Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
This is something that just came up in this Twitter thread. Cody Roux suggested here that some people may prefer to hang out on Zulip rather than the nForum. (Or something like that; I’m not sure exactly what the suggestion is.)
There is already a Category Theory Zulip Chat, and maybe it would be possible to have a stream there for discussions about the nLab? At its simplest, we just create a stream there, and people can coordinate improving pages there if they like. A more advanced option would be to have some code that cross-links that stream with the nLab, just as there are plugins that cross-link StackOverflow sites with Zulip. So there would be updates on the stream whenever a page is edited, for example.
As long as people enter into the project with the intention of fitting in. No major unannounced pages changes, etc.
There is also a possibility of switching the nForum itself to Zulip. It has an API that can be used for nLab’s purposes (e.g., posting comments about changes to nLab pages).
This has an added benefit of using free and open source software actively maintained by somebody else.
This might be a good way to get more people involved in editing the nLab. There are a lot of folks on the CT zulip.
If we switched the nForum to Zulip, is there any way we could still link directly to nLab pages with [[simple link syntax]]?
Re #4: We can substitute the current nForum parser instead of their Markdown implementation: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/subsystems/markdown.html#changing-zulip-s-markdown-processor
Re #4: We can substitute the current nForum parser instead of their Markdown implementation:
My understanding is that this would involve editing the source of Zulip and asking people to use a custom client.
However, fortunately there’s an easier solution. Zulip supports custom “linkifiers”, which search for custom regexes and replace them with URLs: we should be able to use this to automatically link to nLab pages as Mike suggests.
That’s great! Would that require having a dedicated nZulip, instead of just a stream on the CT zulip? I suppose if we were actually replacing the nForum with a zulip we would probably want that anyway.
That’s great! Would that require having a dedicated nZulip, instead of just a stream on the CT zulip?
The linkifier would affect the entire server, but I imagine this would be useful more generally anyway, given how often the nLab is linked. So it would just involve asking a moderator to add a linkifier. There’s a small issue at the moment in that the linkifier syntax doesn’t support square brackets, so the syntax [[link]] wouldn’t currently be supported. Hopefully either that will be fixed by Zulip soon, or we could use an alternative syntax in the interim. There’s another open issue for supporting linkifiers only in certain streams.
Re #6: It’s not just about the double-bracketed links. nForum has tons of Instiki- and iTeX-specific syntax, which is actually used all over, especially since a lot of text is copy-pasted from the nLab directly to the nForum.
For instance, iTeX’s bizarre syntax for 2 or more letters being typeset in a different font. Also, the various TeX commands that the nLab now allows, e.g., \ref{…}, \cite{…}, etc.
Well, I was assuming we would only switch going forward, so the syntax of past posts wouldn’t matter. However, it’s true that we do continue to like to copy and paste stuff in from the nLab occasionally, and that would certainly be more annoying if the syntax changed.
If only a fraction of the effort of talking about the nLab could be put into actually editing it.
1 to 12 of 12