[associated vote ended on 2023-03-21] Community Plans part 1 - DNS & Website

[GregSutcliffe]

Summary

This is the first discussion space for the community strategy for the year ahead. It's a larger topic than easily fits into a GitHub issue, so rather than summarise it badly here, I'd ask that you read the two posts we've created - State of the Community 2023 and Community Strategy 2023 - before discussing/voting.

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As promised in the post conclusion, this is the first of two proposals, namely that the community should:

• Define & register a DNS zone for the community to use for all things relating the Ansible project
• Create a new website at the root of this zone to serve as a landing page, community voice, and signposting resource for the Ansible community

If approved, the next step would be to form a Working Group to implement both parts.

Additional Information

No response

[mariolenz]

It makes perfect sense to me to have a seperate DNS domain as the "home" of the Ansible community. You've suggested ansible.community which sounds like a rather good idea.

This would make it easier to distinguish between Ansible-the-Red-Hat-product and Ansible-the-Community. Additionally, it might give the community more freedom on the content and tools hosted there. As you say: ansible.com is Red Hat’s product site.

* Create a new website at the root of this zone to serve as a landing page, community voice, and signposting resource for the Ansible community

I see a lot of discussions on what content should stay where it is and what content should, at least in the long run, move to the new website (for example The Bullhorn). But those would be later steps. Let's start simple.

[GregSutcliffe]

Thanks for the positive feedback so far folks. The second recording from Contributor Summit is now up, so I've added to the top of the second post, but for those that have already read them (and are interested) you can find that here(YouTube)

[felixfontein]

👍 for ansible.community.

[AndreasDavour]

ansible.community isn't as succinct as ansible.com but it does get the message across.

[Ompragash]

❤️ for ansible.community

[chuckmilam]

I'm old enough to wince a little at these newfangled long TLDs. However, I agree a good delineation between "Ansible, the Red Hat product" and "Ansible, the community" would be of benefit.

Therefore, +1 for ansible.community

[maxamillion]

+1 for ansible.community

[briantist]

+1 for ansible.community

[jillr]

+1 for ansible.community

[gotmax23]

Should we start a vote on this?

[mariolenz]

Should we start a vote on this?

I think so. The reactions have been 100% positive here up until now, at least as far as I can see. Also, people seem to be fine with ansible.community (even if some people "wince a little at these newfangled long TLDs" 😆). So I suggest to vote on the DNS zone while we're at it, too.

My suggestion for a vote:

Register a DNS zone `ansible.community` for the community to use for all things relating the Ansible project. Create a new website at the root of this zone to serve as a landing page for the Ansible community.

Please vote with +1 to do this and -1 to keep things as they are (that is, keep using `ansible.com`).

Please don't use this vote for discussions, use #201 to do this.

@gotmax23 If you create a vote, feel free to improve this or to write up something completely new. It's just a suggestion ;-)

[GregSutcliffe]

I would agree this seems ready for a vote. It has only been just over a week, and I would normally like to give discussion longer (people can be on holiday, etc) - but given the feedback level so far, it seems uncontroversial to move forward. I can do that tomorrow if no one objects before then.

Thanks to all for the positive feedback - I'm excited :)

[GregSutcliffe]

Vote opened at #208 - I tweaked your wording a little @mariolenz, but I thank you for the example :)

Given that the feedback is so positive, the Ansible Community Team here at Red Hat is already doing some exploratory work on this. Of course, nothing will be fully decided until the vote concludes, and (if passed) the working group is formed, but it makes sense to do some research into suitable tooling & stacks. (This is just in case anyone spots us doing things that look like we have already decided for you - we haven't, we're just getting ready 😛)

[apple4ever]

Separate domain for the community would be amazing. Teaching others new to Ansible how to get to it is hard with the current layout, so this would be a big help. (Also, TBH I had no idea there was ansible.com/community!)

[GregSutcliffe]

I see a couple of new points on #208 but discussion lives here, so let me reply with my thinking on this:

@ssbarnea -1 Im in favour of keeping ansible.com/community, or if there are real limitations using community.ansible.com subdomain instead. Extra domains can cause lots of problems and confusions as anyone can register similar domains.
@BigPii Prefer community.ansible.com

To the first point, I really don't think a single page (ansible.com/community) gives us the flexibility we're looking for. It could be a landing page, but the hosting as it stands today really doesn't support that well, and definitely couldn't have community involvement (if my understanding is correct).

