[wyldckat]

There are several ways you can contribute to an open source project and the community around it. You can Google for the following sentence:

contribute to an open source project

to get several pages that tell us how to contribute to open source projects.

But when it comes to OpenFOAM technology, things might get a bit confusing, given that there are several forks and variants that are based on OpenFOAM - hence the term "OpenFOAM technology". A complete list of forks and variants of OpenFOAM is provided at the unofficial OpenFOAM wiki: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Forks_and_Variants

Therefore, there are several ways you can contribute to the OpenFOAM ecosystem, including and not limited to the following ways:

1. You can answer to questions of fellow forum members and help people here on the OpenFOAM forum, which is a nice and interesting way of training yourself.
   • By sharing, exploring and working through solutions for new and interesting problems that other people face, it can become a do-it-yourself-internship way of learning more ways on how to use OpenFOAM et al.
2. If you don't like how the OpenFOAM forum is organized here at CFD-Online, then try using the tag "openfoam" at StackExchange: https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/qu...agged/openfoam
   • There was an effort for having a somewhat more organized way of answering questions in a StackExchange (aka StackOverflow) format at StackExchange's Area51: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/88229/openfoam-technology
     - but this was terminated after a prolonged period of not achieving enough people signing on to the proposition.
3. You can and/or should report bugs you find while using OpenFOAM or any of its forks/variants.
   • Please keep in mind that reporting bugs on the more recent versions is usually more useful than reporting bugs for older versions, because... well, because the bug might already have been fixed in a more recent version!
   • Please only report bugs that refer to the specific project that you're reporting for. Don't cross-report unless the bug is common to one or more versions/forks of OpenFOAM.
   • As you gain experience, start looking into existing bug reports, to see if you can figure out a solution for it!
   • Links:
     • The bug tracker for OpenFOAM is this one: http://www.openfoam.org/bugs/
     • The bug tracker for OpenFOAM+ is indicated here: http://openfoam.com/code/bug-reporting.php
     • The list of bug/issue trackers for each fork is listed at the wiki page: http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Forks_and_Variants
4. If you want to contribute directly to a specific project of OpenFOAM technology, the links for the more popular projects as listed as follows:
   1. foam-extend: the most long-standing and contributor-embracing project of OpenFOAM technology, has at least two pages on how to contribute:
      1. The main project page: https://sourceforge.net/p/openfoam-e...wToContribute/
      2. And the Extend-Project portal: http://www.extend-project.de/how-to-contribute
      3. And a once a year worldwide workshop for old/new users/contributors to meet: http://openfoamworkshop.org
   2. OpenFOAM: the primary project of the OpenFOAM technology, has the following contribution guidelines: https://openfoam.org/dev/how-to-contribute/ - keep in mind that it has one of the strictest contribution guidelines of all.
   3. OpenFOAM+: the second in-line project of the OpenFOAM technology, brewing new features with direct aim towards OpenFOAM. It's a fairly recent endeavour (announced on the 13th of January 2016) and is coordinating community projects as well: http://www.openfoam.com/community/
5. There there are all of the other projects that use OpenFOAM technology. The known lists are provided here:
   • Contributions in general (usually not tied to a specific OpenFOAM version/fork/variant): http://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Contrib
   • Extend-bazaar for the foam-extend project: https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/Extend-bazaar
   • And the community ones for OpenFOAM+: http://www.openfoam.com/services/community-projects.php
6. If you want to contribute to the openfoamwiki.net website, please please check the section "How to contribute to the wiki" on the About page.

If you have any additional questions on how to contribute, or suggestions on how to improve this list, please ask and/or comment below!

______

In case you're still confused about the terminology of "OpenFOAM technology", "unofficial OpenFOAM-wiki" and all of these projects, here's the simple explanation: OpenFOAM® is a registered trade mark of OpenCFD/ESI and official use of the trade mark can only be done with explicitly written permission. For more details, see the trade mark policy.

[Tobi]

Hi Bruno,

since when there is a »stackoverflow« like forum for openfoam? I already heard that the community wants to have some new forum like the stack-overflow one where people can vote answers and so on. I also appreciate this thought but we should do it in a nice way.

