Future of the Forum, we need your input and feedback

News
1

Hello Everyone,

For those that don’t know me, I’m Derrick the Support Engineering Manager here at Strapi but today I’m posting this not from my role but the side duty I have which is one of the Strapi team members who help manage the community spaces.

First off I need to be extremely clear here, we will not be taking any action until we get feedback from you all. Any thoughts you have are welcome and we will be reading all of the comments so please do share your thoughts.

Next let me explain what we are thinking and what plans we have. Lately internally we have been discussing placing the forum (https://forum.strapi.io) into read-only mode or shutting it down entirely.

As I was the person who originally proposed, created, deployed, and manage the forum this is a hard topic for me to raise. My original thoughts when I created the forum was to provide a nice place for the community to meet up and help each other, share interesting projects, discuss issues, ect. The purpose here was to empower the community to help each other like you see in other spaces (I.E. The Ubuntu Linux Forums).

Over time we within the team have needed to put in a lot of effort to maintain some consistent activity which is absolutely not what we intended. Most of us helping out in the community spaces do so entirely of our own volition, no one tells us to help out and we purely do it within our free time. For the most part we do so in the community Discord because we also use this Discord for some internal purposes so we are almost always there.

Because we want to focus our efforts to the areas that matter the most we believe it’s time to make some changes however before we make changes we want to get the input of the people that will be affected most by these changes… You.

So with all the reasons explained (though if I missed something call me out on it) these are some of the options we are exploring, I’ll clarify here that we do not plan on taking any action this year. At best the changes won’t happen until January 2025.

Some of the options are (though not all) and we may combine some:

  • Place the forum into read-only mode (make it impossible to post new topics or reply to existing)
  • Shut down the forum entirely and reroute users to either a new platform that will be a read-only/SEO optimized or to Discord itself
  • Shut down the forum completely and move over to GitHub discussions (closer to a platform we already use)

We are certainly open to suggestions but I need to stress the goals for us internally:

  • Promote the community to help the community (we can’t hire a ton of people just to focus on community questions and would go against our “Don’t Repeat Yourself” AKA DRY method)
  • Focus our efforts into the minimal amount of platforms (hence why we have never/rarely answer questions in areas like StackOverflow, Reddit, Twitter, ect) to provide the most impact
  • Ideally try to have a platform that everyone can enjoy and that we can properly manage/moderate against abuse, spam, ect without too much human requirements

With this wall of text out of the way I open the floor to you all, please share your thoughts. I want to see our community happy, healthy, and getting answers to their questions.

Thank you and with Love

  • DMehaffy <3

TLDR: We plan on shutting down the forum or putting it in read-only mode and we want your feedback

4 Likes
5

Hi Derrick,

We have been using Strapi for over 6 months, successfully completing one client project, and we’re almost ready to release a full stack solution using Strapi with a Next.js frontend.

We’ve really enjoyed working with it and love the experience.

I apologize for not having any community contributions yet; we were focused on meeting project deadlines as we were new to Strapi.

Additionally, my thought is not to entirely shut things down. If possible, please keep it open or set it to read-only mode.

Thank you!

4 Likes
6

Well, this seem to me that there is no place for real suggestions.
Because “hiring a ton of people” is - obviously - not necessary for moderating the forum.
For me the forum was abandoned roughly a year ago and without effort of Strapi the forum became to that mess it is right now.

Shifting community interaction to GitHub / Discord might be more beneficial for you (regarding publicity “xx.xxx k users in our discord!”) however being “real open-source” and “community-driven” obviously comes with the cost of enabling the community or providing a low-barrier solution for community discussions.

2 Likes
7

Indeed I agree with you, we do regularly try to do this but we also have to think about scale and focus our efforts. Both @Paul_Brats and I do “Discord Office Hours” where every Monday - Friday we sit in a voice channel for an hour (most of the time longer) to literally just chat, hang out, and answer questions.

