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Once the Tridion StackExchange Beta will become public should we ask for the "closing" of the forum? Turn it into a read-only archive where no new questions are being posted anymore?

Otherwise we have three (or more) locations were people can ask their Tridion related question.

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  • @MrSmith I was referencing a "closed" for the public Tridion forum that is one of the places for Tridion related Questions. It's been around for probably more than a decade (and it shows). I guess it's a good thing you are not familiar with it ;-)
    – Hendrik Beenker
    Feb 20, 2013 at 15:27
  • But how do we get the old forum's smiley faces here? ;-)
    – Alvin Reyes
    Feb 28, 2013 at 7:19
  • I remember giving Nakele a hard time about the dated functionality of those forums back in 2008 when she was doing some consulting work for us and made the mistake of admitting to being the person who had set them up.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 28, 2013 at 10:29
  • Hehe, I'm actually grateful she helped set up the forum. I recently got a chance to tell Nakele I wouldn't be a Tridion consultant if I didn't get to learn and share on the old forum.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Mar 1, 2013 at 5:06

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That was the general idea indeed, however since Stack Exchange doesn't really give us a discussion forum it will be reviewed if something like that should still be made available (wondering if this meta forum could be used for that actually).

For general Q&A, tridion.stackexchange.com should be replacing the forum as it makes no sense to me to have multiple locations. Mind you the forum has been on the list to be replaced for a couple of years now with a better alternative, and so is SDL Tridion World (as a more integrated site with sdl.com). Unfortunately that is taking its time, so when the Stack Exchange initiative came along, that was a blessing for me.

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  • Jeff Atwood who co-founded StackOverflow/StackExchange has started a new thing called Discourse discourse.org with is a reinvention of the forum. Maybe we could look at that?
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 20, 2013 at 14:40
  • could be worth checking it out, but I would first also like to see if such a forum is wanted. I think most real discussions are already done on the blogs of our community members, and making them available through a blog-roll of some sorts would be higher on my requirements list for a new community site.
    – Bart Koopman
    Feb 20, 2013 at 14:49
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I do agree with Hendrik, we should not have too many places for SDL Tridion questions.

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Stack Exchange works really well for technical support, as long as you're not trying to outsource your entire customer support channel to Stack Exchange. There's a good meta post covering the issue below; the top two answers are worth reading:

Is it okay to use Stack Overflow as the support forum for a product or project?

Stack Exchange should only be ONE of the options available. Feel free to integrate this support option directly into your product or website community — but issues like bug reporting, feature requests, generalized discussions, and specific customer support issues do not fit into our Q&A model, and will be quickly closed by the community.

Make sure you have an outlet for activities that simply do not belong on this site.

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  • I am fairly confident that this shouldn't be done in the "closed" of Tridion forum either. It shouldn't be allowed to name companies, or create hash tags with them. I don't think I have seen customer names or named case mentions in the Stackoverflow, so that should work out. We make this part of the Q&A!
    – Hendrik Beenker
    Feb 20, 2013 at 15:24
  • One theme you see quite often in the Tridion questions on SO etc, is that where a member of the community is aware of a solution that's available from Tridion support, they pretty quickly snap the pointers in that direction. That works for me - if the product is broken, and has been fixed, people need to get sent to support. That's a good, effective answer.
    – Dominic Cronin
    Feb 20, 2013 at 20:31
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We discussed this a little on the Area 51 proposal. And though Tridion Stack Exchange can definitely take over any Q&A posts, this leaves "Semi-private" discussions without a place to transition to.

I suggest we still have (a few) intelligent, useful, open-ended discussions on the forum that do not fit the Q&A format. User CMS Info comes to mind. Much of my own participation didn't fit the Q&A format either.

Though programming and consulting have changed, I'd suggest enterprise customers may still be particular about not using Tridion Stack Exchange.

Whatever we and SDL choose, I suspect we'll have one or more of a few results:

  • Customers won't miss the forum (except maybe CMS Info)
  • Open non-Q&A questions will appear here
  • Customers may ask implementation or other questions via other channels such as Support or Linked-In

So IMO "closing" the TridionWorld forum is fine, as long as we have a plan for those discussions or the willingness to say we don't care what happens to them.

Update: TridionWorld forum has definitely dropped. If that's a trend then it doesn't matter what we say about discussions, especially if no one's around.

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Even though there is some good stuff on them, I tend to forget about the Tridion forums. I expect that has quite a bit to do with the fact my login is something obscure like hwuser003 that I can't remember and hunting down my login/password for the forums adds just enough friction to the process I don't bother with it.

We really cannot 'shut-down' the current forums as they are run by SDL but if there is a continued need for a place to have discussions as opposed to the Q&A of the Tridion SE site there is nothing to stop us, as a community, from finding someplace with less friction to hold those discussions. This could be something as simple as a Google Group.

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  • Definitely, we've found that wherever there are Tridion questions, someone shows up to answer them. Hendrik's asking the right people, though, especially since Bart has a big say with what happens with TridionWorld's forum. :-)
    – Alvin Reyes
    Mar 1, 2013 at 5:10

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