Haxe community and how to improve it

[Dmitry Hryppa]

Hello, dear Haxe community.

I want to talk with you about how to make Haxe community a little bit better and how to grow up it's popularity..

Official Haxe community.

This Haxe group on Google Groups... It's terrible and weird place for official community. Seriously :) 

I know a lot of people who does not hear anything about Google Groups and do not want to hear about it. It's not user friendly and looks like it came from 2000 year. 

Will be much better if Haxe will starts it's own forum on it's own domain. Something like: community.haxe.org. 

Just pick any nice looking forum engine and go with it. 

Checkout this engines: 

Flarum - http://flarum.org/

Discourse - https://www.discourse.org/

Official Haxe chat. 

IRC is good for oldschool guys, but how many new users who came to Haxe will try to use IRC in 2017? Searching IRC settings, searching and installing IRC client, figure it out how it works...

IMHO, it will be much better to use some of modern solutions like Slack or Gitter. 

Website.

DO NOT hide community links into deep menu lists. Do not make it as a secret information. 

IMHO, you need to put big "COMMUNITY" button and point it to community.haxe.org

Checkout how another guys doing this:

Again, do not hide cool features into deep menu lists. 

Put big "TRY IT NOW" button on the main page. Like Kotlin, Rust, Dart and some others doing this. 

Show it to peoples, that Haxe can easly run in browser. 

What do you think? Let's discuss it :)

[Confidant]

Are we allowed to challenge the status quo here? :)

But seriously, he brings up some good points. I don't mind Google group functionality but it does make Haxe seem like more of a hobby group than the mature awesome tool that it is. A self-hosted solution would fix that.

Good point about IRC too. Since so much code is already on Github, Gitter makes the most sense for live chat IMHO and it's not likely to disappear soon. Different other Haxe groups use it or Slack already.

Not sure about the web links. I didn't find it hard to find any of the cool features mentioned.

[Chii Chan]

i think the google groups forum is acceptable. Perhaps embedding it on a static page hosted at community.haxe.org (like described by this site - https://crash-atelier.squarespace.com/google/) would work just as well as any custom forums? Certainly be cheaper.

I believe haxeflixel used to do that (but they've opted for a self-hosted forum now). May be posting on their forum asking about if it is better or not might be worth doing.

[michael solomon]

I agree with all OP points! (and even raised some of them in the past..)

[Hugh]

The gitter channel is probably more active than these groups:

https://gitter.im/HaxeFoundation/haxe

Hugh

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

Gitter would be awesome if its search function actually supported more advanced search. Right now it's really hard to find old posts there. It's not even indexed by Google AFAIK.

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[Greybeard]

In addition to gitter (which is more active), there is a community slack channel: haxe.slack.com.  You can make a request for access at: http://hxbot-slack.herokuapp.com/invite/form

-Eric

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

>In addition to gitter (which is more active), there is a community slack channel: haxe.slack.com.  You can make a request for access at: http://hxbot-slack.herokuapp.com/invite/form

Which I'd argue is one of the main issues. It'd be really nice if we could concentrate all discussions in a single easily-searchable channel. I think searching is a key aspect as well. For now it's okayish but it could indeed be much better, specially for such a small (at the time of this writing) community such as Haxe's.

[Juraj Kirchheim]

I'd say Gitter is a pretty decent choice, because (as opposed to Slack) the on-boarding is really quick (you don't have to install anything and you can just login with GitHub, which you need if you want to be creating issues on the tracker). As for the search, I definitely agree. That said, Gitter has an API that seems to look fine, so if the problem becomes unbearable, we can do something about it ourselves.

Our existing gitter channel should definitely be more prominent on the website (which is what the chat on gitter badges are really for).

As far as a migration to a new kind of forum is concerned I don't have any preferences. But:

1. It's important that participation per email works (as per my post there's 50% of the people in this thread that responded by email).

2. It should be possible to import the old content from the Google Group into the new forum, so that we don't fragment communication any further.

Best,

Juraj

[Itzik Arzoni]

I would REALLY REALLY like to see the haxe community move to discourse! In my experience, it's the best forum mechanism, as a dedicated app, in development, and a bounch of usefull community enhancing plugins.

Oh, and it so convenient!

[Itzik Arzoni]

See here:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/import-from-google-groups-to-discourse/7307

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

Discourse is indeed great. Nice to know they provide a way to import google group's data to it!

It'd be interesting to know if the @HaxeFoundation could / is interested in leading such an effort. 

Here's an example of Discourse in action, as the Ember discussion forums: https://discuss.emberjs.com/. Ember also has a nice `community` landing page, which is also easily accessible from the main menu at the top: https://www.emberjs.com/community/.

Bear in mind Discourse would *not* replace Gitter/IRC but rather our current mailing list. For the real-time chat, right now, there are people spread over the haxe gitter channel and IRC, but ideally everyone would be in one place, but maybe that's too much to ask for.

