When to use Forum vs Slack?

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#1

I share @guylepage3’s concern about spreading ourselves too thin with forum vs slack. We need to make sure we push people to the proper forum (heh) for interactions.

I suggest that when people ask questions in the slack, instead of answering them in slack, we ask them to ask it here on the forum and then answer them here.

Specifically, questions of the form “How do I do X with blockstack?” belong on the forum.

Example slack exchange:

Enthusiastic Developer

Wow! I just saw @ryan’s talk! Blockstack looks really cool! I’m building a decentralized app to solve world hunger, how can intergrate Blockstack ID in my app?

@larry

That sounds really cool! Can you ask the question on our forum? https://forum.blockstack.org/

Discussion around protocol/project direction probably also belong here so that people new to the project can understand how we made design decisions.

Thoughts?

2 Likes
Why is the forum back? Did we give up on Slack?
#2

@larry, is there a way to automate this?

#3

Maybe put an autoresponder in Slack that looks for certain keywords that indicate a question and ask them to ask it here?

#4

something like Hubot?

#5

I think slackbot can do some of the things hubot can do. @ryan any ideas?

#6

This exchange between @jude and community member is a great example of the type of question/problem we can ask users to post in forum. If it had turned out to be a bug, we could then open a github issue on the appropriate repo to get it fixed.

This exchange between @muneeb and a new user is another good example: https://blockstack.slack.com/archives/community/p1479406338002240

#7

This exchange between @jude and community member is a great example of the type of question/problem we can ask users to post in forum. If it had turned out to be a bug, we could then open a github issue on the appropriate repo to get it fixed.

@larry, are you suggesting that we setup a process that involves github?

I just did a search for “using github as faq” https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=using%20github%20as%20faq and the second search result was a link to IPFS/FAQ. "GitHub - ipfs/faq: Frequently Asked Questions. " Looks as though IPFS has created a repository for their FAQ’s. I still feel as though GitHub is a great place to have our FAQ section. It allows us to capitalize on SEM pulling in developers to our repositories for more discovery.

Thoughts?

#8

No. I’m just suggesting if that someone reports a problem that is because of a bug in one of our pieces of software (instead of confusion on the part of the user) that we should open a github issue on the respective repository (we do that already now).