The point about domains causing confusion is valid, but I would argue it applies even for community.ansible.com - once you need people to find a new place, you have a marketing problem no matter what. We'll still need to get the right people to the right place no matter what URL we use. So we can decide between the options without too much concern here, as we have to solve this anyway (likely via redirects and clear links, in both directions)

Also, on the confusion theme, I'd add that a .com isn't really the right TLD for an upstream project, and "community.ansible.com" really confuses that message. It's an admittedly small point, but I think we should consider it.

To the "anyone can register domains" point - yes, that's true. But those people don't have control of the other places we exist (GitHub, Matrix, etc) which is why part of the proposal is a branding element. We use "Ansible Community" and links to the new DNS everywhere, as well as ensuring signposting from ansible.com, to give the new site it's legitimacy. There's a reason it's called the web not just a list 😁

[mariolenz]

Also, on the confusion theme, I'd add that a .com isn't really the right TLD for an upstream project

Why not? It's about "something with COMputers" so that fits, doesn't it? SCNR

"community.ansible.com" really confuses that message. It's an admittedly small point, but I think we should consider it.

👍

[mariolenz]

@ansible-community/steering-committee please share your opinion here on ansible.community, or at least vote in #208, if you haven't done so yet. It would be great if we could get as much input from the SC on this as possible!

[Landrash]

+1 for ansible.community

Seems like a good step in the right direction! :)

[acozine]

I'm struggling with this a bit. It would push community content off of the "main" domain and give up a lot of accumulated "reputation" (that's not the right word, but it's the only one I'm coming up with at the moment) with search engines - if we move community docs from docs.ansible.com to docs.ansible.community I think things will suddenly get a lot harder to find.

Is RH going to continue to use ansible.com? Last I heard (admittedly a while back) they wanted to move most content to the redhat.com domain.

I'm fine with giving up www.ansible.com/community and adding that content to www.ansible.community, but moving everything doesn't seem smart unless it's absolutely necessary.

[samccann]

Do redirects help with the search reputation? We've done that for individual docs pages on docs.ansible.com, but those where going from docs.ansible.com/foo to docs.ansible.com/bar so to speak, not to a new domain.

[tima]

I see your point here about moving the docs domain to the proposed ansible.community. Let me play devil's advocate here though.

The docs have already moved to a redhat.com domain for customers; however, customers don't realize that. (I can't speak for the marketing of the Ansible product going exclusively to a redhat.com -- I just don't know.) Not realizing that is understandable since docs.ansible.com is what comes up in Google searches and they are hosted under ansible.com with all of the other Red Hat Ansible product marketing and news. It is not very clear that what is on docs.ansible.com are community docs, not product docs since, afterall, it is a dot com domain. So they're are confused because things in the product they are using don't line up. Changing to a domain that says "community" right in the name goes a long way to clarifying this.

So I think moving to a new domain, even at the expense of search engine reputation, can be really helpful in announcing "this is something really new you should check out."

[mariolenz]

@acozine

I'm struggling with this a bit. It would push community content off of the "main" domain and give up a lot of accumulated "reputation" (that's not the right word, but it's the only one I'm coming up with at the moment) with search engines - if we move community docs from docs.ansible.com to docs.ansible.community I think things will suddenly get a lot harder to find.

If docs.ansible.com/x/y/z redirects to docs.ansible.community/x/y/z (for example with a 301 Moved Permanently), I think this won't be a problem.

Is RH going to continue to use ansible.com? Last I heard (admittedly a while back) they wanted to move most content to the redhat.com domain.

I don't know about this. Anyway, if this is the case it wouldn't be much difference between moving (some) stuff to redhat.com and moving it to ansible.community, would it?

[acozine]

Would docs.ansible.com disappear altogether? And be replaced by docs.ansible.community for upstream docs and somewhere on redhat.com for downstream/product docs? If so, then I'm a little less uneasy.

[mariolenz]

Would docs.ansible.com disappear altogether? And be replaced by docs.ansible.community for upstream docs and somewhere on redhat.com for downstream/product docs? If so, then I'm a little less uneasy.

If we move the upstream docs to docs.ansible.community, we shouldn't really care where Red Hat moves their product docs to IMHO ;-)

[GregSutcliffe]

Thanks @acozine, you always give us a good perspective :)

For me this breaks into two parts. If redirects are a blocker, then it's part of "should we do a new site at all" - otherwise, it's implementation detail (a big detail, not wanting to minimize it).

