So many years ago when it was shiny and exciting we setup a Concrete CMS Slack. Some community members thought it was a mistake as it spread our attention too thin and unless you pay for it you can’t search old content, but we plowed ahead into the future regardless.
Years later, we agree. Slack for an Open Source project is a mistake. Any good answers in there get lost to the 10,000 line limit of free search, and we’d much rather have people asking & answering questions in these forums anyway.
A few weeks ago some poor soul desperate for answers they thought they might be in the history, and they actually found a way to pay for the community slack, only to quickly realize that’s not a sane pricing model for an open source project. We want to avoid that in the future, and we want to make it easy for people to ask questions and get answers from helpful people here.
That said: we’re going to turn off Slack for Concrete CMS. It’s a bit of a wasteland anyway, but this is the official notice that we’re pulling the trigger on that and putting it out of its misery.
Now there’s some discussion internally that Discord might be a better fit. It’s free and doesn’t have the limit on search that has made slack such a bad solution for our open source needs. There’s even some Discord → Discourse (these forums) integrations that look kinda interesting.
The question is, do we really want to have yet another communication channel to spread our community out on? What discussions are required that wouldn’t be better served by just keeping things here in the forums? Is there really an active user base eager to do real time chat support for newbs who are too busy to post to the forums? If we setup Discord, do we make the same sin we did years ago in spreading our community thin with Slack, or is chat a different enough communication medium that we can and should afford to run both.
Thoughts?