• My question first, ... who was introducing that new forum?
• Who is responsible for the cfd-online forum? Due to the fact that I scripted a long time with php, there should be a way to order the replays based on - for example - the likes.
• Instead of creating a new forum, may it not be better to improve the one we have here? Adding some "solved" button to indicate that there is an answer which is good.
• Furthermore the ordering of the replays could be changed based on the likes that we have (or some options -> order as the replays were generated or order by the likes or any new button that can be used for that (:

It is just a thought
I like cfd-online and the wiki and do not want to interact on 4 new sites

[akidess]

The Stackexchange site is not live - it's been stuck in proposal stage for over a year I think. I've been advertising it in my signature ever since, and if it ever comes to life I will throw a party. In my opinion, CFD-Online is horrible for finding answers quickly. Ordering replies based on likes does not replicate Stackexchange and would actually break most threads. Many, many questions and answers here evolve over many posts (instead of live, updated responses on SE), and often you need to mangle through multiple closely related threads to find answers (duplicates are not being strictly deleted). CFD-Online by the way already has a solved and rating feature which nobody uses.

[Tobi]

Hi,

Okay. I did not know that. Thanks for the information. Hmmm... I also like stackoverflow forums for c++ ... I also agree that it is really hard to find the answer quickly in most of the cases. Difficult... I mean all the different sites and so on. Joszef is organising something at the moment based on tutorial stuff but not for a forum. If the stackexchange forum would be used I am in to support people but for me it does not look very serious even if the layout should not matter, I would prefer something better.

I was not on the workshop in Portugal but as my colleagues told me, a new forum is not supported by Bruno and Jasak (maybe I missunderstand things).

For me one good way would to use the wikisite, put a new index side that shows buttons to the code like -> Openfoam.org, .com and the foam extend project, another one should go to the wiki, another one to the forum (cfd-online; a new stack overflow like one), another one to good pages Luke Chalmers etc...

Even the new stack overflow forum could be hosted by the openfoamwiki. Well this are just ideas and I would definitely work on that to make life easier but I am not involved. I also could open a new forum but I think no-one would use it, even it would look very serious.

Well, that's my opinion.

[wyldckat]

Hi Tobi and Anton,

I'll have to be quick (although I'll be long-winded...):

Originally Posted by Tobi

since when there is a »stackoverflow« like forum for openfoam? I already heard that the community wants to have some new forum like the stack-overflow one where people can vote answers and so on. I also appreciate this thought but we should do it in a nice way.

• My question first, ... who was introducing that new forum?

Fellow forum members tomislav_maric and jhoepken from Sourceflux kick-started that effort... although I'm not 100% which one of them was who started it, but after talking with Tomislav at OFW11, he is the one most adamant in solving this problem, i.e. how to provide open support the community. The reason came up because he noticed that he was answering to the same questions over and over here on the forum...

This was kick-started after or during OFW10, if I remember correctly, as Anton already pointed out.

The problem is that this effort requires frequent users/contributors of the StackExchange platform and that those users sing up to supporting this particular effort. 100 of those users are needed for making the platform go forward from the proposal stage.

They (Tomislav and Jens) also have a server on the ready to support foam-extend more extensively, but there were several setbacks that lead to the server not being available yet to the public.

Nonetheless, it's expected that at this year's user conference held by ESI-OpenCFD there will be further discussions with those present on how this or a global community effort can start to go forward at full steam in the near future. A few details are available at my blog, in the following post: 11th community OpenFOAM Workshop: finally managed to attend one of these! Part 3

Nonetheless, please use the contact at their website http://www.sourceflux.de/about/ (top of the page) to ask Tomislav and Jens for more details on how you can contribute to their server.

Furthermore, for those who can, please attend this year's User Conference on the 11th to 13th of October 2016 in Cologne, Germany: http://www.esi-group.com/company/eve...onference-2016

Originally Posted by Tobi

• Who is responsible for the cfd-online forum?

Depends on what type of responsibility:

• The administrators of CFD-Online are responsible for the forums platform.
• The moderators from the OpenFOAM community are responsible for maintaining the threads and posts here at the OpenFOAM section.

The two lists are provided here: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/showgroups.php

Problem is that (I'm not 100% certain on this) I've been the only moderator more active on the OpenFOAM side. And I've had a massive set-back on free time, partly due to OFW11 (it was in Portugal and I simply had to show up and contribute to it as well), partly due to work and other work-related set-backs.

Originally Posted by Tobi

• [...] Due to the fact that I scripted a long time with php, there should be a way to order the replays based on - for example - the likes.
• Instead of creating a new forum, may it not be better to improve the one we have here? Adding some "solved" button to indicate that there is an answer which is good.

There is an open policy here at the CFD-Online forums, namely to re-use existing threads on a topic, precisely in an effort to consolidate information on a particular topic. The "[SOLVED]" threads would have the exact opposite effect: it would increase the number of threads, simply because solved threads are usually closed after being solved.