The first step of empowering through requires some effort, we need that to scale meaning people searching for the information first (this is one of the core reason we have a bot to replicate Discord stuff over to the forum).

2 Likes
8

I’m adding my two cents here as someone who has built two projects using Strapi, one personal, and one professional: I think that the option of moving entirely to Discord would be a loss for the ease of adoption of Strapi.

Strapi is as much a development framework as it is a “plug & play” SaaS product. The docs are good but don’t cover all the use cases that people have. This forum has helped me on several occasions to accomplish things and solve problems, mostly by me finding existing topics here via search engines (mostly DuckDuckGo). For some, see my likes history.

From my perspective, a migration to Github Discussions seems the best option forward among those given (other than keeping Discourse).

In any case, I think it is important that Strapi keeps controlling a searchable, web-exposed community space where community discussions can occur. Otherwise, you give SEO ground to some of the LLM-generated crap that proliferates today, degrading the experience of (possible) users looking for answers.

Regarding Discord: I’m personally not enough on Discord to say this with confidence, but I think it’s fair to assume that:

  • It decreases (eliminates?) the ability of users to find solutions online with a simple search (the SEO argument)
  • It forces all community support to happen in a walled garden built on closed software
  • What if in 5 years Discord decides to hide history and starts charging per user, just like Slack does? I’ve observed how this degraded several Slack communities.

I’ve also seen the Discord-Discourse commentsBot integration in action, but this has lead to my Discourse summary emails only including long community threads from commentsBots talking to each other, which I think are confusing and messy. I wouldn’t miss that integration overall.

Regarding GitHub Discussions: for me, GitHub has had a better track record of findability and being useful for development, also in relation to Strapi (despite it being closed software, too). Here is just one example that helped me in Github Issues.

I generally find the organization of GitHub Discussions more chaotic than Discourse topics, although I also see them being used by so many orgs (Immich, Photoprism, Paperless NGX, Nextcloud Desktop, … from the top of my mind).

Maybe you can identify the most helpful/visited topics using Discourse’s built-in analytics, and move those over? Having a dead read-only forum seems messy too.

You’ll also need to clarify what goes where. For example, there is now also the Canny instance for feature requests. Are you intending to keep that one?

This rings true:

Probably there will be some work regardless of which platform you use. But I understand that you want to lower the platform surface and focus your efforts as a company.

9

Can we make a discourse replacement with Strapi and migrate the content and move the forum there?

maintaining it would be on scope.

I have been finding this forum useful, what about embassador programs or community volunteers? lots of open source projects manage to sustain a community and Strapi is growing in popularity

1 Like
10

Hello! My honest opinion about Strapi Forum. I’m a part of community since late Strapi v3. Nowadays i’m running and maintaining 6 projects on Strapi4, developing another 2 with v5.
Most helpful (for me) things for solving appearing problems are (sorted in most value for me)

  1. Discord Open Office Hours (huge thanks for this opportunity),
  2. Documentation and KapaAI (still need a lot of job here),
  3. Official Youtube channel and Blog (huge thanks for content and how-to’s)
  4. Searching and Forum (often provides outdated info)
    When developing a product, it is often necessary to find an operational solution to the problem. The forum cannot cope with the task in time to give a hint, since you can not get the answer to the question asked at all. Therefore, the forum remains in the smallest priority as operational assistance.
    As a contributor to a Telegram’s community i can provide a poll (votes for 7 days) results from some part of community which meets and begins development with Strapi
    Screenshot 2024-10-14 at 22.53.18

Overall

  • Fair enough to make Forum read-only till Strapi 4 will be active.
  • Github Discussions not looks like convenient way to handle it forum-alike but it might be the place for it
  • Discord nowadays best place to get answer in shortest time, cuz all team in-touch there
  • I would gave preference to the stability of the product than spending money and effort to maintain the forum - cuz this will provides better product, better docs, better ecosystem. Forum it is not a preference.

