Hexo: suggestion: build a forum for ask-for-help

[huyingjie]

Hugo has a forum (https://discourse.gohugo.io/) for people to ask for help. It can separate the issue section on GitHub and simple ask-for-help questions.

Could you make one?

[NoahDragon]

Yeah, it's good to have one. But I think we may need a dedicated server to host the forum. @tommy351

[huyingjie]

@NoahDragon @tommy351 How about flarum? It uses PHP and can be hosted on any shared server. The cost will be low.
The downside is that it is the beta version and cannot guarantee to upgrade without errors for each version.

[NoahDragon]

Thanks for the suggestion. I also found this https://www.freeflarum.com/ . But it hosts ads.

[huyingjie]

@NoahDragon I found that, too. I created a forum for my theme on it. https://arsnippet.freeflarum.com/
Official Hexo forum should possess the ability to control ads. Self-hosted is a good option. There is another forum app, https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB

[tcrowe]

My preference would be to keep it to github. The gitter has been available but participation is low. My guess would be that participation on a forum would also be low and would also be many duplicates of what is right here on github.

There's a ton of activity on github to keep anyone interested.

I hope you don't mind me adding a dissenting view. 😳

[huyingjie]

@tcrowe I appreciate your reply and here is my concern.

I don't like GitHub issues. It is very cold and not a good way to build a warm community.I met the situation at least twice that owners of repos closed my problems without answering the questions.
After the issue is closed, new answers will be rarely created by other people except for owners. Then how can I find the answer to my questions?

There is another extreme, never close issues. The number of issues is overwhelming. People can assign the label to the issues but most people won't create the labels. https://github.com/hexojs/hexo/issues. The homepage of issues gives a vivid example. If not all questions are assigned labels, using labels to filter issues are not a convenient way to find workable bugs for a potential contributor.

Both Hugo and Hexo are statistic website generators. Hugo's forum can be a good predictor if Hexo builds a similar forum. https://discourse.gohugo.io/ Their forum is very active. The gitter of Hugo is active, too. The gitter is used by developers of Hugo, not for ask-for-help.

Issue section on Hexo should be dedicated to bugs and feature requests. I hope that Hexo can attract more users and developers, and build a better community.

[tcatche]

@huyingjie Seems like you mentioned wrong people...

[huyingjie]

@tcatche I am sorry.

[YoshinoriN]

I totally agree with @huyingjie

Discourse is free for opensource.
How do you think @NoahDragon ?

[tomap]

I see the need for a space to ask questions, but I would prefer not to do it on a forum, at least not one that we are handling ourselves. I would rather suggest to do it on stackoverflow, or open another channel on gitter, and invite people to go there. There is also disqus, attached to the site

[stevenjoezhang]

How about using GitHub discussions?
https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/
Demo:
https://github.com/zeit/next.js/discussions

[dumindu]

Hi guys,
Any update on this?

Also with Node 14, many users faced lot of issues and having a forum or a chat channel will be super helpful to reduce duplicate error reporting, to more people to help other and to get quicker solutions for the problems like we faced with Node 14.

And how about using a chat channel like Slack; Free option.

• https://slack.k8s.io/
• https://dockercommunity.slack.com

Especially, this will be helpful to build more active community than using a forum.

Thanks

[SukkaW]

@dumindu Gitter or Slack would be great. But personally I would prefer a Community.

[dumindu]

@SukkaW If we are having a Gitter or Slack channel, users/ the community will be more active than on forums.

[jiangtj]

If we are having a Gitter or Slack channel

@dumindu In fact, we are having a Gitter, and Discord and Slack are very similar. In addition, we can also chat through Telegram or Google Group.

However, I think it's a little bit more, I prefer to discuss in one place.

https://github.com/hexojs/hexo#more-information

@SukkaW before @ivan-nginx was active in the next theme, he added some bridge robot, sameroom and t2bot.

• sameroom: I feel good, but it does not support Discord
• t2bot: sometimes down (maybe often ...)

How about this?

[dumindu]

Btw having multiple communication channels make the community less active due to active users distribute through multiple channels and none of them makes more active and stable. If we can choose only Slack or Gitter, the community will be more active and will be easier to get a help from others while a help/ discussion needed.