This pull request includes a radical change: removal of the link to the chat from the readme file.
Background
Here is some background:
The chat itself is good for quick communications between developers and questions / answers which are obsolete after a short time. Because most of the time the results of these conversations are moved to another system like issue tracker, pull request, project board or other tools.
But I see some problems for questions and answers from users of the framework, because many questions and answers are important for a later use and / or for other users. But in a chat room or channel everything is often lost after few hours. Answers can often only be helpful for one, two or three users. And then the same question will be asked a few days later.
There are also no categorization for questions and topics, limited search and complete loss of any relationship, which makes it hard to find something again.
Suggestion
Therefore my suggestion:
reducing the reference to the chat or kill it completely
push the users with questions to the forum, not chat
close some channels on Slack (if this works)
At the moment the forum is used only slightly; 331 entries in the category "Questions". However, the forum can help to find questions and answers faster, because it suits the requirements better than a chat. The forum entries are also listed on search engines like Google.
This means also we need to improve tags and categories in the forum. For the (new) website we can add a new entry in the main navigation: "Community" – this should be forwarded to the forum. (please compare with https://gohugo.io)
Help wanted
Criticism, ideas and suggestions are welcome!
If we can improve the chat, channels or other parts on Slack, then add your comment.
If we can improve the forum, please also add your comment.
If there is another platform that better fulfills the requirements then we could move.
Maybe I'm just using the chat incorrectly. Let me know. 😉
…
Additional Information
A good blog post on this topic can be found in the blog of Discourse:
This pull request includes a radical change: removal of the link to the chat from the readme file.
Background
Here is some background:
The chat itself is good for quick communications between developers and questions / answers which are obsolete after a short time. Because most of the time the results of these conversations are moved to another system like issue tracker, pull request, project board or other tools.
But I see some problems for questions and answers from users of the framework, because many questions and answers are important for a later use and / or for other users. But in a chat room or channel everything is often lost after few hours. Answers can often only be helpful for one, two or three users. And then the same question will be asked a few days later.
There are also no categorization for questions and topics, limited search and complete loss of any relationship, which makes it hard to find something again.
Suggestion
Therefore my suggestion:
At the moment the forum is used only slightly; 331 entries in the category "Questions". However, the forum can help to find questions and answers faster, because it suits the requirements better than a chat. The forum entries are also listed on search engines like Google.
This means also we need to improve tags and categories in the forum. For the (new) website we can add a new entry in the main navigation: "Community" – this should be forwarded to the forum. (please compare with https://gohugo.io)
Help wanted
Criticism, ideas and suggestions are welcome!
Additional Information
A good blog post on this topic can be found in the blog of Discourse:
"Effectively using Discourse together with group chat"