Conda mailing list will be replaced by conda Community Forum at end of 2022

[Dave Clements]

Hello All,

After a 9 year run the "conda - Public" Google group (this mailing list) will close at the end of this year.  It is being replaced by the conda Community Forum. See The post below for more on the forum, and for why we are doing this now.

I encourage you to create an account on the community forum today.  You can use your email address, your Google account, or your GitHub ID to create a login. 

Hope to see you in the forum, 

Dave C

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Announcing the conda Community Forum

Date: Oct 3 2022

Hello all,

We are pleased to announce the launch of the conda Community Forum, an online forum for questions, answers, news, and discussion about the conda ecosystem.

We expect that this site to become the "go to" place for people with questions about conda & friends.

The site is organized in several broad categories, each with a different focus:

• Users
  • Questions, answers and discussion about how to use the conda ecosystem to manage software packages, and run time environments.
• Package Builders
  • How to make software packages available in the conda ecosystem.
• Contributors
  • Conda ecosystem development and infrastructure.
• News
  • Items of interest to the conda community.
• Site
  • Rules, policies, questions, answers, and discussion about this site.

Anyone can read posts on the forum.  You will need to create a login to start and add to discussions.  Anyone can create a login, and we strongly encourage you to sign up today.

Note: The Forum will replace this mailing list.

We are planning to archive this list by the end of 2022.  Until then you will still be able to post here. However, we encourage you to start posting in the forum starting today.

Why?

The co...@anaconda.com mailing list has been around for a long time, and has over 800 members.  However, engagement on this list (and on mailing lists in general - not just in the conda ecosystem) has been in decline for many years.  People now generally prefer chat or forum interfaces for Q&A.  

This is one of the reasons for creating the conda Community Forum and we hope the forum will be far more engaging and active than the mailing list has been recently.  We are archiving this mailing list as part of a larger effort to give the conda Community a small set of obvious places to visit when they have questions.  We also plan to launch a few more places In the coming months:

• A conda community website at conda.org.  
• A unified chat platform to replace (or possibly gather) our current disparate Gitter and Slack channels.  (See this issue and search for "Chat Platform".)

These will be announced on the conda Community Forum when they are launched.

Thanks to everyone who helped get the forum ready. And thanks in advance to the entire community for posting your questions, answers, news items, discussions and upvotes there. We look forward to having the site become a vital knowledge base for the community.

Thanks,
Dave Clements