This forum isn't mobile friendly... or user friendly.

[Flabby_Fabby]

I've tried using this forum with my phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) and it's rubbish. There's a built in scrolling area that doesn't respond well when trying to use it.

And is this forum apart of Google+ somehow? It just doesn't feel right and it puts me off using it.

Are there any plans on remaking the forum to make it more user friendly?

Does anyone else agree with me?

Who can I email about improving this forum?

[Sam Bellman]

Have you tried going directly to the google group that it embeds? https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/haxeflixel . Note the link may not work going directly if you're not already subscribed - you may have to do a search and add it to your groups.

[Karl Penzhorn]

Yes, exactly - The google group is the same thing. I had the same problem on my phone and just access it through there when I'm on the move.

[Flabby_Fabby]

Yes. This looks a lot better. Why don't they just use their own forum? These are things that will put people off using HaxeFlixel. We need to make it more user friendly.

[Jimmy JimJim]

On one hand I agree - Google groups is basically a glorified mailing list with one of the worst interfaces around. It constantly freezes up loading pages, looks horrible on mobile, all sorts of problems. It was actually the biggest issue I had moving from the damn nice looking phaser forums to here. On the other hand, there's so much legacy knowledge here it would be hard to move. Plus at the end of the day as crappy as the interface is, it does its job, kind of. And the search isn't too bad. 

[Will Blanton]

I think that we should decide the purpose of the forum. It's my impression that we're using google groups because we want the forum to function best as a help desk, and google groups works really well for that.

I personally think that haxeflixel suffers from a non-active social community, something I loved about the original flixel. Of course, that's as much my own fault as it is anyone else's - but the forum doesn't feel conducive to social chit chat.

Should we use something different if it removes the functionality that makes google groups so helpful for addressing questions? Should we keep this forum as a help desk and have another for discussion? I don't think there are any perfect answers, but it's worth a discussion I think.

[Jimmy JimJim]

"I personally think that haxeflixel suffers from a non-active social community, something I loved about the original flixel."

 

That was probably the biggest culture shock for me when I started using haxeflixel. I often find myself hanging around the Phaser forums just chatting to people and helping out technical problems, and I don't even use Phaser! I just really like their forums. I do the same with Construct2 - I've not used it in years but it's just a really nice conducive community. When it comes to HaxeFlixel you look at reddit and see that the community is very quiet for something that seems to be a popular framework.

However, even if we ditched google groups or added some kind of extra community hub, it makes me wonder - what really is the status of the haxeflixel community? There's no point building a community chit-chat hub if everyone is leaving flash in droves (I'm assuming most HF devs export to flash). On the other hand, I found haxeflixel specifically because I was fed up with WebGL game engines and all their frustrating browser quirks, so maybe the community is actually expanding lately?

So yeah, it would be nice to get an idea of what community surrounds HaxeFlixel - it's a bit of a mystery to a newcomer. It could be used by hundreds of people or tens of thousands of people, I have no idea. The community could be blowing up wildly or quietly shrinking away. It's a catch 22 - without knowing those numbers it's hard to tell the size of the community, but without knowing the size of the community it's hard to know how much effort should be put into connecting that community with each other.

[Will Blanton]

There are a bunch of awesome people using haxeflixel, there's just no centralized place where they gather to socialize (that I know of) - check out the #HaxeFlixel hashtag on twitter, or search HaxeFlixel whenever there's a new Ludum Dare.

[Gama11]

Don't forget the #haxeflixel IRC channel on Freenode.

[SruloArt]

A centralized place sounds interesting, and I also agree that this group is best suited for quick technical answers (though I don't necessarily think that this group is the best solution for that; another Github repo dedicated to technical issues might be more helpful and may also bring more people over to Github which is even more helpful).

This is a classic Chicken or the Egg situation, where you need a forum in order to gain supporters but you need supporters in order to gain a forum (which is pretty expensive, even with the new patreon: https://www.patreon.com/haxeflixel?ty=h in place. BTW, @gama11 maybe you can pin the message: https://github.com/HaxeFlixel/flixel-docs/blob/master/documentation/01_community/06-contributing.html.md#donations to this group?).

