We have been using Discourse for a while now and while it’s a solid forum platform, I find that I personally don’t visit it enough as my attention is already spread between Github for issues and Discord for chatting. Github has recently made its own discussions platform publicly available, and we enabled this on the getgrav.org repo to take a look at it. It’s no way near as feature-rich as Discourse, but the major benefit is the tight integration into Github for tickets, pull requests, etc. That simplicity also makes it much easier to manage and maintain going forward, It just seems like a better fit.
There are currently no importing capabilities so we would probably leave this forum up in a read-only mode so as not to lose the important discussions that have their home here.
As the users of this forum, what are your thoughts on the matter?
as for the ease of use for the main developers, I would recommend this proposal.
however, this would be another breakage for new users, having to search in 3 different places, then (think of the old forum, MUUT, which has not even preserved usernames).
anyway, I support this switch.
Have you explored discourse integrations with github issue tracking? Although I understand your push to move, I think that you should wait a little for github discussions to be out of beta for such a large project
GitHub Discussions are a wortwhile alternative, but just like your attention is divided between GitHub and Discord, a large amount of users are divided between Discord and Discourse. While it’s a good fit, it is not a sufficient replacement because there is a loss of a userbase.
The main developers of the Core Team/Trilby Media do focus much more on GitHub Issues than either Discord or Discourse, at least that’s what I’ve observed in the years I’ve been involved with Grav. There is also not a big overlap between Discord and Discourse, even for me and Ricardo. The activity in all three platforms is cyclical at best, and the Venn-diagram circles between them is not overlapping enough that I think moving to GitHub Discussions is warranted.
In part, this is also because GitHub Issues already demand a lot of attention. GitHub Discussions would presumably increase the quality of those. There are some superusers on Discourse though, that solve a great deal of issues – especially those too complex to be followed-up on Discord, or that get lost in GitHub Issues.
TLDR: Leave the Discourse-forums as they are, there’s a solid userbase aided by users not present in either Discord or GitHub.
These users are invaluable, and the quality of the posts here are a great deal higher than on Discord. Going read-only does not mean these users would come along to either of the other platforms, and the arguably highest quality support-platform would be lost.
I do not yet have a clear opinion on the question, but IMHO there are two potential obstacles:
lose previous discussions, reflections, questions and solutions currently stored on Discourse: in this case, maybe it would be useful to look for a solution to migrate the content from Discourse to GitHub as it had been done with Muut
neglect some of the users registered on the Discourse forum and who do not wish to register on a new network like GitHub (which in many aspects appears to be more complex to use than Discourse) just to follow simple discussions on general questions
Nevertheless, it is clear that such a direct integration of a discussion system within the development repository itself can certainly bring huge benefits.
As a rule, no. Every self-hosted Git-instance or code-repository I’ve ever come across as a reference to a primary source of code has broken or gone away from lack of maintenance.
GitHub has been around since 2008, SourceForge since 1999. GitHub has far and away the better user interface and experience, as well as community – also compared to Bitbucket and GitLab. GitHub supplies stability and persistence, much more so than SourceForge or other alternatives, and Grav’s source code has even been stored for 1000 years to come.
The same tends to be the case with self-hosted community-solutions like chat and forums, they all exist rather shortly in the grand scheme of things, and require too much maintenance and moderation. This is why it’s better to move onto and adapt new solutions over time, and why the chat and forums have been through several iterations.
As pointed out in one of the current discussions on GitHub, the current setup maintains a decent balance between current platforms.
If GH means getting answers more promptly, then I’m all for it 