However, I noticed just now the that there is poll to change this: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/sit...matically.html
Further details on why this poll was started: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/sit...cfd-forum.html

Originally Posted by Tobi

• Furthermore the ordering of the replays could be changed based on the likes that we have (or some options -> order as the replays were generated or order by the likes or any new button that can be used for that (:

It is just a thought
I like cfd-online and the wiki and do not want to interact on 4 new sites

Like-ordering is not necessarily the best strategy, given that people sometimes like stuff that has nothing to do with the topic, i.e possibly an in-between joke on the reply.
There is however a "star" ordering already, which was meant to help with this... but rarely anyone uses this feature.

There are also tags that can be used/sorted/importance-clustered, but again, rarely anyone uses it and last time I checked it was limited to 5 or 10 tags.

There was a thread I started a few years ago to sort out the organization of the OpenFOAM section: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/sit...ams-forum.html - there were a few problems as to why it didn't go forward:

1. Too many sub-forums was the main idea, which was bottlenecked by the fact that not enough moderators exist to go around ensuring that things are in place.
2. Everyone wants their questions answered, so they don't care where they should ask it, if no one goes there.

The latest idea was to rely instead on prefixes as it's already used in the ANSYS meshing sub-forum: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ansys-meshing/ - problem is that I haven't managed to gather a list of what prefixes should be used for each sub-forum and it also relies on moderators.

Originally Posted by akidess

Many, many questions and answers here evolve over many posts (instead of live, updated responses on SE)

Although StackExchange has great benefits and organization, it's also limited; at least AFAIK. The main structure allows for questions to be answered, but its main focus is to have a 1-to-1 Q-A. But there are a lot of questions where that simply isn't possible, given that it's not just a matter of a single "fvSchemes" option or a boundary condition, it's actually several details over the whole case.

Nonetheless, there is a need to have those two scenarios well met and kept. But: moderators are always needed for both platforms! Although on SE I have the notion that it's based on points, when people become moderators or not.

Originally Posted by akidess

(duplicates are not being strictly deleted).

I've done the best I could when I have the time. But past threads (~2012 and older) and the past few of months have been off my radar

Originally Posted by akidess

CFD-Online by the way already has a solved and rating feature which nobody uses.

"Solved" feature is not yet available, at least last time I checked. Some people simply write it on the title or ask a moderator to change the title to add those prefixes.

Originally Posted by Tobi

For me one good way would to use the wikisite, put a new index side that shows buttons to the code like -> Openfoam.org, .com and the foam extend project, another one should go to the wiki, another one to the forum (cfd-online; a new stack overflow like one), another one to good pages Luke Chalmers etc...

Read the blog post I wrote and go to the User Conference this year. Efforts are being pulled towards this and OpenCFD is willing to listen and collaborate towards this effort, namely to consolidate everything under one platform or at least website.
But essentially the message I got was that this will only happen if people are truly willing to contribute, as it's already been seen that this is the main detail that has been failing for several years now.

Originally Posted by Tobi

Even the new stack overflow forum could be hosted by the openfoamwiki.

Uh... I think Bernhard is already over-scheduled as it is. Please don't burden him with having to maintain a StackExchange clone on his server.

Originally Posted by Tobi

Well this are just ideas and I would definitely work on that to make life easier but I am not involved. I also could open a new forum but I think no-one would use it, even it would look very serious.

The http://extend-project.de/ website was the previous iteration/attempt at solving this problem. Not enough people stepped in to contribute. It's still up... but not used very much

From what I discussed with a few people at OFW11, to properly improve on the current forum structure, the "real" solution would be to enforce that people who ask questions on the forum, should be held responsible for writing a wiki page on what was the problem and how the problem was solved. It would be a good learning experience for those who asked about a question and it would help consolidate information.
The other hypothesis would be to be able to pick the posts that have the questions and answers that mattered the most and give the summary version of the thread...
StackExchange makes these concepts more streamlined, but the discussion itself about a problem would have to be done separately from the Q-A section, which is also something that StackExchange does... problem is whether the original asker will consolidate the original question or not, to meet expectations, since I'm not familiar if the live discussion system allows sending the answers directly to the respective Q-A thread.


Either way: attend this year's ESI-OpenCFD User Conference if you want things to move forward!!

Best regards,
Bruno

[akidess]

Hi Bruno! Let me start by saying you are doing a fantastic job for the community!

