Ask HN: Chat or forum-based platform for open-source community? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Chat or forum-based platform for open-source community?

5 pointsgervwyk8 comments

I’m launching an open source framework project soon and really want to make sure that the community around the OS framework has a place to contribute to community discussions. I see many projects choose either a chat based or a forum based community platform for this. What is import when considering the one or the other?

And what platforms to consider?

Chat based: - Discord.com - Spectrum.chat - Slack.com

Forum based: - Discourse.org

any others favorites?

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Reviewing your post and comment history, it looks like you are the dev director or cofounder of a no to low-code dashboarding tool that is thinking about going Open Source to increase adoption, so this medium will be the bulk of your exposure with customers and the net. Is this roughly correct from a 10km viewpoint?

My response is entirely around how the tool will fit in the overall goals, not about any specific tool.

Things I would think about from the perspective of how the solution fits the problem.

- Is it crawlable? Is it deep linkable? Is knowledge or discussions from 4 months ago valid now and would you want folks to be able to find them? If findability and linkability are important, forum or ticket systems are preferable over chat transcript logs.

- What is the nature of the requests and the latency they should satisfy. Is it, "Help! I am stuck!" Or, "How should we structure this support tool so that it also can edit the ticket taxonomy?"

Chat is great for dev teams with micro-blockers that can be satisfied by a 30-90 second transaction, where helping the person asking the question also ultimately unblocks you. Think a group of people that all need to make progress, where the laggards prevent the whole group from moving forward.

Things I would think about when how it affects you and your team and the other participants.

- How much will this change your focus. What kind of duty cycle will you check on the medium? How are you envisioning the interactions taking place, quality (question quality has a huge impact on outcomes), latency, number of exchanges, total time to resolution.

- How much time will it take?

- Who will be the primary participants, is it a community thing and community folks are answering questions, or is it just you at a 24 hour office hours in addition to your regular work?

- Will it be staffed specifically, or will other employees do rotations?

- What are your SLAs, SLOs for response times?

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Email, chat, forums and issue tracking systems all interoperate with group dynamics in different ways. Visualize and simulate those interactions, taking note actors and outcomes. Ask your existing customers how they would like to interact and what their expectations would be.

I have also gone through this exercise a couple orgs, it is org specific, customer specific and testing in production is one of the best ways. Don't commit to a tool before having actually used it in anger. Be willing to burn it down and try something else.

I hope this helps and good luck!

Thanks for the excellent advice!

I think you have raised a very important point - why do users come to the conversation? It feels to me that chat platform is then only a good fit where it is more conversational and not necessarily that much technical help. Storybook has done a great job to build their community on discord, and meteor has done a great job by using Discourse, however as a past storybook and meteor user I had a much better time finding help or how to answers in past conversation with meteor on discord than storybook.

But I can imagine that if you need quick help with fast response chat is preferred, but only initially, when its too big / busy a ticketing solution can be a better alternative if it is only the maintainers providing help.

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Your investigation skills are on point. We created a low code solution for building internal tools in yaml, and we really like open source and are playing with the idea of making it all open. At the moment we are making sure we do as much research as possible to make sure we best understand the implications of this decision. Check us out, lowdefy.com - I’m busy redesigning the website and defining our gtm strategy, so that will all change, visit docs.lowdefy.com (also built with lowdefy) to get the best idea for what it is.

Fundamentally the result is the same: the conversation will happen regardless of the medium.

However, there’s a big difference between the types of conversations: async or sync.

That said, my recommendation is to pick whichever medium is easier for you to manage/moderate on the go.

For me as a use of such forums in the past, one extremely important thing is to search past discussions in order to find the quick insights that I need. Someone recently posted that there is a trend of communities moving questions from stack overflow to GitHub issues since finding related answers is often nowadays not about ”in javascript, go do I...?” but more like ”with npm lib, how do I...?” so problem searches has become much more specific than 10 years ago especially in the js world.

I find in the search sense that forums are much better because they are separated by topic and not only by channels, the tag equivalents used in forums.

Is the chat more a trendy thing that came along with the fame of slack, discord? or is there really some value to be gained from sync / real time conversations?

Forum: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Forum is more useful for future users. Live chat gives a better experience for the immediate asker. Pick your poison.

I have often found in chat conversations that if it gets too busy difficult questions goes answered or the discussion overtaken by some other question. Then, it can easily become a worse experience for the immediate asker..

Chat works when there is an existing relationship between both parties. Doing random support over a chat channel would take someone with patience better spent elsewhere.

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