Some good points here, though a couple are outdated too. For instance, I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be.
That said, one extra piece of advice that should be added for a future version of a list like this is as follows:
Do not use a chat system as your only support channel.
Seriously. Things like Slack, Discord (and open alternatives like Riot) are not good systems for support forums, or any sort of community that should be visible by the public. They make it impossible to find answers with search engines like Google, impossible for archiving services to back them up in case things go down and force users to register to simply find any help given to others.
They're terrible systems for this purpose, and should not be used as a primary support channel for a project.
That's another piece of advice for such lists right there.
> I'm not sure I'd recommend mailing lists in 2018, since they're simply less convenient for the average user than a good forum might be.
I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018, because they're much more convenient for the average user than a forum.
If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place.
Google groups and similar make it quite easy to set one up.
> If a user is extremely interested in a single project, then specialized software makes sense. But most people have lives beyond the single project - a mailing list makes it easy to funnel all that stuff into one place.
This is backwards. Unless someone is deeply involved in a single project, they don't want to sign up to a mailing list and have it flood their inbox (yes, I'm sure you have a sophisticated filtering system that separates out mailing list messages, but typical users don't). Yes you don't want to require users to install a custom executable, but a web forum that uses one of the handful of familiar packages for such will work great.
It really depends on the types of people you wish to attract. Obviously this is very subjective but I've always found mailing list discussions to be of noticeably higher quality than forum discussions. If your topic is a technical one then a mailing list makes sense, whereas a support area for average Joe really wants to be a forum (actually, Facebook groups seem to have taken over a lot of the area previously carved out by forums, and the standard of discourse is lower again).
A lot of web forums lack proper threading implementation (other than a flat thread descended from the original post). Hacker News and reddit do implement threads, but make it difficult to see new posts when you refresh (though reddit does mark them if you have "reddit gold").
> I would definitely recommend mailing lists in 2018
I'm curious as to why setting up a newsgroup (on usenet) or setting up a private news server (with public read access and account required post access) was never the standard way to communicate for open source projects.
The advantage newsgroups have over email is that it makes browsing archives of the list much easier, and they can be used just as easily with a mail/news client.
Historically they were. CVS was originally posted to 'comp.sources.unix', for example.
I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet. Spanmers are trouble elsewhere too, but there are more tools to counter them. In short, spammers are why we can't have (some) nice things.
> I think the fundamental problem is spammers. It's hard to kick off misbehaving users from usenet.
I know that usenet has the concept of moderated groups. I don't know whether managing one would be more time consuming compared to an email list. Based on what I see in the git mailing list (via gmane), there is a significant amount of spam that makes it through, but most people have set their filters to handle that.
Swift recently moved from a mailing list to a forum (Discourse). Honestly I'm not sure I prefer it. Sure, we get niceties like better search and Markdown formatting, but those only really work if you use the website, which breaks often (especially when it tries to do things like track clicks). So now I have to keep a tab open for the forums, which I really dislike as opposed to the native, more performant, and more customizable experience Mail gives me.
> Do not use a chat system as your only support channel.
I disagree. We've found Slack and Gitter to be the easiest and most effective way to communicate with our users. At least for troubleshooting and diagnosis. Even our paid users love that we setup a private Slack channel for communication with us on-demand. If we identify a big enough issue then it becomes a GitHub issue.
So many support requests are one-off "How to do X?" They're usually softball questions or good points for us to interact with our users about pain. So what if folks can't self service their issue? Providing excellent on-demand customer support and responses is really valuable from the perspective of showing you care about your users and building a relationship. It's often through that communication we learn interesting new things about usecases for our software too.
But if you answer it in a chat, you are going to have to answer it in that chat multiple times. At least with an issue tracker, you can search through the old issues pretty easily.
If we answer it enough times it's an indicator to fix our documentation. Also, often times the reason someone is asking something leads to learning useful stuff about the problem.
The downside is repetition, but we invest in doc improvement to avoid that too much.
The upside is personalized support which really means building trust with our users and also really trying to understand what they're trying to accomplish. Yea it has overhead but you just build that into your operations.
In the long run we probably will start adding things like a Knowledge Base or using other support mechanisms but we've found so far that chat based support is very effective.
That said, one extra piece of advice that should be added for a future version of a list like this is as follows:
Do not use a chat system as your only support channel.
Seriously. Things like Slack, Discord (and open alternatives like Riot) are not good systems for support forums, or any sort of community that should be visible by the public. They make it impossible to find answers with search engines like Google, impossible for archiving services to back them up in case things go down and force users to register to simply find any help given to others.
They're terrible systems for this purpose, and should not be used as a primary support channel for a project.
That's another piece of advice for such lists right there.