[Community Initiative Proposal] Remove the old forum

Open on Drupal.org →

Created on 30 May 2020, over 4 years ago

Updated 4 November 2023, about 1 year ago

Why should this issue be prioritized:

The forum is a legacy system and dead. Let's not spend 10 years about if we should keep it or not!

Summary of Proposal (500 words or less):

The forum is a legacy system and dead.

The forum is not a pleasant experience, especially for new user. The community should be easy to understand and tools should be familiar.

Because drupal.org is highly ranked, outdated answer from the forum pop-up in google search.

Their is also:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/
- https://drupal.stackexchange.com/
- https://discord.gg/XKjUsN4
- https://www.drupal.org/slack →
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/drupal8beginners/
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/drupalon/
- ..

I think we could delete the forum. But some users think it's still important and useful (at least in theory).

I propose to take advantage of discourse free hosting plan for open source: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/.

Plans

Launch a new forum based on discourse free hosting plan on forum.drupal.org
Archive the old one.
Update the links in do to point on forum.drupal.org

=> no integration is needed (we can simply add a field "my pseudo on drupal.org").
=> old message should not be transferred
=> Q/A question should be redirected to https://drupal.stackexchange.com (add a warning when user create the first post and list that in the forum rules)
=> I think creating a "general category" at first and see what emerge is the easiest way.

As an experiment and to get early feedbacks:
I posted in

🌱 Plan

Status

Active

Version

3.0

Component

Miscellaneous

Created by

🇨🇭Switzerland gagarine

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Community Initiative

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Comment about 1 year ago →
🇳🇴Norway gisle Norway
-1 from me
Comment about 1 year ago →
🇳🇴Norway hansfn
I don't think Discourse (not Discord) is a bad alternative. AFAICT it's open source. I have used it on OpenStreetMap and enjoyed it. Anyway, some kind of forum is needed in addition to Drupal Answers.

PS! Many of the points that we are likely to mention is discussed in the forum post → that gagarine linked to.
Comment about 1 year ago →
🇩🇰Denmark ressa Copenhagen
-1 for closing the Drupal forum at https://www.drupal.org/forum → .

It would be really bad to shut down a central resource for the community, such as the Forum, which provides valuable support for new Drupal users.

Since you have no control over these third party services, you can never know if they exist in the future, if they turn "bad", become paid services, or something else we can't imagine right now ... Also, they may not be indexed by search engines, etc.

All very well summed up by @gisle in 📌 Please put link to "Forums" back in the "Community" pulldown menu Active and discussed in the Forum discussion Forum "deprecated" from home page? → .

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