We started the new Discourse-based discussion forum at https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/ in the middle of August.
We labelled as an experiment for several reasons.
First, it was new territory for the project to be hosting its own infrastructure, and we would need arrangements to ensure a reliable service with regular backups etc.
Secondly, while there were lots of complaints about Google Groups, we were all accustomed to it, and any switch would be disruptive and risked alienating or losing users.
As it’s turned out, the reaction to the experiment has been somewhat polarised. While many users are enthusiastically embracing talk.tiddlywiki.org there is a significant group that have given clear feedback that they prefer the old Google Group system.
So, it seems to me that the best way to proceed is to continue to operate both forums. The Google Group is of course operationally free of charge for us, and only requires very light intervention from administrators.
The tricky question is which forum should be the official forum for announcements etc. I propose to fudge that for the moment, and just continue to post announcements to both forums. It may not be sustainable to do that forever, but it seems reasonable for us to move cautiously and gather feedback when we can.
I have made two small changes to mark this transition:
- Updated https://tiddlywiki.com/#Forums to link to talk.tiddlywiki.org
- Updated the welcome text for this group to include a note that “the official community forum is now talk.tiddlywiki.org – please consider posting there to reach a more active audience.”
I’d like to thank Boris Mann who set up the Discourse instance for us, and the administrator team.
The new forum costs a small amount of money every month to keep it running. Our goal is to cover those costs via contributions to the Open Collective platform. It’s working well so far:
https://opencollective.com/tiddlywikidotorg
Best wishes
Jeremy.