Still:
1. It is pretty cumbersome to support all the available channels (here, Github, irc, Twitter, reddit(?!)), so one channel, one address sounds better (especially for @gama11, he's everywhere :D).
2. HaxeFlixel can sure use a fun place where you can post non-technical stuff, something more light and friendly that can attract more patreon supporters.
3. So, my general idea (if it can be made cheap) is something like a forum which is based on a Github repo of issues, where the tags are the *ROOMS and the messages are shown in a thread like structure, while registration is being done via Github (but I don't know if the Github API can support that).

But: it's not really a HaxeFlixel problem, it's a general Haxe visibility issue.

[MegaLeon]

I agree,  Haxeflixel needs a proper forum. I see this as more of an help desk, where you get instant-ish support on your issue and then that gets lost in the flow of time.

[Tembac]

I agree that we need a forum. Openfl forums are nice.

Maybe also a facebook page and facebook group.

[Jimmy JimJim]

Wow the OpenFL forums look really nice. 

Does anyone have any idea how big the haxeflixel community actually is?

[SruloArt]

It's nice and expensive. I'm (totally) guessing up to 5,000 people ever tried it, and around 100-200 of them are current active users (as in, they are developing games with it, not just experimenting, and that's based on Twitter/Github/Google/Game Jams/Haxelib/Here). These numbers can be a lot smaller though...

[Tembac]

Ouch, didn't know it was so expensive.

How can someone join Slack? It is in use?

And about facebook communities and groups? I know that here in latinoamerica are very popular places. I'm the admin of one of the largest dev comunity in spanish https://www.facebook.com/groups/comunidad.duval/

Another example is the Godot Comunity: https://www.facebook.com/groups/godotengine/

[MegaLeon]

Sorry for the bump, I really think that a proper message board would help the community to step up a notch.

What's your opinion about https://github.com/discourse/discourse? Seems like a good compromise between the structure of a forum and the intuitivity of a google-groups style helpdesk. Plus it's used by tons of communities (http://www.discourse.org/faq/customers/) so it's throughly tested.

There's a google groups -> discourse scraper as well: https://github.com/pacharanero/google_group.to_discourse

I assume that the main obstacle here is that google groups supplies their own hosting while discourse would have to be hosted on a private solution, right?

[Eric Grice]

That's pretty much how I use it, I don't even look at the forums I just check my emails lol.  Except when I'm researching something, then I have to do some digging :-)

On Jun 11, 2015 2:50 AM, "Jimmy JimJim" <laserdi...@gmail.com> wrote:

On one hand I agree - Google groups is basically a glorified mailing list with one of the worst interfaces around. It constantly freezes up loading pages, looks horrible on mobile, all sorts of problems. It was actually the biggest issue I had moving from the damn nice looking phaser forums to here. On the other hand, there's so much legacy knowledge here it would be hard to move. Plus at the end of the day as crappy as the interface is, it does its job, kind of. And the search isn't too bad. 

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[SruloArt]

O.K, so Discourse is the best way to go here (OpenFL and Level-Up-Labs are using it as well). The problem here is with the hosting.

So the choices are:

1. Discourse own Hosting - very expensive (the minimal plan is at 100 bucks a month) but easy to set-up. https://payments.discourse.org/buy/

2. Private Hosting - cheap, not easy to set-up at all. There are mitigating solutions for that though, like: https://github.com/discourse/discourse_docker

3. Bitnami - FREE* (* a one micro server for the first year: uses the free services you get when first registering to AWS), and it also allows direct Discourse installation! After the first year the costs should be pretty minimal, I don't expect the HaxeFlixel forum to get as big as the Flixel's forums...

4. A Joker: To ask the Flixel forum guys to host the HaxeFlixel forum (here: http://forums.flixel.org/index.php, "HaxeFlixel"). My logic here is that they are keeping their forum no matter what (it's a giant knowledge-base), and they won't mind to have a slightly bigger bandwidth usage there. HaxeFlixel would gain a safe forum (but also a bit antiquated one). In the end, AS3 Flixel guys know Haxe is the (near) future :)