Going to have this topic pinned for the first few weeks of using the new platform so that the first handful of people can get to know each other and give some feedback.
Let me give you some condensed back story:
Ghost.org launched in 2013, with a self-built (this is a terrible idea, never do it) forum so that we could support users who weren’t necessarily hosting with Ghost(Pro) and give people a place to talk
The forum ate all our time cause it was poorly coded and ended up full of spam. Awful experience for everyone.
So we closed the forum, moved the community to a public Slack team, and set up feature-requests voting thing with UserVoice
Fast forward a few years later
Both have become a Ghost town, because they just weren’t very good at their intended purpose.
That brings us to now:
We’ve set up a new Discourse forum which solves a bunch of different problems at the same time:
People can ask for and get support with anything to do with Ghost, without it getting immediately lost in the dregs of a Slack archive. It’s also searchable. And when you start a new topic, it will automatically suggest previous similar topics - making it easy to find an old answer to any question.
We’ve got an #Ideas category which replaces the UserVoice thing which most people didn’t even know existed. So if you have feature requests, there’s now a place for them and others can vote on them / discuss them.
This forum also now powers the comments on all of our blog(s) and those show up automatically in the #news category. I’m particularly excited about this one, because it means we get to move away from Disqus - who have in the last 5 years moved from being “a little shady” - to - “haha, you literally can’t imagine how many different ad trackers we inject into your site without permission”.
A bunch of people ask us often “Where can I find someone to build me a Ghost theme?” - and - “I made this Ghost-related product/service, where can I promote it?” – now we have a #marketplace category for that too
TL;DR:
All useful community discussion now lives in one place and is searchable, here, instead of being scattered all over the place. Hopefully it’ll be a better experience all round. I guess we’ll find out!
If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see or would be important, we’d love to hear them :) say hi!
The idea of a forum is great. I love the fact that messages will be indexed in google and will not be lost in Slack channels. Finally we can link to a problem if someone has it. I saw that people were asking the same questions pretty much every day. This will definitely help.
I also like the #Ideas category. The old one wasn’t very helpful to be honest. Would love to see a #Roadmap category too. The only way to see now what is in the future is to read GitHub latest issues and Pull requests. This unfortunately creates a lot of questions like: ‘Is it done?’, ‘Are you working on it?’, etc.
Hey folks,
+1 on moving out of slack and into a public forum instead. Much better. And Discourse is a great choice
Could we get a login with Ghost though, so we can use the same account as on Ghost: Sign in? (Or alternatively, is there a way to log in to ghost.org with a Google account?)
I’ve never been much of a fan of joining Slack channels for support, since I don’t want to get overwhelmed with searching for questions among back and forth discussions.
without it getting immediately lost in the dregs of a Slack archive
This really reflects my overall experience with Slack. I follow a few other communities that use it, and I know the same questions are getting asked and then lost there too. And we use it at work, and have the same problem.
we get to move away from Disqus - who have in the last 5 years moved from being “a little shady” - to - “haha, …
I’ve read enough articles over the last year that I’m convinced, easy as Disqus is to setup, they’re definitely shady with the business practices. My blog is so small I haven’t been the victim of any nonsense yet, but I’ve heard enough from others. Looking forward to seeing how this goes for you. I’d like to play around with setting up Discourse too at some point, but I hadn’t belonged to any communities that use it yet.
All useful community discussion now lives in one place and is searchable
Thanks for making this change! Going back to the “lost in the dregs” comment, it’ll be a huge win that all the great info your team and others share will be fully and easily discoverable.
The problem with a Roadmap is, in my opinion, that people tend to be a little bit greedy. They expect a lot of features to see in their dashboard. Sometimes they tend to belive that things are moving slow or something. They don’t see bugs, dependencies upgrades, server issues, etc., that are fixed every day by core members. To be honest, a Ghost Pro client might not even know about Ghost CLI, that is the best thing that happened to this platform.
We tried this once and it was one of the single worst mistakes we’ve ever made. So, unfortunately not. We’ll be keeping it simple. If you don’t want to remember another set of credentials then use Twitter / Github / Google auth
Not atm, but this one is actually possible in future maybe one for the Ideas category!
Glad to hear about using discourse to better support open source community. I am blogging with ghost about open source hardware/software biology lab gear that I develop. blog.kitmatic.com
Discourse is wonderful for managing communities. Kudos for that. A little bit of a SysAdmin advise tho. Tell your SysAdmin to be careful while maintaining discourse. Things can get really intense.
We tried this once and it was one of the single worst mistakes we’ve ever made. So, unfortunately not. We’ll be keeping it simple. If you don’t want to remember another set of credentials then use Twitter / Github / Google auth
