does the job just fine :slight_smile:

Anyway, when there’s a bug, don’t worry, we know about it very quickly! :joy:

8

[quote=« pierre-gilles, post:5, topic:7225 »]
Actually it would be an aggregated view between the « PR » view on GitHub (Pull Request), which corresponds to

9

It’s not bad, besides that the service is Canny (https://canny.io/), it’s great but it’s a shame — I’d like to stay on the forum for collecting feature requests. Why? It’s self-hosted (we control the data) + it doesn’t force users to create an account elsewhere + it encourages creating an account on the forum, and then everyone can « discuss » the feature request.

After thinking more about it, I think the current issue is more philosophical than technical.

We’re not a company behind Gladys, and we can’t guarantee that features will be developed.

In a traditional company, where developers are paid, it’s « easy » to plan developments: you estimate the number of person-days of development time, and you match that against your developers’ schedule.

If your feature takes 16 person-days to develop, and you have 2 developers who will work on it 4 days per week, then you know that in 2 weeks you should have your feature ready, and it’s more or less guaranteed.

But we are an open-source project. Developers are volunteers and work in their spare time.

In Gladys’ history, a huge number of developments (not to say at least 40% of developments) have reached up to 95% of the work and then the dev disappeared off the radar/has had other personal priorities, etc… And that’s normal!! It’s the reality of this decentralized model, and I don’t want to blame anyone for that, on the contrary :slight_smile:

If we start putting this kind of roadmap in place, and someone marks a feature as « started », the community will expect:

  • that the feature will arrive quickly
  • will think it’s not necessary to work on it, because « someone is already working on it »

Which will only create disappointment for users who are remote from the development.

The reality is simple: we cannot communicate about features in development, because a feature in development is not any closer to release than a feature not in development, we have no idea.

Some resources on the subject to go further:

10

Yes I agree with you, for the solution it’s really just an example :smiley: I didn’t look further, that was what I had in mind directly.

I completely agree on that. The only thing you can « plan » is yourself since you know what you’ll be working on « globally ».

For the other devs we agree, myself included having worked on Netatmo, I absolutely no longer have time to work on it. We fall right squarely into that case.

We can however differentiate your devs and those of others:

  • you plan to work on such-and-such tasks
  • other tasks are « under consideration » and developed by contributors.

What might be interesting, I think, is precisely knowing who is handling what — maybe automate it by linking planning + GitHub PRs and therefore if the person hasn’t touched it for more than X days we remove them from the dashboard.

Typically, if you are, for example, working on the Alexa integration, we know we can focus on other elements. It’s a big topic and maybe the added value is elsewhere (bug fixes / small features) which are therefore easier to bring to completion.

However, knowing that a given person is working on a new integration can be useful to help them and above all to avoid starting a development from scratch when work has already been done on it.

But I agree with you: it’s crucial that a developer of an integration not be put in a category like « coming soon ».

11

But I was just responding to the message above. If it’s not viable and doesn’t add any value, we might as well not spend time on this kind of task :slight_smile:

12

Honestly, even for me it’s very hard! The reality of any « startup » project is that your sense of priorities is constantly being challenged.

And since I do everything in Gladys (customer support, YouTube live, marketing), it’s very hard to know how much time I’ll have available to develop in a given week. Sometimes I have a lot of time, sometimes I have 0 :slight_smile:

Alexa is a very good example, I started it 8 months ago, and even if I would have had plenty of time to finish it if I only did development, unfortunately the reality is that I juggle between different priorities:

  • Make Gladys profitable
  • Attract more users to Gladys

I think at this stage of the project, it’s not viable.

I can’t guarantee anything, because quite simply Gladys hasn’t reached the stage where the project is well-established. The business model isn’t proven, I don’t have fixed time allocated to development :slight_smile:

We’ll see about that later!

13

Yes of course I understand completely :slight_smile:

Let’s not bother with that then :wink:

14

By the way, where are you with this? Need help to make some progress? I’d be very interested, if I can free up some time to suggest a few things. For my part I’m starting to have a bit more free time — work is beginning to calm down a lot :slight_smile:

15

For the moment, I have the final stretch left, which is mainly administrative stuff to handle with Amazon for publishing / testing and validation + all the marketing around the launch (launch article in FR/EN, documentation EN/FR, newsletter, etc..) :slight_smile:

However I’ll probably need testers at some point — I’ll let you know when I need them!

But there are hundreds of other developments / things to do if you want to help so I’m not worried, you’ll find something!

16

[quote=« pierre-gilles, post:15, topic:7225 »]
But

17

I don’t want to give you false hope, I’ve been in the final stretch for a few months now but I’m not working on it.

For the moment, my absolute priority is the project’s financial profitability, which is critical for its long-term viability.

18

Sorry, I should’ve specified, good to know since it works :slight_smile: Now I’m waiting — I don’t want to put pressure on you.

And yes, of course you need to make a living from the project