Yes, you’re right Steve.

I’ve already mentioned other more sophisticated alternatives to allow the community to exchange more easily and efficiently :

– Discourse for asynchronous exchanges (the forum)
– Discord for instant exchanges (but not only)

These tools are much better adapted for a convivial and efficient space of mutual aid. Many other communities have already adopted them for a long time and it seems to work very well that way. But it is true that, in the case of Discord, community satisfaction is based on daily sustained animation. And I understand that Sara and Rui don’t have enough time to invest in the management and animation of their community on a tool like Discord. They seem to prefer Facebook, which already takes up a lot of their time… I think it’s a pity in the context we are interested in here. Facebook can be effective in announcing the publication of new content and allows to capture a larger population beyond the regulars. But it is by no means a platform adapted to the exchange and mutual help on specific technical issues that need to be followed up.

As far as the forum is concerned, Discourse would allow them to better organize the exchanges, by themes, and above all to constitute a real knowledge base with sometimes very valuable contents provided by the members of the community.

We use this “Forum” software more link a ticket system, if someone has a question we try to reply and solve the issue.

As Steph suggested, we would love to move to a real software solution or Discord, but we need to keep up with all our current communication forms (Email, RNTLab Forum, RNT blog comments, YouTube comment’s and Facebook group). With everything combined results in at least 100-200 queries per day. It’s just impossible to keep up.

We hope by the start of next year, we can have a real forum software, but I can’t promise that.

Thanks for your helpful feedback!

Thank you for your answer Rui… and hope it will be a good surprise for 2021.

Different software solutions exist. Some of them are paying (in one go or as a subscription). Others are free… but they do not all offer the same functionalities.

Discourse has the advantage of being Open Source software and can therefore be installed and hosted on a platform that you have system control over.

You have to make sure that code can be posted easily, with syntax highlighting for the languages we use here (C/C++, Python, PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript), as well as various media such as images or videos for demonstrations.

Steve? Do you have other proposals?

I am not a big fan of the Discourse style of forum. I guess I am old school and would prefer something like PHP-BB. It’s been around forever and is constantly being updated.