Author : deoren

What are your thoughts regarding current and potential rsyslog support channels?

Overview

Traditionally the rsyslog community has sought and provided support through three main channels:

  • mailing list
  • forums
  • ticketing system (at one time Bugzilla, now GitHub)

Over the years, the community support options have shifted to the point that we are considering retiring the forums in order to best direct users that post there to other, more current options that better fit their needs. It would appear that aside from specific cases, the time of the web forum has passed.

That said, we would like to get your feedback to best determine the way to move forward. What follows are some initial ideas to get the conversation started. Please feel free to respond here, via Twitter, the mailing list or on GitHub. Thank you for your time.

Potential Support options

The following items are all “whiteboard” topics, listed in no real order in an effort to start discussion. Neither the order or presence in the list indicates that a decision has already been made by the team to pursue the support option. Please feel free to suggest your own entries.

Keep the forums, send notifications of new posts made on the forums to the mailing list

  • Note: Attempts to respond to those notifications would not result in the replies being posted to the original topic on the forums.
  • Would this truly result in any additional responses to those forum posts than are currently being provided now?

Set forums to read-only, direct visitors to GitHub for support

  • Could GitHub serve as a replacement for the forums? If so, what do you think about mixing general questions with bug reports in the main project (rsyslog/rsyslog)?
  • Would a dedicated “project” (e.g., rsyslog/rsyslog-support) be useful?
  • Set forums to read-only, direct visitors to StackOverflow

    It would appear there is already solid participation there for questions tagged with rsyslog:

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/rsyslog

    Official Twitter presence

    followers are encouraged to retweet rsyslog related questions, guides, etc to their followers.

    This is actually a “trick” entry of sorts! We already have a Twitter account that you can follow and interact with: @rsyslog

    • Do you already follow that account?
    • Would you retweet content from others?
    • Would you respond to help requests that are retweeted
    • If links to active GitHub issues are posted, will you take the time to go view them?

    Official Facebook presence

    Would you participate in discussions and support requests made there?

    IRC, XMPP, Slack, …

    • Would you participate?
    • Do you feel this could replace the forums?
    • Would this be more useful to you than the mailing list?
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