Chat or forum-based platform for open-source community?

Reviewing your post and comment history, it looks like you are the dev director or cofounder of a no to low-code dashboarding tool that is thinking about going Open Source to increase adoption, so this medium will be the bulk of your exposure with customers and the net. Is this roughly correct from a 10km viewpoint?

My response is entirely around how the tool will fit in the overall goals, not about any specific tool.

Things I would think about from the perspective of how the solution fits the problem.

- Is it crawlable? Is it deep linkable? Is knowledge or discussions from 4 months ago valid now and would you want folks to be able to find them? If findability and linkability are important, forum or ticket systems are preferable over chat transcript logs.

- What is the nature of the requests and the latency they should satisfy. Is it, "Help! I am stuck!" Or, "How should we structure this support tool so that it also can edit the ticket taxonomy?"

Chat is great for dev teams with micro-blockers that can be satisfied by a 30-90 second transaction, where helping the person asking the question also ultimately unblocks you. Think a group of people that all need to make progress, where the laggards prevent the whole group from moving forward.

Things I would think about when how it affects you and your team and the other participants.

- How much will this change your focus. What kind of duty cycle will you check on the medium? How are you envisioning the interactions taking place, quality (question quality has a huge impact on outcomes), latency, number of exchanges, total time to resolution.

- How much time will it take?

- Who will be the primary participants, is it a community thing and community folks are answering questions, or is it just you at a 24 hour office hours in addition to your regular work?

- Will it be staffed specifically, or will other employees do rotations?

- What are your SLAs, SLOs for response times?

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Email, chat, forums and issue tracking systems all interoperate with group dynamics in different ways. Visualize and simulate those interactions, taking note actors and outcomes. Ask your existing customers how they would like to interact and what their expectations would be.

I have also gone through this exercise a couple orgs, it is org specific, customer specific and testing in production is one of the best ways. Don't commit to a tool before having actually used it in anger. Be willing to burn it down and try something else.

I hope this helps and good luck!

Fundamentally the result is the same: the conversation will happen regardless of the medium.

However, there’s a big difference between the types of conversations: async or sync.

That said, my recommendation is to pick whichever medium is easier for you to manage/moderate on the go.

Forum: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Forum is more useful for future users. Live chat gives a better experience for the immediate asker. Pick your poison.