Expose zulip to google search indexing

[coderedart]

trafficstars

Zulip conversations are already public at https://bytecodealliance.zulipchat.com/ . But they are not index-able by search engines and the zulip issue https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881 for this feature has had no activity for more than a year now.

Zulip recommends using https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive for making a static html archive and publish that. It seems to be trivial to automate.

There's plenty of reasons for doing this:

1. Zulip has a lot of beginner questions already answered, and those will help other beginners. I am sure the friendly people on zulip who are answering the questions have seen the same repetitive questions popup from time to time. This would reduce the chances of duplicates too, if people could find their answer in google search.
2. It makes the info more accessible for people who are not comfortable joining chat platforms and asking strangers for help.
3. you can let chatgpt like services consume the zulip archives and converse with it to extract useful info.
4. The lack of info on google search made me feel like nobody is using component model. I think atleast a few others would come to a similar conclusion.
5. Finally, it would actually advertise the existence of https://bytecodealliance.zulipchat.com/ itself. The more people discover and join it, the larger the community. wasmtime/component devs can't forever dedicate their time answering questions on zulip. There will always be "power users" or experienced community members who hang around and answer questions of beginners, reducing the burden on core devs. This could also slowly lead to more contributors and helper crates surrounding the CM ecosystem.

[itowlson]

This is probably out of scope for this repo - @ricochet are you the right person to determine whether and how to approach this?

[ricochet]

This seems like a great idea. I think you're right @itowlson that we probably wouldn't host it from this project.

We could potentially hang it off of https://github.com/bytecodealliance/bytecodealliance.org The other alternative is that we create a new GH repo just for this and automate the archival to gh-pages. That should give us free hosting.

What do you think @disquisitioner?

[coderedart]

pinging after 3 months :) hope this can be moved forward.

[kate-goldenring]

I agree that this is an important step to take. @ricochet maybe we can start by creating a new GH repo for this and using gh-pages as you mentioned @ricochet?

[kate-goldenring]

We are now publishing an updated archive of Zulip every hour to https://bytecodealliance.github.io/zulip-archive/ 🎉 Thank you for this great proposal @coderedart and pointing us in the right direction. Repo: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/zulip-archive