The reason came up because he noticed that he was answering to the same questions over and over here on the forum...

Yes, that and low effort posts. I have the feeling it contributes to expert users leaving the forums at some point.

Problem is that (I'm not 100% certain on this) I've been the only moderator more active on the OpenFOAM side. [...] I've done the best I could when I have the time.

I have the same feeling, and I think 10 more moderators of your caliber would be necessary to keep everything organized.

There are also tags that can be used/sorted/importance-clustered, but again, rarely anyone uses it and last time I checked it was limited to 5 or 10 tags.

There was a thread I started a few years ago to sort out the organization of the OpenFOAM section: Suggestion for a new sub-forum at OpenFOAM's Forum - there were a few problems as to why it didn't go forward:

1. Too many sub-forums was the main idea, which was bottlenecked by the fact that not enough moderators exist to go around ensuring that things are in place.
2. Everyone wants their questions answered, so they don't care where they should ask it, if no one goes there.

The latest idea was to rely instead on prefixes as it's already used in the ANSYS meshing sub-forum: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ansys-meshing/ - problem is that I haven't managed to gather a list of what prefixes should be used for each sub-forum and it also relies on moderators.

I'm not a fan of the many sub-forums, though at the current state they probably work better than tags or prefixes (which are essentially the same concept). Tags and prefixes heavily rely on moderators.

Nonetheless, there is a need to have those two scenarios well met and kept. But: moderators are always needed for both platforms! Although on SE I have the notion that it's based on points, when people become moderators or not.

It is somewhat based on points, yes. But it makes the entire community grow into moderators - first you get to vote, add tags, edit questions, vote to close, ... The entire system is designed as a game to keep people engaged, with a progression to not overwhelm new "moderators". The system also does it's best to automatically detect duplicates while people write out their questions (a feature which could directly translate to traditional discussion based forums as this one).

From what I discussed with a few people at OFW11, to properly improve on the current forum structure, the "real" solution would be to enforce that people who ask questions on the forum, should be held responsible for writing a wiki page on what was the problem and how the problem was solved. It would be a good learning experience for those who asked about a question and it would help consolidate information.
The other hypothesis would be to be able to pick the posts that have the questions and answers that mattered the most and give the summary version of the thread...

Would be great, but I don't think that's a realistic option.

StackExchange makes these concepts more streamlined, but the discussion itself about a problem would have to be done separately from the Q-A section, which is also something that StackExchange does... problem is whether the original asker will consolidate the original question or not, to meet expectations, since I'm not familiar if the live discussion system allows sending the answers directly to the respective Q-A thread.

Anyone can suggest edits to questions, which are peer reviewed. With enough points you can edit without peer review.

[akidess]

On a side note, check out http://www.discourse.org/. It's a "traditional" discussion forum, but implements many of the learnings from Stackexchange, e.g. community moderation features.

[Tobi]

Originally Posted by akidess

Yes, that and low effort posts. I have the feeling it contributes to expert users leaving the forums at some point.

I agree, if I look back a few years I would say that there were more experts available on the forum.

Originally Posted by akidess

Hi Bruno! Let me start by saying you are doing a fantastic job for the community!

I also agree. Bruno without your encourage, I am not sure how the forum would be at the moment.

In any case, I hope that a good solution could be found in feature.

[rdbisme]

I saw the the attempt to create an OpenFOAM Q&A failed. That is very sad... I really think that this forum, though being useful in the past suffer several problems:

• Old discussions and answers that are not updated to new versions of OF
• Unpolite behaviour of the average asker (i.e. ask and run)
• Spread material. Some of it is on Github, some other as attachment to the forum answers, other sent by email etc..
• Markdown really eases writing nice posts
• Aged graphics (minor problem...)
• Low flexibility to follow only what we want to follow. On Stack Exchange instead you can setup notifications on specific tags. And if we a priori split the tags among us, we could easily taking under control lots of topics...

I really believe that running the main Q&A on a StackExchange site would really improve the quality of support this community is providing lowering also the effort of the community maintainers. StackExchange also provides stanzas where discussion can be pursued for those situations where a well-defined answer is not immediately ready. Moreover StackOverflow at least already ships with a Careers section (that is unfortunately not free for the job promoters) that could embody the same service currently provided here.

I believe that all the forum, and not only the OF section, would benefit from switching to SE (there are also opensource alternatives but I think that staying on the SE platform is really a plus!).

