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
- 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