Ryan Weaver, Symfony core team member and SymfonyCasts founder, needs our help

Using GitHub Discussions for Symfony Support

August 6, 2021 · Published by Avatar of Javier Eguiluz Javier Eguiluz

Open Source Symfony Support is provided by the community via StackOverflow and Slack. Both have served us well for some years, but they lack some features that are increasingly important for us.

StackOverflow is nice for async support and its discussions stay forever and can be found via Google, but it lacks advanced formatting tools, better moderation and GitHub integration (to ping users, mention issues, etc.)

Slack is nice for sync support, where you need a quick and live reply to your questions. Sadly it suffers from the same problems as StackOverflow and some of its own problems. The free version of Slack used by Symfony has a 10,000 message history limit and its messages can't be found via Google.

That's why we're enabling GitHub Discussions for Symfony as a new way for the community to provide free Symfony Support. In our opinion, the main advantages of GitHub Discussions over StackOverflow/Slack are:

  • There's no history message limit and all discussions are easily found via Google;
  • Discussions can use all the great formatting tools provided by GitHub, including the seamless picture uploading;
  • The entire Symfony community is on GitHub, so discussions can leverage the features to ping users and mention issues and pull requests;
  • Although discussions won't be as sync as Slack chat, the size of the Symfony community could ensure fast replies to most discussions;
  • Instead of closing some issues because they are support questions, we can now convert those into discussions, improving the newcomers experience;
  • We'll have more moderation tools to ensure that GitHub Discussions is a great and safe place for everyone.

We're looking for moderators to help us monitor discussions and contribute to them. Visit https://github.com/symfony/symfony/discussions and find discussions that need answers or people looking for help.

We're delighted to try GitHub Discussions. However, for now this is just an experiment. We'll adjust things as needed and we could even remove GitHub Discussions in the future if expectations aren't met.

Published in #Community

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Comments

Avatar of fd6130
fd6130 said on Aug 6, 2021
About the slack, how about consider to move to discord instead? Since discord is totally free and slack got limitation on free version.
Avatar of desc
desc said on Aug 6, 2021
I think discord is certainly worth a look - the server owner may need a paid account and there may be a file upload limit but as we are querying / discussion code those posts would count as text so not an issue? - I am not an expert but have used it and it is worth input / research from someone who knows more. I certainly prefer it to Slack.
I am learning Symfony but I do not have a github account as this post suggests we all do (not yet).
Avatar of Romaric Drigon
Romaric Drigon Certified said on Aug 9, 2021
I poked around a bit, and Github Discussions seem pretty great.

Maybe the symfony.com support page should be updated, now? Otherwise it is a bit hard to find, it will stay a bit private.
Avatar of Michael Brauner
Michael Brauner said on Aug 10, 2021
After 6 years of symfony enthusiasm I spent a year working with Laravel. So I know that one of the main reasons Laravel has become so popular is the fact that you NEVER feel left out. Taylor Otwell has posted several times on Twitter how impossible this climb would have been if he hadn't constantly promoted the people who write about his framework or help others. I also know that even members of the core team spend a lot of their time supporting. The fact that Symfony FINALLY thinks about how we can improve our support is like a little wonder of the world for me. THANK YOU!
Avatar of CJayHe
CJayHe said on Aug 17, 2021
If I have enough news, I think the community should use AI to summarize it. In this way, an effective knowledge collection can be formed.
Avatar of CJayHe
CJayHe said on Aug 17, 2021
中文翻译：https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/400760417

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