With the creation of the new MonoGame Foundation we plan to make some changes around how our infrastructure is set up.
The Continuous Integration systems have already moved to GitHub Actions which will provide the project with a more reliable integration and testing system.
The main website has been moved to GitHub Pages via the new Website repository, this will make it easier for the community to contribute documentation and reduce our maintenance costs moving forward.
The final part of this migration is the Community forum site (currently running Discourse). We have had some discussions among the Foundation Board members on what to do here. The difficulty is there is a lot of content on the current site. Some of it is out of date, but it is still a valuable resource, especially for new users. Some ideas we had include
Keeping the Community forum site as is, but migrating it to a Cloud provider.
Move the Community forum site to GitHub Discussions to provide better integration with Issues and Pull Requests and turn the current site off.
Move the Community Site to GitHub Discussions, but archive the current Community Site to an archive which is searchable.
Keep both the existing Discourse and new GitHub Discussions site.
We would like the community to have some say on which option we go with. So with that in mind, please vote on your preferred option below. We shall leave the poll open until the end of November to give enough community members to have a say.
Thanks for your continued support and enthusiasm for MonoGame.
The MonoGame Foundation
MonoGame Community Site Consultation
Stick to the current Community Discourse forum site.
Migrate to GitHub Discussions and take down the current site.
Migrate to GitHub Discussions and archive this site.
Use both GitHub Discussions and the Community Discourse sites.
About the GitHub Discussions… I’m not very familiar with it and little was mentioned about the benefits of the new forum, aside from being able to tie a discussion to the issues and pull requests for MonoGame. So some questions:
Is there any other benefits for the community? (Specifically those who are NOT contributing to the core project)
Will we still be able to do showcases or share our related projects or supporting libraries for MonoGame in a similar manner?
Can it be embedded into this website? I ask this because I’ve never looked for the discussion tab in a github project, so probably others won’t notice it’s there either. Also, being on the github site, I would feel uncomfortable posting anything not directly related to the associated code base
If it can’t/won’t be embedded into this site, what plans are there to improve this site in the forum’s place? If someone considers trying MG and only sees github, a disabled/removed forum, and a discord they have to join to see, they may think the community is dead
I see a tab for discussions on the MG github page already, but there isn’t any posts yet. Is this not the right one or is it already set up completely there? If it is set up, why is no one posting there?
Taking the current forum down and putting up a new one on the repo site feels like a lazy downgrade, at least on the surface. If you can share some reasons it would be an improvement for the community as a whole to use the new one as a replacement instead of an addition, I think the vote will be more meaningful.
I quite like our little space here, but I freely admit that’s more out of comfort than anything else. If things move I’d have no problem moving along with them.
I do think it makes sense to have one or the other though. The stated intent is to reduce maintenance costs so keeping both doesn’t really align with that. Plus it just creates two places to monitor and maintain.
My preference is to stay here but it’s not strong. I’m good with whatever, but I appreciate the engagement with the community on this topic
That’s my point tho, people will end up on archived site most of the time. Just make sure there is big visible link to new active site on them, otherwise they might get feeling the project ended/is archived all together.
One thing to consider if switching to GitHub discussions is the history of posts in the current community forums. There is a wealth of information there from questions answered by people and other tutorial/guide posts made. There are ways to export from Discourse and import into the GitHub discussions in order to retain the history of information. I don’t know how it would work in terms of linking the user that posted it with the user on GitHub, but it might be something worth looking into community · Discussions · GitHub
Just note, EU gdpr would probably throw massive wrench into it, you have to be extremely careful when manipulating, especially copying user made content from system to system (some day we have to talk about what’s happening on MG discord as I assume system you are running there didn’t change since I left, but that’s for another day).
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?
I’ve been working with MonoGame for roughly a month, and I signed up for the community yesterday, and I love it here!
If you choose to move the forums elsewhere, as long as people are moving with it and it is as easy to use as this forum, I am fine with it.
It’s not the location that makes a good forum, it’s the people in it.
We really need some kind of announcement about the closure of the forum here with a link to the discord until the new github thing is done, more information about the github thing could be helpful too.
