[Geoserver-devel] More attractive tools for supporting users

Hi,

In the PSC meeting today we were discussing about alternatives for geoserver-users mailing list. The gis.stackexchange was considered to be too much just questions and answers site that does not suit well for the hard cases when some research and additional tests are needed and the discussion can get lengthy. Someone had suggested to set up a forum like https://discourse.mozilla.org/. But one think I like in gis.stackexchange is that questions with accepted answers are easy to find, see the full green “answers” box for example in https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/geoserver?sort=votes&pageSize=15. Votes are sometimes informative as well.

I made a quick search for some software and project support forums:

https://reefmaster.com.au/index.php/forum/recent

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=10

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/spatialite-users

It may be easier to ask questions from these forums than from a mailing list, but afterwards there is not much difference really

https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2019-May/thread.html#start

Despite being ugly and unattractive (personal opinion), the Firefox support forum seems to have some nice features

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/firefox?show=needs-attention

This is probably the source code of that support platform https://github.com/mozilla/kitsune/

I wonder if other OSGeo projects would be interested as well.

-Jukka-

gis.stackexchange is not an option to replace bug reports on the user list as the moderators (and sometimes users) will close bug reports as “off topic” - see https://gis.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4185/what-should-we-do-with-bug-reports for a longer discussion of the policy.

If we want to move more general user questions to there then there are going to need to be more people than Andrea and me answering them, see https://data.stackexchange.com/gis/query/1051691/geoserver-answerers, The problem of users asking a question and moving on is high too, resulting in the low number of accepted questions and 900+ unanswered questions.

Ian

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Ian Turton