Will HaxeFlixel ever get a real forum?

[Justin C.]

     One thing I constantly bring up is the lack of a real (and organized) forum. I always wondered why we never get one, and are just stuck to this small google group. I'm guessing it's because of the size of our community, but maybe this tiny community would thrive on a small forum? I'm not sure what the point of this post is, I guess just asking why we don't have a forum.

[Pizzamakesgames]

A Discord group or something similar wouldn't be bad as well.

[Ashiq A.]

I think the goal is to have a single point for the community, not to have distributed communities everywhere (eg. one forum, and one mailing list, and stack overflow / gamedev.se)

I agree that a google group has poor visibility to search engines, and that something web-based like Discourse or even Stack Overflow may serve HaxeFlixel better from a "marketing" perspective. (Same goes for Haxe itself. OpenFL has a pretty awesome Discourse installation.)

On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Pizzamakesgames <feliks...@online.de> wrote:

A Discord group wouldn't be bad as well.

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[Pizzamakesgames]

I think the suggestion is to have one forum, just instead of a google group, not side-by-side.

[Jeru Sanders]

I actually don't mind Google Groups, what's the problem with it?

There's also a subreddit which I don't think anyone uses, there's just not enough users to spread out like that.

[Justin C.]

The google group is an unorganized mess that isn't fun to work with.

We did just get a discord group though, although I'm fairly sure it's unofficial.

[Jeru Sanders]

Discord? I'm looking at is now and it looks functionally similar to IRC, which we have and is reasonably active (26 members online now)

But you can't create threads on either of them, I'm not sure how it could possibly be an alternative to Google Groups.

What about Google Groups is unorganized?

[Justin C.]

First of all, you can infact make different channels on Discord http://puu.sh/mnhnz/4322db50e7.png

Second, Google Groups is unorganized due to the fact it doesn't support separate threads like a normal forum.

Also, whenever I go onto the IRC, no one speaks whatsoever. It's also not the best since you need to know the HaxeFlixel server name and all of that.

[Jeru Sanders]

Can standard users create channels? I can't seem to figure out how.

And you need to sign up to even see the contents? That's absurd, and I'm sure 0% of it will be indexed for searching for that reason. It's also missing some very basic features like inline links, coloured text, and fonts.

Does Google Groups not support separate, threads? How is a "thread" different than a "topic"?

As for IRC, that's how I'd imagine the Discord chat would be as well, with p2p chat people aren't always eager to talk, but when people do ask questions they're generally answered. As for the server name, you'd still have to know this long ass Discord url.

https://discordapp.com/channels/134598558342053888/134598558342053888

Which is way more complex than the IRC channel name.

Discord seems to be a somewhat viable alternative to IRC, although IRC has a far stronger foundation and is currently populated.

[MegaLeon]

There was some talk about this here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haxeflixel/NGoJzA1JgaE

I think the main obstacles are: 

- hosting costs

- time / effort spent on moving, setting up and maintaining the forums

I'd love to see something happening after the 4.0 release. Who knows?

[Tembac]

Remember that anyone can make contributions to the project using Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/haxeflixel?ty=h

I think that if everyone puts 5 dollars a month the team will be able to complete more things.