RFC: Provide a community-wide banner server

[skade]

This RFC suggests providing a banner server serving recurring messages to spread over multiple web venues, such as our website to make people aware things in the Rust ecosystem.

@aturon suggested to try writing RFCS for community subjects and this is the first edition for this.

It doesn't follow the standard RFC conventions to the fullest, as it's not a Rust feature per se. The relevant community team ticket can be found here

Rendered

[Ixrec]

Indeed, we are at a state where even seasoned people in the community suddenly hear of something that was announced quite a while ago.

Case in point: I've never heard about the Forge or Servo Starters before reading this RFC. And I'm a crazy person that has the entire rust repo and rfcs repo and a few others set to "Watch" and actually reads every single email that generates.

On the other hand, I have no idea whether this proposal would solve that, since that seems to depend entirely on what sites show these banners. Personally, the only Rust-related website I visit regularly is https://internals.rust-lang.org/, but maybe that's just me. I imagine someplace like r/rust would get plenty of attention.

[mark-i-m]

I've recently had this problem, too (#2109), and @SimonSapin has a similar concern in #2122 ...

Resources like This Week in Rust are great, but it seems that there is a need for some official Rust new source.

My only concern is that I'm not sure that this is the most effective way to do that... Perhaps an RSS feed or some sort of announcements mailing list would be useful?

[skade]

This isn't a news source, though, this is a recurring pointer to news sources. Doesn't TWIR have the relevant sections?

Also, FCPs are listed on the rusty dash (https://rusty-dash.com/fcp). That's another resource we tell people about again and again :).

[mark-i-m]

TWIR is excellent(!), and does contain all of the relevant info.

That's another resource we tell people about again and again :).

And yet, I seem to have missed it...

Perhaps the problem is that the Rust home page doesn't have a clear link or subsection for "News" or something. As I see it, (TMK) there is no officially sanctioned Rust News source which we universally tell everyone to follow.

[Ixrec]

I'm also subscribed to TWIR, which I always saw as a "news source". Maybe we just need to put a few more things in there?

[mark-i-m]

I think the content is fine, but the publicity is somehow still spotty... I've heard from a lot of others that a lot of effort is made to announce things everywhere, but somehow, I still missed the news?

[skade]

@lxrec @mark-i-m Let's not change the subject.

This RFC adresses the problem of repeat messaging. TWIRF is announcements and it works quite well as such. Suggestions to TWIRF should be sent to the TWIRF team.

The problem that @mark-i-m mentions is basically what I want to address: if you somehow miss the announcement (you're on holidays, caught up with something else, whatevs), you never get a chance to find it again. Also, the Rust website has a lot of content for that, but it is dense at you won't come back to it once you read it once.

[nrc]

As an alternative/addition, it would be great if the banner server had an API providing news in JSON format, so rather than embed an HTML banner on a website (which I wouldn't be keen to do on my personal website) I could ping the server for news and display some text and a link. It also lets people try cool and novel experiments using the news which should increase the reach.

[mark-i-m]

The problem that @mark-i-m mentions is basically what I want to address: if you somehow miss the announcement (you're on holidays, caught up with something else, whatevs), you never get a chance to find it again

TBH, not sure this is precisely the problem I face (and perhaps I'm wrong altogether)... I actually manage to miss news even when I think I'm paying attention.

[skade]

@nrc I specifically avoided the term "news", as this is less for news then things that are specifically not new anymore.

The current implementation of the server has a JSON API, but I'd rather focus on serving an easy to include embed code and later commit on a fixed API. I'll add it as a possible future extension.

[skade]

I misspoke, the section "Example Implementation" hints at an API to be used for custom stuff. Clarified the state of the API.

[mark-i-m]

Hmm... I feel uncomfortable with this. Would it be possible to do a survey of how people find out about Rust events/discussions first? It's seems like we are all guessing at what the problem is, but maybe we want some more systematic analysis? Just a suggestion; I don't want the community to put a lot of effort into a bunch of efforts that don't get that much bang for the buck.

[skade]

Well, there's a common and recurring complaint that stuff is hard to find.

It's hard to figure out something that is in unknown territory without trying.

Also, this is a low-cost solution, we've got a trial implementation with 2 maintainers, which is much more then we have on most community efforts.

[skade]

It just occurred to me that there is another project that very rarely generates news, but could use promotion: our YouTube channel. It's surprisingly successful, basically because YouTube does what we propose in this RFC: constantly offer it again and again.

[mark-i-m]

Hmm... well, I guess that's true.

[bestouff]

Is there something wrong with a simple RSS feed ?

[skade]

@bestouff an RSS feed doesn't repeat. We have RSS feeds and use them for syndication, but they solve a different problem. They don't give you the info you missed last year but that is still of interest.

[ghost]

I think this is a cool experiment! 😄 Some comments:

Banners are an appropriate place for recurring messaging: they are always at the same place, they can hold different content and they can be placed at different locations.

I don't fully understand this sentence. If banners are always at the same place, how can they be placed at different locations? I hope you don't mean having several banners on the same page?

Specialised ad publishers are not a unusual and regularly have a better rep then large ad networks, because they can easily control relevance and annoyance.

This is the first time the RFC mentions the thing as an "ad" instead of a "banner", and for me this gives a wrong connotation: that of money being paid. While the README for the Rust Campaigns Server makes it clear that no money is accepted, this is not mentioned in the RFC at all. I would prefer it if the RFC explicitly states that these are not ads and not refer to them as ads; both "banner" and "campaign" are much more value-neutral in my opinion.

Finally it would be cool to have a small example of what this would actually look like on a website, either here in the RFC text or on the campaigns server repo. I have a hard time visualising what it would feel like to have such a banner added to a site without seeing it.

[skade]

@bupknar thanks for catching these places, yes, you fully catch my intention.

While it's totally up to whoever uses the banners, there's no intention to encourage people to use more then one or break text flow using them.

[aturon]

Ping on this -- is this still of interest to the community team? cc @booyaa @ashleygwilliams

[skade]

I'd still be interested, but currently don't have time to drive it. That might change soon, though.

[skade]

Closing this because it lingers. I still feel this is a good idea, but I think time is better spent somewhere else for now.