To decide if it's a blocker, I have two thoughts - (1) it must be possible to do this in some sensible form, or you'd just never see companies rebranding due to the SEO hurt, and (2) even if it's not possible, it may be worth the cost (which is @tima's point). Taken together, my gut feel is that this is a solvable issue - even if we can't get it perfect, we can minimize the pain to a point that is acceptable.

Thus it becomes an implementation detail, and then I 100% agree this won't be a day-1 problem. I foresee docs.ansible.com being around for a long time for a bunch of reasons, and we are better served by starting with creating the things we don't have today (core static site, blog, etc) than by migrating things that do exist which we can link to for now.

[acozine]

Redirects are definitely possible, as long as the original URLs are not used for something else. But that plan breaks down if there is still content on ansible.com.

If we move the upstream docs to docs.ansible.community, we shouldn't really care where Red Hat moves their product docs to IMHO ;-)

True, as long as the product docs move somewhere else. If product docs remain on ansible.com, then I think we should care.

[tima]

The product docs moved some time ago.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.3
https://console.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub/repo/published/cloud/terraform/docs/

[saito-hideki]

+1 for ansible.community :)

I think it would be nice if the ansible.community domain could become a portal for sharing the results of the comprehensive Ansible Project.
Also, it would be very beneficial to the users if the documentation of Ansible Community projects such as ansible-builder, ansible-runnner, etc. could also be provided in docs.ansible.community.

[mariolenz]

The product docs moved some time ago.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_ansible_automation_platform/2.3 https://console.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub/repo/published/cloud/terraform/docs/

@tima This means the docs on ansible.com are already upstream and not Ansible-the-Red-Hat-product docs anymore, right?

[tima]

Mostly. On further review there are a few thing that should have moved, but have not made it. The intent is for all product docs to be in access.redhat.com and content available in automation hub. I'm going to see what can be done here to finish the job. Right now I would personally suggest that this effort not be too concerned about continuing to maintain this dual role at the expense of the needs of upstream (community) documentation and website.

[mariolenz]

I counted votes:

7 x +1 from SC (mariolenz gotmax23 Andersson007 felixfontein briantist markuman acozine)

1 x -1 from SC (ssbarnea)

12 x +1 from community (jillr chuckmilam tremble rooso AndreasDavour apple4ever cybette Landrash tima samccann saito-hideki chofstede)

1 x -1 from community (BigPii)

Can someone from the Steering Committee confirm?

[Andersson007]

counted the same numbers. So i confirm

[GregSutcliffe]

Thanks everyone! We'll get to work on creating the Working Group for this, stay tuned for details!

[GregSutcliffe]

It's been a month, so I figured an update is in order.

Firstly, the Working Group is already live, if you're not aware of it - you can find the details here:
Repo: https://github.com/ansible-community/community-website/
Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#website:ansible.com
Preview: https://ansible-community.github.io/community-website

We've opted to work async, so there's no weekly meeting, everyone is welcome in the room or to raise issues on GH.

In terms of timeline & deployment, we've had some excellent news - we are going to get ansible.com back for the community 🎉! I genuinely didn't expect this (which is why my earlier writing skated around the topic), but my colleague @wbentley15 has done a stunning job of organising the internal stuff needed to make this happen. We (the Community Team here in Red Hat) had to make some quick decisions on this, so apologies for the lack of discussion - I hope you'll agree with us that getting ansible.com is worth the effort :)

Now, it's going to take some time to migrate the existing content, but I've been told we should get it later this year. That seems an acceptable timeframe, and we can use the summer to work on the prototype for the new community site. We can look at deployment in the autumn, and hold ansible.community in reserve in case of any problems once we get closer to that time.

In short, the plan remains largely the same (separate site, community repo, community governance), only the deployment part (target URL and timeline) have changed. The work is gathering pace, so I hope to see you in the chat room / GitHub issues 😛

[felixfontein]

Awesome! Also thank you very much @wbentley15 and everyone else involved in this :)

[andreasscherbaum]

we are going to get ansible.com back for the community

That is indeed a very good outcome!

[GregSutcliffe]

We've reached October, which was our original forecast for the switchover - sadly, that's not going to happen. The new site is largely complete, but the migration of content from the old site isn't finished yet. I'm told it should be done by the end of the year, which hopefully means this will be too - but certainly I'd expect to be switched over by FOSDEM (early February).

Hang in there folks, and prepare your blog post PRs ;)

[mariolenz]

@GregSutcliffe Is this something we should close, move to the forum or keep open?