{"id":3524,"date":"2022-06-21T11:24:52","date_gmt":"2022-06-21T17:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3524"},"modified":"2023-04-08T14:44:23","modified_gmt":"2023-04-08T20:44:23","slug":"thoughts-on-managing-a-devtools-forum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3524","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on managing a devtools forum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m one of the team members tasked with managing the <a href=\"https:\/\/fusionauth.io\/community\/forum\/\">FusionAuth community forum<\/a>, where folks using FusionAuth who don&#8217;t have a paid support plan can find help and answers.<\/p>\n<div class=\"p-rich_text_section\">Here&#8217;s some advice for running such a forum. (I wrote previously about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3451\">why you should use a forum rather than Slack\/Discord\/live chat<\/a>.)<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<ul class=\"p-rich_text_list p-rich_text_list__bullet\" data-stringify-type=\"unordered-list\" data-indent=\"0\" data-border=\"0\">\n<li>First, consider why are you going to run a forum? Lots of great reasons: ease a support burden, help with SEO, foster community, get product feedback. Get clear on what you are trying to build before committing, because it is a commitment.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Choose forum software carefully. Migration will be a pain. Common options include nodebb (what we use), discourse, and vanilla forums.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Seed the forum. This means gathering up questions as you see them pop up in other venues (support tickets, GitHub issues, customer calls). I did that religiously for a few months. I learned a lot about the product and the forum posts meant that folks were helped even when it was new. I&#8217;d recommend posting the question and then responding in-thread with an answer.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Forums will bubble up commonly asked questions. This can tell you where your docs should be improved.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">You must groom the forum. It won&#8217;t be set and forget. You have to pay attention to it, answer questions, respond to responses. A forum full of unanswered questions is worse than no forum at all. Trust me, developers will notice (we&#8217;ve had customers mention that they appreciated how active our forum was).<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Because we sell support, we don&#8217;t answer questions immediately or have engineering staff answer them. There are also questions that we can&#8217;t answer such as architecture recommendations. Immediate responses and answers requiring context and research are reserved for paying customers. This hurts my heart some times, but <a href=\"https:\/\/fusionauth.io\/docs\/v1\/tech\/admin-guide\/technical-support\">we are open about it<\/a>. May not be applicable to in all cases.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Don&#8217;t be afraid to ban users. We ban anyone who spams, no questions asked. Delete the content and ban the user. We luckily haven&#8217;t had any abuse issues beyond spam.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Have a code of conduct. I grabbed GitHub&#8217;s (you can see <a href=\"https:\/\/fusionauth.io\/community\/forum\/topic\/1000\/code-of-conduct\">ours here<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.github.com\/en\/site-policy\/github-terms\/github-community-forum-code-of-conduct\">here&#8217;s GitHub&#8217;s<\/a>)\u00a0 but have something. We didn&#8217;t in the early days, but it&#8217;s a good thing to have out of the gate.<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">Don&#8217;t expect a lot of community to grow out of it. At least, I haven&#8217;t had that experience, most people just want their questions answered. May be because I&#8217;m extremely part time on it and haven&#8217;t fostered it, though. Slack\/discord is much more likely to build community in my experience. But know what your users want: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3486\">Google or Facebook<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li data-stringify-indent=\"0\" data-stringify-border=\"0\">At a certain point, I had to enable a post queue, where a team member approves every new user. We were getting a lot of spam accounts and then they&#8217;d post gambling ads and then direct a ton of traffic (1000s of pageviews) to the ads. I don&#8217;t know what the spammer endgame was, but approving each new post has solved the issue. I&#8217;d definitely look for that feature.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div class=\"p-rich_text_section\">In general I love forums, and <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=29154216\">so do devs<\/a>, but they do take some work.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m one of the team members tasked with managing the FusionAuth community forum, where folks using FusionAuth who don&#8217;t have a paid support plan can find help and answers. Here&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,93,37,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devrel","category-fusionauth","category-tips","category-web-applications"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3525,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}