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I was wondering what everyone's thoughts are on moving the Pythonista community over to reddit. It seems to me that a lot of Pythonista-related content is already there, and many Pythonista users are redditors anyway.

While it's nice to have full control over the forum, it's also quite a big liability, both in terms of keeping your data safe, and maintaining the server. I've spent several days unsuccessfully trying to migrate data (posts, users) from one version of NodeBB to another, and it's not pretty... There are also issues with the automated emailer that I'm unable to fix without upgrading to a newer version which turns out to be quite hard while keeping the data intact... :/

Anyway, as I'm pretty new to reddit (at least, I've never had a user account before), I might be overlooking some downsides, so I'm looking for input from the forum – are you already using reddit? Would you welcome a change? Do you absolutely hate it for whatever reason? Let me know. :)

I like telegrame.

@lpl Telegram isn't public, right? I think it makes sense to have something that Google indexes, so people can search without signing up for anything...

@omz But reddit looks like a forum while telegrame is the iMessage. We can read and reply at once.

@omz Agree with you. Google search is mandatory

@omz Slack isn't indexed either, so... Telegram is way better on desktop and mobile as well.

As for reddit, imo it's better than having a dedicated forum. Don't get me wrong, the forum itself is very good for this type of content, but not having a dedicated app (like Apollo for Reddit) is kind of a letdown.

@Ichicoro I didn't set up the Slack myself, and I'm honestly not a big fan of Slack in general. But it can co-exist peacefully with either the forum as it is or a subreddit.

For me reddit is cluttered. For instance, is there a way to show only unread messages? Also, does reddit support code formatting, etc?

Isnt NodeBb designed to be upgraded easily?
https://docs.nodebb.org/configuring/upgrade/

@JonB Maybe, I haven’t found this to be the case in practice, though I might just be doing things wrong.

Well, I am not the most frequent participant if this forum, but I like to come around and check what people are talking about from time to time, or to ask for help.

I understand your concerns, but to be honest, I don’t feel that Reddit would be a viable alternative. This forum format (or a Discourse-based one) is much more easy to read on both desktop and mobile, even long discussions. Every time I get into Reddit, I end up getting the impression that I am in the middle of something a bit messy.

@victordomingos Not false

@omz - It sounds like upgrading the forum, keeping it secure and all the ops work is taking away from your ability to work on Pythonista which makes me all for a subreddit. Apollo works fine for mobile for most cases, and you could then have a dedicated mod staff to keep it clean. I don't think it would be any better or worse than a dedicated forum, and it could be easily linked to /r/learnpython for the learning, just starting questions that aren't Pythonista specific as well as /r/Python for some heftier questions that are not Pythonista specific.

If folks are worried about it looking cluttered, there are ways to have CSS help with that. There's also the RES which is an addon for most browsers that will help with things like unread etc. If that doesn't work, unfortunately Reddit keeps certain website features behind the paywall for the subscribers to Reddit (the Gold program). Apollo is a pretty great app on mobile for a sub there.

Overall: +1 for a subreddit, if nothing else to ease your interaction with the community and remove the ops work that you're doing now so you can focus more on Pythonista and any other projects you have going on!

I like the current forum and see no benefit to switching...

M

Reddit is awesome, and it already hosts many forum-like subreddits that do very well themselves. I think it'd' be a great idea to migrate. Security in terms of our data is good, and the accessibility of Reddit is a plus as well.

I wasn't really a huge fan of NodeBB from the start.

@JonB it definitely takes some getting-used-to. But once you've gotten into it, it's actually really enjoyable to use.

The upvote and downvote system is pretty handy, the comments are nested nicely, and the community isn't normally super toxic (depends on what subreddit you're in). I don't see ours being bad, though.

I use the Boost app on Android, personally, and it works like a charm. It has the functionality you're looking for. Unfortunately with the fact that Pythonista is an iOS app, and you're still using this forum, you're probably still an iPhone user, so that might be out of the picture.

I guess it depends on what client you use. I have always hated the Reddit website. It's disgusting. The remodel helped a bit, but I still prefer client apps.

I don't think a subreddit would be a good replacement for the forum. While Reddit provides the same basic functionality as a forum (you can make posts and reply), I feel like it's mainly a "content sharing" rather than a "discussion" site. On a forum, topics and posts are sorted purely by time; on Reddit the order is also influenced by up- and downvotes. This vote-based ordering works well for finding interesting content related to a topic, but isn't all that useful in a discussion environment (unless there are a lot of posts, which isn't the case for the Pythonista forum).

Reddit also makes it hard to see all recent comments in a subreddit - you can sort posts by new, but this shows the most recently posted posts rather than the most recently commented ones. The same goes for comments on a single post - because of the tree structure, sorting by new shows the most recent top-level comments, rather than comment chains with the most recent replies. Even when logged in, there's no way to see all unread posts/comments like on the forum.

On top of that, I'm not a huge fan of Reddit's web interface (the "new" one at least). Like most sites nowadays, clicking a link does some JavaScript magic instead of actually loading a new page, but it's not implemented very well. On desktop things are slow to load, and on mobile it doesn't work well on unreliable network connections (the tiniest network disconnect causes the entire page to be replaced with an "oopsie woopsie"-style error, and reloading will lose your current reading position). I know there are apps that probably work better than the website, but I really don't want to download an app for a site where I usually don't even log in. (I also like having multiple tabs.)

@omz I can totally understand if hosting the forum yourself takes too much time and work. In general I'm not against moving to a different website/service, the points above are about Reddit specifically. (Sadly I don't think there are any good alternatives though...) But tbh whereever the community decides to move, I'll probably go there too, unless it's Facebook or Google Groups.

Also, regardless of whether I like Reddit or not, there are a few things that I think should be considered before moving the community to Reddit:

• @omz You should probably get in touch with the /r/Pythonista moderator and see if you can also become a moderator. (Might be a good idea to mention your Reddit username in a post here, so they can verify that it's actually you contacting them on Reddit.)
• What happens with the existing forum posts? Reddit doesn't support "importing" content, and automatically reposting all forum threads onto Reddit wouldn't work well (everything would be under one account, linear forum threads don't translate well to Reddit's tree-style replies, and this sort of mass posting would probably be considered spam). I suppose the existing threads could be converted to static pages and hosted in place of the forum.
• Could the community be realistically migrated off of Reddit again? Of course there's no "export" feature either, so the content would need to be downloaded some other way (I'm sure there are already tools for that). However there would be no way to redirect old links to the new location.

Also, another thing about Reddit that I forgot to mention in my previous post: after some time, Reddit posts are "archived", which means that they can't be voted or commented on anymore. This would be a problem for threads that are not updated often (for example threads about a specific project that are only updated when a new version is released). I don't know how exactly the archive mechanic works though - if the archive delay is based on the initial post date or the last comment date, or if it can be changed or disabled by moderators in any way.

Love Pythonista And Love Reddit.
I think the biggest advantage in moving to Reddit would be getting a more intelligent search, searching in this forum is not good.
I am no expert but i see no downside to shifting to Reddit.