[Uno]

I'm a Haxe user of the first hour, I've wrote some of the first questions on this mailing list and I wrote a lot of the first documentation (tutorials).

So I have seen this question come up quite a few times and I have seen a few enthusiastic attempts to improve the community.

I think now is the right time. The situation was similar in Ocaml community, the mailing list activity was in decline a lot of users where frustrated, but still nothing changed.

Then a few people open up a Discourse page and put some good (sticky) content on it. The Ocaml community has improved a lot. There is more communication and overall a better "mood". I'm not sure why but the tone improved a lot, there is friendly and helpful atmosphere which I didn't expect.

With discourse the communication is faster and more targeted. I think everyone profits.

So yes, do it! And stick around and help people. I'm looking foreward to be a part of this.

[Itzik Arzoni]

Bear in mind Discourse would *not* replace Gitter/IRC but rather our current mailing list. For the real-time chat, right now, there are people spread over the haxe gitter channel and IRC, but ideally everyone would be in one place, but maybe that's too much to ask for.

There is an effort for providing a chat plugin for discourse, so it could even replace the IRC (If you want).

https://meta.discourse.org/t/babble-a-chat-plugin

or

https://github.com/discourse/discourse-chat-integration 

[Nicolas Juneau]

Am-I the only one reading all this from a good old fashioned desktop
mail client? ;)

All interesting ideas, that said :)

May I add Matrix/Riot to the lot? ;)

Le 2017-10-23 à 09:47, Itzik Arzoni a écrit :
> I would REALLY REALLY like to see the haxe community move to discourse!
> In my experience, it's the best forum mechanism, as a dedicated app, in
> development, and a bounch of usefull community enhancing plugins.
> Oh, and it so convenient!
>
> On Tuesday, 17 October 2017 00:28:34 UTC+3, Dmitry Hryppa wrote:
>
> Hello, dear Haxe community.
>
> I want to talk with you about how to make Haxe community a little
> bit better and how to grow up it's popularity..
>
> Official Haxe community.
> This Haxe group on Google Groups... It's terrible and weird place
> for official community. Seriously :) 
> I know a lot of people who does not hear anything about Google
> Groups and do not want to hear about it. It's not user friendly and
> looks like it came from 2000 year. 
> Will be much better if Haxe will starts it's own forum on it's own

> domain. Something like: *community.haxe.org*.
> <http://community.haxe.org.> 

> Just pick any nice looking forum engine and go with it. 
> Checkout this engines: 
> Flarum - http://flarum.org/
> Discourse - https://www.discourse.org/
>
> Official Haxe chat. 
> IRC is good for oldschool guys, but how many new users who came to
> Haxe will try to use IRC in 2017? Searching IRC settings, searching
> and installing IRC client, figure it out how it works...
> IMHO, it will be much better to use some of modern solutions like
> Slack or Gitter. 
>
> Website.
> DO NOT hide community links into deep menu lists. Do not make it as
> a secret information. 
> IMHO, you need to put big "COMMUNITY" button and point it to

> *community.haxe.org* <http://community.haxe.org>

> Checkout how another guys doing this:
>

> <https://i.imgur.com/vN35tfB.png>

>
>
> Again, do not hide cool features into deep menu lists. 
>
> Put big "TRY IT NOW" button on the main page. Like Kotlin, Rust,
> Dart and some others doing this. 
>
> Show it to peoples, that Haxe can easly run in browser. 
>
>
> What do you think? Let's discuss it :)
>

[Confidant]

I also read the digest version in email. :)

[Itzik Arzoni]

Mailing list is the basic function of Discourse forum. :)

[OvermindDL1]

I too also read this from email, and yes, Discourse I've seen increase engagement in a variety of other communities I'm in and it really does help, and yes the admin can setup full mailing list functionality to discourse as well, which I highly recommend.  :-)

[Michael Apfelbeck]

There's also an active discord at https://discordapp.com/invite/0uEuWH3spjck73Lo

It's a chat channel and not a message board though. I've gotten help immediately every time I've posted a question there.

[Justin Donaldson]

Here's a new haxe discourse community site : http://haxe.trydiscourse.com/

[我每天睡不着]

I think Haxe needs more successful cases to get more people to understand it. not what community

[Dmitry Hryppa]

For everybody who missed it, Haxe discourse community on the new domain. Thanks to Andy.

http://community.haxe.org

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

That's awesome. Time to deprecate this ML? Maybe an automatic email explaining that it has moved over to http://community.haxe.org?

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Dmitry Hryppa <dmitry...@gmail.com> wrote:

For everybody who missed it, Haxe discourse community on the new domain. Thanks to Andy.

http://community.haxe.org

--

[Alexander Konotop]

Maybe a link should be added to "Connect" menu of haxe.org website...

01.11.2017 16:15, Dmitry Hryppa пишет:

For everybody who missed it, Haxe discourse community on the new domain. Thanks to Andy.

http://community.haxe.org