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Forum

Purpose

A forum, also known as "discussions", is used to interact with users. Common discussions may include topics such as:

  • how to do something with the project, whether certain features are supported
  • correct / intended usage of features, often "is it me or your project", i.e. "pilot error or bug?"
  • potential feature extensions / contributions / generally evolution of the project
  • release announcements
  • job openings.

Sometimes, discussions in the forum end up becoming an issue.

Questions and answers should be publicly visible, searchable, and indexed by search engines.

Open-source projects should use a dedicated Discourse instance, usable with CERN lightweight accounts, i.e. anyone in the world can post after registration. Users can configure their discourse account as a mailing list. You can enable reply-by-email.

For Github-hosted projects, the use of Github Discussions can also be considered; this can be enabled in the repository's settings.

Forum as community-driven knowledge base

A good forum becomes a knowledge base: the collected questions show up in search engines, the answers can help all users. A good community will reduce the support load of developers by uses answering other users' question; an incentive system helps, also to identify power-users and judge on the credibility / authority of answers. The mechanisms are similar of that of StackOverflow, on a more targeted, smaller scale.

FAQ / Q&A

Providing both a forum and an FAQ / Q&A section of the project's web page would confuse users. Instead, the forum should have a developer-maintained FAQ section where regular users cannot post.

Release announcements

Release announcements can be posted to the forum, in a news / announcements section where regular users cannot post. Make sure to lock the posts after creation: all users will be notified of announcements and all replies.

Forum as feedback mechanism to developers

The forum can provide valuable input to the ease of use of features. It can also provide indications of which new features might be needed to help users. On longer timescales, the forum can serve as an indication which parts of the projects became irrelevant and are candidates for deprecation, and which large-scale developments the project should invest in.

Forum as metric for community health

The forum statistics can provide crucial data for documenting the community health. Most relevant metrics are