Maybe we could use the scicomp.stackexchange.com site with specific tags? What I could think is that we take the most liked questions and answers and we migrate them on scicomp. But this does not solve the problem and maybe it creates others since data replication in different places is always the source of all evils (wasn't it precoce optimization?) :P

Are there other discussion related to the improvement of the forum experience? Maybe on other threads I do not follow...

[tiam]

The mechanism that upgrades the users based on their actions that Stack has is great. It introduces a very clear "reward" system that motivates being active.

[ordinary]

Stack is good one. On the other hand there are restrictions about posting, elitist attitude, downvoter trolls etc. Pros and cons. Just my two cents.

[akidess]

Originally Posted by ordinary

downvoter trolls

Stack has filters for malicious downvotes, downvotes are penalized and a downvote has a small impact compared to an upvote. This really isn't an issue I have ever encountered on the niche sites (which OpenFOAM would have been).

[ordinary]

Originally Posted by akidess

Stack has filters for malicious downvotes, downvotes are penalized and a downvote has a small impact compared to an upvote. This really isn't an issue I have ever encountered on the niche sites (which OpenFOAM would have been).

I intended to mean elitist and 'How can you ask this? How do you dare to ask this you noob? ' attidude. Format is much more important there rather than the topic or question itself.

[akidess]

You noted elitest as a separate point, and also it's an issue not specific to stack but which affects any kind of user generated content. If it's an issue here on CFD-online it would be an issue on Stack, if it aint I don't see why that would change?

[rdbisme]

Originally Posted by ordinary

I intended to mean elitist and 'How can you ask this? How do you dare to ask this you noob? ' attidude. Format is much more important there rather than the topic or question itself.

I must basically disagree. Posing a good question is a prerequisite to get a good answer. That kind of attitude, even if sometimes exaggerated, is a guarantee of good quality content.

Before asking you need to read and document yourself to pose a correct answer. As a side effect this helps also to understand the answers.

Sent from my LeTv x500 (BB72 ROM)

[ordinary]

Originally Posted by tidusuper91

I must basically disagree. Posing a good question is a prerequisite to get a good answer. That kind of attitude, even if sometimes exaggerated, is a guarantee of good quality content.

Before asking you need to read and document yourself to pose a correct answer. As a side effect this helps also to understand the answers.

Sent from my LeTv x500 (BB72 ROM)

I understand what you mean. Of course you need to read and document yourself (e.g. what you tried). But even if you do so, you can get downvotes and reaction. In Stack, I think it is a little 'exaggerated' than appropriate way. I feel much more relaxed when I ask here, -CFD-online.

[wyldckat]

Greetings to all!

Sorry for being a bit late to the latest conversations on this topic.

@tidusuper91:

Originally Posted by tidusuper91

I saw the the attempt to create an OpenFOAM Q&A failed. That is very sad...

Many thanks for the heads up! I was not aware of this. It would probably have taken a few more years until this was achieved, namely having enough people signed on to the idea.
I will update the first post on this thread, to revise this information.

I don't know if there are currently any joint efforts being done with ESI-OpenCFD, as part of their efforts they have been doing to work more closely with the community: http://openfoam.com/community/

Originally Posted by tidusuper91

Are there other discussion related to the improvement of the forum experience? Maybe on other threads I do not follow...

An old thread on the specific topic to try and improve the forums for OpenFOAM is this one: Suggestion for a new sub-forum at OpenFOAM's Forum - I wrote about this in one of the posts above.

In December 2014, in the anniversary for CFD-Online, Jonas Larsson asked for suggestions, including if we should switch to a StackExchange format, in this thread: CFD Online Celebrates 20 Years Online


What I strongly suggest for those on this thread that are interested in improving the community experience, is that someone starts a new thread at https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/si...k-discussions/ suggesting in more detail about this possibility, namely to either switching to a StackExchange format or how the forum can be improved.
Because as far as I can figure out, at least for the OpenFOAM technology ecosystem, the only somewhat practical solution requires:

1. Consolidating the existing forums and threads into relying more on tags and prefixes. I've been trying to do this a bit on the Installation sub-forum, at least by manually using prefixes.
2. An easier way for people to vote for threads to be moved to another sub-forum, namely for triaging.
3. Rely more on openfoamwiki.net to consolidate answers.
   • This something that no matter how automated StackExchange might be, manually writing wiki pages that consolidate information is preferable, both for the person that originally posted the question and for those that are still learning about OpenFOAM.

Best regards,
Bruno

[rdbisme]

CFD-Online Community 2.0

I started a thread in the global forum to discuss improvements on CFD-Online community. Feel free to contribute.