This discussion group is moving to Discourse

[Daniel Meyer]

With great pleasure I have observed this discussion group become more and more active over the last 3 years. Looking at the last month (February 2016), the stats are quite impressive: there were 521 posts and 121 total topics. Given a total of 21 working days in February this accounts to over 20 posts and 6 new topics per working day!

Camunda as an open source project is also getting broader and broader in scope. Over the last six months we added the new Camunda Modeler and the DMN runtime. Some of our users only use the Modeler to "draw" processes and are less interested in following Java discussions. Others only use the DMN engine and do not want to get distracted by posts about the tasklist.

Given this positive development of the discussion group and the Camunda open source project in general, we think that it makes sense to use a better tool for hosting it. Therefore, It is with great pleasure that I announce that this group will move to discourse by the end of next week.

We feel that moving to discourse is the right choice. It provides

• Great support for categorizing and tagging posts for focusing the discussion,
• Improved search and sorting to allow users to find answers to questions which have been asked before,
• Superior text formatting and authoring features to improve the quality of the answers,
• Better overall usability and much nicer look and feel,
• User reputation system,
• Independence from Google (You can use a google account but you don't have to). This makes this forum accessible in countries like China.

And we have had a very good experience with discourse in the bpmn.io project: https://forum.bpmn.io/

The downsides of this move are that is is not easily possible to move over the existing 2200+ threads over to discourse. Also, users who have written many posts here will "loose their reputation".

Yet, we think that the advantages of moving to discourse outweigh the downsides.

Here are some questions you may ask yourself:

What happens to the Google Group?

The content of the google group will continue to be available here and you will be able to search through it as a knowledge base. However, it will not be possible to create new topics anymore.

Can I have a look at the new discourse forum now?

Yes. It is already hosted at https://forum.camunda.org

Can I use my existing Google Account to login to the new Forum?

Yes.

What happens to the developer forum?

There is a Category "Contributions" in the new Forum which can be used for discussing contributions to Camunda.

Feedback Welcome

If you have feedback on this change, please comment on this post.

Thank you and all the best,

Daniel