#1918 Selecting a project purpose
Closed: MIGRATED a year ago by nikromen. Opened 2 years ago by frostyx.

We have a lot of new projects every day (which is totally awesome!)
but only a small fraction of them is meant to be consumed by users.

Currently, we have the "Project will not be listed on home page"
checkbox to hide the rest but I think there is a big room for
improvement. The main problems with this checkbox IMHO are:

  • It just hides projects from the recent listing on the home
    page. The recent projects list is IMHO useless and nobody cares for
    it, as we discussed in #1890
  • When searching something via an on-page search box, such projects
    pop-up and flood the results
  • When viewing a project (that I find through on-page search or via
    Google), there is no indication that the project has "such unlisted
    on homepage" attribute
  • It is too ambiguous. What does that even mean, that a project is not
    listed on the homepage? Why is that? Is the author just shy? Can I still
    use it?

Most of them can be addressed while keeping "the unlisted on homepage"
feature but the last one can't. As I see it, we have the following
types of projects:

  • Project that is meant to be consumed by end-users
  • Project for personal use, might be a bad idea for others to enable
  • Project for a CI. Might be temporary
  • Project for a transition period before a package gets into official
    Fedora repositories

I would call this attribute a "Project purpose".

My idea is to allow users to specify the project purpose when creating
it or editing its settings. There may be a small overlap across those
categories but the general idea is to allow selecting only one
"purpose" for the project. This might have interesting implications.

  • We can put some badge on the project detail page signalizing what is
    the purpose of this project (and whether as a user I should consider
    enabling it or not)
  • We can put such badge also to search results and wherever we list
    projects
  • It will be trivial to list interesting projects (basically all that
    are meant for end-users)
  • I like this one a lot - we can have different defaults and require
    different values for each project purpose. Let's say I create a
    project that is meant to be consumed by end-users but don't write
    any description, installation instructions, etc. Copr might either
    show me (as project owner) warnings when viewing the project that I
    really, really should fill those in, or it may not even allow me to
    create a project for end-users without such information.
  • After some time, we can have cool statistics and know more about how
    people use Copr

This "Project purpose" feature makes "Unlisted on homepage",
and "New Fedora Review project" features redundant and unifies them
under itself.


Alternatively, we can at least mark projects, that conform to some criteria (having information filled in, having a successful build, etc), with some kind of "interesting project" badge and prioritizing them when searching and signalizing this badge to users. So we can at least somehow separate the wheat from the chaff.

But I like the idea of project purpose much better because I imagine the amount of work to implement it might be the same (because this would require some sophisticated caching) and the project purpose has much cooler implications.

Metadata Update from @nikromen:
- Issue close_status updated to: MIGRATED
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

a year ago

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