Add a forum to support the Raku community and provide a searchable repository of Q&A

[shishini]

Suggestion

This is a request to add and fund a discourse forum to serve the Raku community I will explain below why adding one is a good idea, if you think you like the idea and don't want to listen to me rambling why we need one, please go directly to cost and implementation options

Justification

We don't have an easy to search repository of question and answers

Currently the Raku Community page (https://www.raku.org/community/) seem to only really offer one option to interested developers to communicate with the community, the IRC channel on freenode

The discord server seem to be just a bridge to the IRC channel and it remains a chatting option

The mailing list is said to be inactive as of 2014

New comers, don't have access to any searchable repository of questions and answer s

New comers, will have to repeat the same question on the IRC channel or the unofficial Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/raku.perl6)

Asking in chat, can be intimidating, because of the live interaction forums in my opinion provide a less stressful form of communication

You can ask a question, edit it, follow up on it, and you don't have to connected live or online to wait for answer

You can also also easily search if the same question was asked before and use that thread instead of repeating the question

The Perl (5/7) community, have had the https://www.perlmonks.org/ ( https://perldoc.perl.org/perlcommunity#Forums ) page for years and its a very rich place to search for information about Perl 5

Other newer languages, like Go, Rust, Fsharp, Julia opted to use the discourse platform It is modern, feature rich and easy to use

You can look at it in those links

https://forums.fsharp.org https://discuss.ocaml.org https://users.rust-lang.org https://discourse.julialang.org https://forum.golangbridge.org https://clojureverse.org

Cost and implementation option

We can either, install from source on our own servers or pay for a hosted option

A hosted option will cost 50 USD for the standard plan 150 USD for the enterprise plan And we will have to call if we need a bigger plan

Those costs are at 50% discount from the commercial plans https://www.discourse.org/pricing

Considering the size of the Raku community, I think the standard plan will be good enough

Alternatives

• discourse is opensource, if the cost seem to much, and if it will be cheaper to install discourse on a server available for the Raku community, this can be an option I personally don't have any experience installing or admining a discourse installation, but if needs be I can look into it

• User Perlmonks, historically Perlmonks was used for Perl6 and it seem to still get some questions on Raku, although very few We can reignite the use of Perlmonks by the Raku community and publish a link to it on the community page https://www.raku.org/community/

[JJ]

Thanks for raising this issue, and very grateful for the kind offer. The mailing list is actually rather active, with emails almost every single day. And StackOverflow works rather well, with a high rate of answered questions, most of them during the day. Besides, people know that SO is the place for asking questions. So, in principle I'm not so totally sure we would need another place. Also, I think this is more of an infra than documentation question, so I'd rather hear @rba's opinion on this matter.

[shishini]

I agree, that if the mailing list is still active, considering the size of the community, paying for a discourse plan, is probably not very well justified

Feel free to close this issue, a discourse forum is just nice to have, far from being a must have Maybe in the future if the community becomes bigger, we can reconsider

For me personally, I will also try to post my questions on perlmonks , Raku is still on topic on that forum

[jubilatious1]

I enjoy using the perl6-users mailing list (https://lists.perl.org/list/perl6-users.html ).

• First of all, it's indexed and searchable within my email client.
• Second of all, I can keep a copy of mailing list posts on my hard drive--no net connection needed.
• Third of all, I can cite a post directly from the NNTP archive ( https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/ ), to reference any prior topic under discussion--for example--should I be opening a Github issue.

We hope you'll join us!

cc: @AlexDaniel

[shishini]

We hope you'll join us!

Sure I will, the community page just gave me the impression that the mailing list is not active anymore, I should have checked it myself