How did you know you could be successful with a forum?

I led the move of the Open Data Kit open-source community from Google Groups to Discourse last year.

We had a couple of thousand people on our mailing list and it was impossible to keep track of all the many conversations. The things that I wanted to be able to do are:

  • Be on a platform that’s actively being worked on. Google Groups hasn’t changed in years and it isn’t long for this world.

  • Build sub-forums to enable more focused discussions (e.g., form design, job posts, beta releases) where interested parties can talk in detail without the entire community being notified.

  • Reduce duplicate support posts by showing related questions,
    stickied posts, etc.

  • Add features like FAQ, voting for features, @mentioning
    relevant parties, analytics on activity.

  • Keep engaging the community by sending out weekly emails
    with most active discussions.

  • Ability for folks to keep using the platform as a plain old mailing list.

I knew about Discourse through OpenMRS and Bootstrapped.fm. Both communities seemed to like the platform. That plus all the activity on this forum gave me the confidence I needed to make the move.

So far it’s been great. We’ve doubled the size of the community over the last year and Discourse continues to work well for us and I’ve migrated a number of other communities to their own Discourse installs.

For me, if you run an open-source project and have a reasonably sized community, Discourse is a must.

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