The Redox OS Discourse has been on life support for a while. The options were to cut it, or to revive it. I have decided to revive it, as it is an open-source self-hosted forum with a lot of value.
I have been working on creating categories and moving topics into them. I welcome any feedback into how to make the Discourse more interactive and useful. We will move many discussions from GitHub and Reddit to here.
This is really great news!
I listened to your interview talking about the forum. I have to agree that its a bit unfortunate how things went in the past. But i really do think that its not the right way to channel every interaction through github or mattermost. We need a place for People to interact without having a strong background in Rust or software development at all. We need the distinction between āUserā and āDeveloperā (or anybody who likes digging code). I thinks what Rust did with āinternalā and āuserā is not the worst way. Regardless of how we handle things (i really like mattermost) a place for regular users needs to exist. I think the greatest problem in the past until today was, that Redox did not have too many āregular usersā so the forum is often very empty and mixed with ādev peopleā. But i think we need to establish such a place regardless of how many users are there today to use it. Time will come and if there is a certain amount of people using it, it runs by itself. Until then we need to be āpreparedā
Arch is a model for successful, loosely organized information via its forum and wiki. Purely for reference:
Iām new. I just got it built last week. But Iāll mention my other favorite thing in Redox: this week in redox
I would suggest reducing the scope of the forum to only user and support questions, because there are not many other places to handle these cases.
I would I would build the community around the website, reddit, the chat and of course github issues.
Reddit is just more fun, and interesting stuff floats to the top, so people have a more positive experiance on first landing there.
I would change the website to only link to the forum if people click on āsupportā.
to revive forum you have to fill it with useful information (instead of just newbie questions) and actively ask people to help to do it
forum should be the central place to aggregate and store long-term content, somewhat like wiki and stackoverflow
periodic extraction/archiving of related, important and interesting discussions from chat/twitter
cross-posting/-linking to the topics here from reddit and github
There seems to be more posting taking place as of late. Nonetheless there is more to be done to help beginners feel welcome.
A lot of relatively basic technical support questions are going unanswered, which is a pity, as even acknowledgement of a new person taking the trouble to post might help encourage them to stick around. Which in turn might lead these new users in turn to help others, and give them confidence to contribute to discussions already in progress. That is how the forum will reach critical mass.
I am happy to be a forum moderator for a bit. I could āgreetā new members so they donāt abandon the forum after one post, merge stubby threads made of individual technical support queries into master threads for that topic, and keep an eye out for spam (not that I have noticed any here).
I can also try to provoke discussion into relevant operating system and computing stories I find elsewhere.
Thereās no need to say things just to fill the void if you have nothing to add. Honestly some of your posts have felt like meaningless word salads and I donāt think that helps.
Thereās no need to revive the forum either. Devs are busy and shouldnāt have to worry about this. If you guys want to see an active forum go work on a project to make Redox usable. Once it is the users will come.
I am quite confident in my ability to construct coherent sentences. If you had simply said I didnāt know the first thing about the topic at hand you might have been on more solid ground 
.
I may not be blessed with coding skills to write vital system software, but I donāt think that should be a disqualification to attempting to learn, at an abstract level, about the decisions that are being made in realtime as a new system is born in front of our eyes.
If anything is not helping, it is comments like that.
If, as you imply, anyone with an ounce of competence is fruitfully engaged elsewhere, pray tell why you are here exactly?
I disagree that there has to be a product before the community can start to assemble. One of the most successful trends in product development in recent years has been so-called crowdfunding, where promoters of a new widget actually generate a buzz for their idea and even get the prospective customers to cough up before it exists.
The forum provides a shop window into any community that might surround this project. How can volunteer coders be attracted when it looks from outside like nobody is at home?
