Community-maintained forum replacement?

[Ingo Schommer]

Hello!

We've shut down the silverstripe.org forums back in October, and moved them to readonly operation. The currently recommended alternatives are:

- Slack: For topic-based chats (e.g. #graphql), smaller technical questions and general community coordination and banter

- Stack Overflow: For specific technical questions
- Github: For issues and discussions on planned features

- Uservoice: For highlevel product suggestions and voting

- doc.silverstripe.org and api.silverstripe.org: For common documentation topics, lessons, reference (with a focus on long-term maintainability)

- Blogs (silverstripe.org and others): For time-bound advice (without long-term maintenance), recipes, case studies, deep dive on practices

Those capture a good chunk of use cases for SilverStripe community interactions. Through direct chats and feedback on the community survey, it surfaced that many of you like the persistence of a "searchable knowledge base". Technical questions tend to be answered repeatedly in Slack, particularly with our 10k message limit in the free account. Answering the same question twice is time spent by dedicated community members which could be used more effectively.

The driver for shutting down the forums was to reprioritise time commitments by the still relatively small team of dedicated staff members at SilverStripe.

We've got a lot to take care of: There's nearly a hundred Github repositories under our maintenance now,

and even seemingly small things like getting api.silverstripe.org working with SilverStripe 4 (and PHP namespaces) was nearly a person week of effort.

So within that team, we have to pick our battles.

Which is why I'm proposing that we revive the forums as a community-maintained resource.

Possible forum topics and examples that don't fit well elsewhere:
- General (Example: "Who's keen on a StripeCon US?")

- Feature discussions (replacing Uservoice, Example: "Replace TinyMCE editor with X")

- Feature-based (Example: Ecommerce, content blocks, etc)
- Tech Practices (Example: "SilverStripe + Postgres performance tips?")
- Community Organisation (Example: "Review needed for new lesson draft")
- User Experience (Example: "Do your clients understand the effect of publishing a draft?")

I would suggest using Discourse for this purpose, which is a modern take on forums that can scale with our community. You can self-host it on a $10 Digital Ocean box, which SilverStripe Ltd. is happy to cover.

What we'd need from the community is a commitment from a few people on the following activities:

- Setting up the instance and configuring good defaults

- Simple design adjustments to make it look SilverStripey

- Managing updates, security patches and backups

- Baseline monitoring of the instance

- Passively moderate posts and members (respond to complaints and reports)

There's a few shortcuts we should take to make this realistic:

- Excludes migrating old content or users from silverstripe.org/forum. I don't think it's a blocker, unless somebody is really motivated

- Excludes single sign on with silverstripe.org: I don't think that's crucial. People are managing just fine with separate Github and Slack accounts already.

- Excludes eesponding on forum threads (that should be self-sufficient, and not rely on the forum maintainers alone)

SilverStripe can provide some assistance to get maintainers started, and I'd expect SilverStripe staff to contribute as forum admins. We can also provide some design and infrastructure assistance at the start of the project.

If you're interested in creating a community-maintained forum, please respond here, or contact me directly for further clarifications. You're welcome to suggest alternatives to Discourse as well, or describe your experience with it based on other communities.

Thanks

Ingo

[Jonathon Menz]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

 

Simple design adjustments to make it look SilverStripey

I'm happy to do that part, and probably some moderation too.

[Naomi Guyer]

I'm happy to set it up and configure it on Digital Ocean, do updates, and to look after it generally. I've done a PHPBB to Discourse migration before, but there were tools for that that don't exist for the Silverstripe forum module, so I'm glad that's not in scope. :)

I currently look after another forum on Discourse, and the good news is that its generally pretty good at stopping spam.  Jim Perry has also offered to help. 

--Naomi

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[br...@silverstripe.com]

I am also happy to lend a hand in setup / maintenance. The areas I would be most helpful in are Infrastructure / Security / Patching / etc, however happy to help with moderation as well.

I haven't worked with Discourse before, but have worked with other forums (E.g. PHPBB) back in the days. Also could look at developing a script to import from old forums to new if we want to look at that as well.

Regards,
Brett

[Simon Erkelens]

I'm happy to help with moderation and things. I've been a moderator on multiple forums before.

Possibly also maintenance, although I've never done any Discourse maintenance.

Simon