Also i understand and agree with important highlights that mentioned up here:
Discord and GitHub (haha) - it is aside platform and no trust in future
SEO - yes, need some platform/resource in the web which will be Strapi’s owned and well indexed by search robots.

Anyway, thank you all in Strapi Team! Great job!

3 Likes
11

Being very objective and summarizing a lot, I believe you could create an official “Authorized Community Managers” program

The logic itself would be to form/train/prepare/authorize people to represent Strapi (company) and manage their local communities autonomously.

A ridiculous example here: Imagine that in a world of 193 countries, Strapi was used in all of them. Imagine supporting/supporting/managing so many people from all these countries, thinking that there could be millions of people using Strapi and needing help and/or generating knowledge/money around it

But, it would be easier to pay attention only to “193 people prepared” to replicate knowledge and help for each of their countries.

From your point of view, from the company itself, Strapi as a brand, you wouldn’t have to worry about anything in relation to “whether a forum, discord or any other channel will be used”. You could just focus on Strapi’s core and make it better and better for those who use it, removing all the workload you mentioned.

Just share community management with authorized, friendly, and trustworthy representatives of yours :slight_smile:

That’s more or less what I proposed when I wrote this here

2 Likes
12

You are totally right in this idea. I understand that you had the best intentions in creating these forums, but they are not properly moderated and this leads to more confusion than anything else.
It seems to me that an healthy software should also have an effective place for its community to discuss.
As far as I’m concerned, all questions should be redirected to a single and efficient platform like Stackoverflow or Github - and other places like this forums should be shut down.
Personally, I don’t like Discord at all. I suppose it can be an ideal place for live discussion, but not for giving detailed, precise answers to general questions - at least because you need to be logged to access it.

Thanks for your hard work.

2 Likes
13

Hello Derrick and everyone,

I just discovered Strapi and this community today, and I wanted to share my perspective as a new user and as someone who is a native Spanish speaker.

First, I’ve noticed that the forum seems to be quite inactive, but I believe it still has great potential. As a non-English speaker, audio or video content in English is not very helpful for me. However, text-based communities like this forum are incredibly useful because they can be easily translated into other languages, either manually or with AI-powered tools.

One of the features I requested earlier was the ability to translate the Strapi admin interface into other languages. While Strapi itself doesn’t need to provide translations, it would be amazing to have a structure or framework that allows the community to contribute and share translations. This would open the door for people from different linguistic backgrounds to use and contribute to Strapi.

Regarding the forum, I strongly believe that keeping it active is important. A well-maintained forum with good SEO will always attract new users searching for solutions to their problems. Over time, this will naturally create a community. However, I understand the challenges of managing a forum, especially when the activity level is low.

To address this, I suggest:

  1. Assigning someone specifically to monitor and nurture the forum—answering questions and creating content to help grow the community. This would only need to be temporary, as a stronger community would eventually take over.
  2. Maintaining the forum while gradually transitioning users if you decide to move to another platform. Abrupt changes can alienate users. It might be better to leave the old forum in place while encouraging new discussions on the new platform.
  3. Introducing features like community email digests—where users receive updates when new questions are posted—can encourage engagement.

Finally, I think the issue might not be the platform itself but the way the migration was handled in the past. If previous discussions were not preserved or the transition was too abrupt, it may have caused users to leave. A forum like this needs patience, consistent effort, and a welcoming environment to thrive.

In summary, I believe shutting down the forum completely would be a mistake. Instead, focus on nurturing it, addressing the root causes of inactivity, and allowing time for the community to grow organically.

Thank you for listening, and I hope my thoughts can contribute to making the Strapi community stronger!

14

Obrigado por compartilhar sua ideia, Juliano! Agradecemos muito a colaboração e iremos analisar todas as possibilidades com carinho. Sua sugestão é importante para nós! :brazil::brazil:

1 Like