By fkelly12054@gmail.com on

It appears, without any announcement that I can see, that Forums have been replaced by Slack on the Drupal.org home page.  

Forums were generally used by "less-expert" users and sometimes provided assistance to such users.  

Sometime ago I supplemented Forums with Slack and usually checked both sources for information when coming into the Drupal.org home page.  You can still get to Forums with the link:

https://www.drupal.org/forum

Throughout the forums you will see occasional posts from "disaffected" Drupal users complaining that Drupal has become "too expert" oriented and doesn't accommodate to less expert users well.  The fact that the Forum link would be removed from the Drupal.org home page without any announcement or transition is just another example of this.

I may have missed the announcement but I don't think so.  

⋅ Categories: Drupal 10.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

With the forum.module being removed from Drupal 10 and put back in contrib, I venture decisions are being made as to how/when to upgrade drupal.org and what will eventually occur to the forums here. That said, I don't know what 'announcement' you expected to see. The change very well may be captured in the issue queue.

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

 I don't know what 'announcement' you expected to see"

I expected an announcement that Forums were "deprecated" (to use a term used throughout Drupal) from the home page of drupal.org and replaced by Slack.  Because that's what appears to have happened.  Maybe the announcement would include how to get to the "old" Forums that still exist but are "buried" a bit on Drupal.org.  It's unlikely that anyone new to Drupal dot org would ever stumble on them.  

I spent some time searching various issue queues and didn't see anything about the change.  I may have missed it.  

I read the link @Ressa posted (thanks) and I look in on the Drupal Slack area pretty much every day.  Seems to me that Slack has better capabilities (e.g., you can post a screen capture) that the Drupal Forums are missing.  I can see the argument for replacing Forums with Slack but it sure would be helpful if the transition (if that's what it is) was handled better.  Certainly there is more involvement by Drupal developers and committers on Slack than there is in the Forums on Drupal.org.  

VM’s picture

VM commented

: ) apologies, I meant don't know 'where' you expected to see an announcement.

I couldn't locate an issue but I venture there is one where this was discussed. While looking though I did take note of the plethora of slack/drupal integration modules that have been developed over the past 2 - 3 years since Drupal 8 release. Perhaps there is a plan to intetgrate here on drupal.org (pure speculation).

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

I suspect that few people who have the authority to make changes to the structure of Drupal.org ever look in the Forums here.  

If no one else does it first I will try to figure out where in Slack (announcements?) to post this.  

The Drupal issue queue does a very thorough and professional job of processing issues going from a statement of the problem, to alternative solutions to proposed solutions and review of them to what they call reviewed and tested by the community to a commit by authorized committer.  It's good bad this approach was not followed here.

I suspect that anything posted in this forum is probably indexed by Google and can be found.  Just removing it (the Forum link) from the banner of Drupal.org would not stop it from being indexed.  

ressa’s picture

ressa commented

Thanks for sharing @fkelly, that was a surprise move. Replacing a free and open source resource with a proprietary walled garden, where we have no control over the content, is a bad move in my opinion. It doesn't align with Drupal's Open Web Manifesto:

Drupal and the open web go hand in hand. The open web is a web that’s built for everyone — a free, public internet that all people around the world can access for information, connection, commerce, and political participation. Drupal, the world’s leading open-source, community-built content management system, powers the open web with innovative, secure, accessible digital experiences. Both are driven by the same core principles: access, freedom, inclusion, and empowerment.

Since we don't control the content, or control access to the system, it means that content can (or will) disappear, and also that it won't get indexed by the search engines. For more criticisms of Slack, and why a forum is better solution, see The Problem with Slack at Scale.

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

The main problem I see with this is that when you google an issue, you find forum links. Slack conversations do not show. So there is no record of support.

ressa’s picture

ressa commented

I may have missed the announcement but I don't think so.

Maybe it was discussed, agreed upon, and announced in Slack? :-)

ressa’s picture

ressa commented

@gisle created the issue #3397421: Please put link to "Forums" back in the "Community" pulldown menu.

gisle’s picture

gisle
he/him
Primary language Norwegian Bokmål
Location Norway
commented

It really is a surprise. I couldn't find any mention of this on Drupal Slack either.

But not everybody in the community is a fan of the Forums. When searching for background for the depreciations of Forums, I found this: #3144067: [Community Initiative Proposal] Remove the old forum, and this Forum post: Shut down this forum. But absolutely nothing indicating some consensus about replacing Forums with Drupal Slack.

- gisle

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

I read the issue Gisle posted and thanks @Gisle.  

For someone who has been around Drupal a bit and used the Forums, it is not too onerous to put a link to Drupal Forums in your browser favorites.  I already had a Slack link in my favorites and could just add Forums another Favorite.

What I suspect is that, unless they add the Forum link back in to the banner line at the top of the Drupal.org home page, new users will never even know that Forums exist and they will eventually wither away and die.  Which is a synonym for "deprecated", I suppose, and may be what the Drupal.org managers intend.

I will be interested to see if anyone in authority responds to #3397421.  I did some additional searching on Slack this morning and the topic is not mentioned there.  

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

The Drupal association has long had a problem with updating the forums. Roughly 10 years ago I offered to do development for free on them, as long as I could get a commitment to reviewing my patches within a reasonable amount of time, as it was taking weeks to get the reviewed. The Drupal association member argued that they were becoming irrelevant. 

https://www.drupal.org/project/drupalorg/issues/2536122

Edit: Interestingly, I notice the comments by the Drupal association member have all been deleted from that issue, so it makes it not clear that I was debating the matter with someone in the issue.

ressa’s picture

ressa commented

Thanks @jaypan, the #2536122: Push to get the Drupal Organization to update the Drupal forums issue should be re-opened, and a plan made on how to update the Drupal Forum.

Outsourcing support content to a third-party is bad practice, as the many arguments here and in #3397421: Please put link to "Forums" back in the "Community" pulldown menu states.

John Pitcairn’s picture

John Pitcairn commented

@Jaypan: 

The main problem I see with this is that when you google an issue, you find forum links. Slack conversations do not show. So there is no record of support.

Exactly. Slack channels are great for fast comms between developers, but if we are going to deprecate support in favour of something the DA doesn't need to maintain (if that's the rationale), then at least (say) Stack Overflow can be googled.

I doubt all the devs on Drupal Slack will be all that thrilled with a bunch of non-coder support requests clogging things up either.

user9000’s picture

user9000 commented

I am very new to your community. I am not so familar with all the modern web protocals and would have been unable to join the community with out the help I recieved in the forums. Not to mention the amount of knowledge I have been able to abtain  from the forums that will allow me to side other problems before they happer to me.

This is in  valuable to an old, tech not to savy dude trying to learn and build something cool. To remove, hide, depecite, reduce zre anthing like that is insane to me. Just imagineof all the knowledge not realized by stopping the open flow of information about drupal and specificlly the D10 release which appearntly has some major changes from prior Distrobutions. Appears to be bad timing.

Another thing to consider many of us older folks are just used to forums being availble as a knowledge base to not need to bother or annoy moderates with already covered question/isshes. We like to find solution at our own pace and availabllity.

Again it seems a no  brainer build a knowledge base dont shrink/hide it

fkelly12054@gmail.com’s picture

fkelly12054@gmail.com commented

Forums are now on community/support/forums. That's good enough I suppose.