Document discuss.ocaml.org and plan chat.ocaml.org

[avsm]

See ocaml/ocaml.org#1169 for the overall tracking issue.

status: active

The https://discuss.ocaml.org service has been running happily for a couple of years now, with rising usage and engagement numbers. It is hosted on the Discourse hosting plans (happily covered by @avsm) and has run without issue. I would like to acknowledge the sponsorship of the Discourse team (for us as an open source project) on the ocaml.org website as the first item on this bit of infrastructure.

Aside from that, there is also the question of more real-time chat. The question has come up of having more synchronous chat channels around ocaml.org (thread 1, thread 2).

The decision we need to make is how synchronous real-time chat fits in with the forum-based model that Discourse currently implements. Some options:

• Discourse can be extended to real time chat with the babel plugin.
• We can install a self-hosted Zulip instance, which has been used with good feedback from both the Coq and Clojure communities. However, it would be very nice if there were shared accounts across the Discourse and Zulip instances.
• There are more nascent options available such as Matrix (which has OCaml bindings in progress) but the user experiences so far reflect an early-stage project.
• There are several closed-source hosted options such as Slack or Discord, but I'm discounting those in favour of open source hosted solutions in the interests of long-term hosting on ocaml.org. If there is a strong desire to change this position due to a particularly nice solution, I'm all ears.

For all these solutions, we need to consider accessibility, and in particular if an email workflow can be made to work for them. In that regard, it ties into #1170 and the future of the ocaml.org email infrastructure.

[gs0510]

@avsm Would you consider adding a consolidated search across https://discuss.ocaml.org, mailing list and the future synchronous chat channels to this roadmap? I think a lot of wisdom is lost without this consolidated search 🙂

[avsm]

That's a great point @gs0510. I think we'll need to think about what a consolidated search engine would look like for ocaml.org, since it should also get the API docs indexed (#1171, @jonludlam). I'll split that out into a separate roadmap issue for next year once we get the short term stuff out of the way.

Some other random notes:

• matrix/element bought gitter and will be integrating it
• in terms of longevity, mattermost has an impressive agpl license, while zulip has a wide set of contributors and a founder who is committed to keeping it open source, even if outside investors take it over
• I would personally choose cloud hosted zulip or mattermost, but should do a community survey of which systems people like the most

This could also be useful in a compromise matrix + zulip approach: https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/matrix . Zulip's message organization is nice, but matrix/element might be more useful for people who are in many communities and don't want to use a full browser tab for ocaml zulip instance alone.

Regarding consolidated search, maybe ahrefs would be willing to provide technical guidance?

https://github.com/typesense/typesense - may be useful, open source algolia clone