Hi All, The CouchDB slack channel has been a real success with lots of people asking for help and getting involved. The main issue is that it is not searchable so we often get people asking the same questions over and over. The user mailing list is great in that sense that if you have subscribed to it you have a searchable list of questions and answers. However, it's really not user-friendly and judging by the fact that it has very low user participation I'm guessing most people prefer to use slack to ask questions.
I've been really impressed with how the FoundationDB forum[1] and the rust internal forum work [2]. I find them easy to use and really encourage participation. I would like to propose that we move our user and dev discussion to Discourse or a forum that works as well as Discourse. I think that would make it really easy for users of CouchDB to look up answers to questions and get involved in the development discussion. I haven't checked yet, but I'm sure we could get all discourse threads to automatically email back to the user and dev mailing list so that we still fulfill our Apache requirements. I know its a big step away from what we're used to with our mailing lists, but I think it would definitely open up our community. Cheers Garren [1] https://forums.foundationdb.org/ [2] https://internals.rust-lang.org/
