Migrating from Discourse

[hlissner]

As of June 22nd, I've begun migrating our community off of Discourse and onto Github Discussions.

This will include the many project, development, and community resources that have been posted there (like our roadmap, Do-Not-PR list, and litany of guides/tutorials). You'll find links to the transferred resources on our Github org page. Until doomemacs.org is up—that page will serve as the new front page of the project, taking over from the doomemacs/doomemacs repo (which will soon be split up).

Check out #2 to follow this effort.

What will happen to all the old posts/resources?

They will be absorbed into either:

• An appropriate Github Project board,
• Our official documentation,
• Our new community repo,
• Our new community wiki,
• Or our Github Discussions board, as pinned posts,

All of which are works-in-progress. The Discourse will remain online (and in read-only mode) until enough of them have been migrated over.

Why the move?

To reduce maintenance burden (so more time can be spent working on Doom rather than maintaining a web server). Here's what I've learned since I deployed our Discourse:

• Maintaining a self-hosted Discourse with plugins (some of which required us be on nightly builds) was more hassle than expected.

• Maintaining and synchronizing three, redundant userbases (especially where sponsor rewards or user roles were concerned) across Github, Discourse, and Discord, was a burden to me and users. Attempts to automate this were made, but breakage across Discourse (or Discord) updates cost me enough afternoons that it never materialized.

• Discourse's anti-spam caught many false positives and swallowed a number of legit posts and DMs that flew under my radar, and so went unanswered. If you were one of the unlucky many, I'm so sorry; try posting again on our Github Discussions board.

• Our Discourse wasn't as discoverable or easy to use for users as I'd hoped. Posts that should've gone there still ended up on our Github issue tracker; questions that are answered there were still getting asked on Discord, Reddit, or our issue tracker; and there was little collaboration on QnA's or wiki posts there due to lack of visibility, having to create an account to participate, or folks were simply unaware they could, say, edit wiki posts.

  It also did not help that our Discourse was so far removed from where the majority of user interaction with the project actually happens: our Github repo.

There were good reasons to have a Discourse at the time, but it was also the only decent option available for what I wanted out of it (a forum/wiki hybrid). Now that Github Discussions (and Projects v2 boards) exists and has matured, it makes more sense to use the platform already integrated into Doom's development cycle and that folks will already be familiar with out the gate.