Hi everybody, grown over time, there exists multiple ways to communicate with the CouchDB developers and with the community. They are:
0. CouchDB mailing lists 1. IRC Chat 2. Slack Workspace 3. Jira/Confluence 4. GitHub Issues/Pull Requests 5. GitHub Discussions While the mailing lists are a ASF prerequisite, we should consider to reduce the other possibilities to only one alternative for the following reasons: 1. It’s easier for a user to have fewer options 2. Fewer channels to „monitor“ as a person who wants to help 3. Fewer service registrations needed 4. Maybe a better user experience and maybe a higher probability that someone answer their questions The Jira/Confluence System isn’t used by the dev team anymore. IRC gets monitored by some people and mostly forwarded to Slack. GH discussions is only monitored by 1-2 active people too. At the moment, the de facto standard I think is Slack and there are 3 people (me excluded) which are very active with answering questions. I hope (for the sake of the community) they never retire ;-) - and (by the way) a big thanks to them! On July 18, 2022, Slack announced that starting September 1, search history for organizations on Slack’s Free plan will be limited to just the past 90 days of message history. One or the other may have noticed that topics that are asked frequently - these can no longer be found and are therefore "lost" for the community. Or person XYZ shared a code snippet or any other knowledge and it’s not there anymore… Are there any other solutions out there, which better fit with our needs? In order to decide this question, we have to be clear about the requirements we place on such a system. For example: a) Should it only be a “chat” system to react on questions or b) Should it be as a knowledge base for users, not to answer the same question twice (I know, the problems are the users and the search ;-)) c) a combination of both d) an other use-case at all e) my requirement isn’t listed, I will answer this email ;-) Maybe we find our requirements and a solution for this. I would like to hear what others think about it. Cheers, Ronny
