Hello,

In response to the following topic (i.e., what are good
candidates for user forums/platforms other than SourceForge),

https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/6440

I have tried searching the net and it seems to me
that the situation is roughly like the following:

* Pattern 1 : The language website itself provides
a "built-in" forum.

* Pattern 2 : Google Groups
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!overview

* Pattern 3 : Discourse
https://www.discourse.org/

* Pattern 4 : Github issue pages

(*) Pattern 5: (more "chat-like" services like Reddit, Gitter,
HackerNews (?)...)

-----

And various pages found for each language...

* C++
https://isocpp.org/forums
https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/std-discussion
https://groups.google.com/a/isocpp.org/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/std-proposals

* D
https://forum.dlang.org/
http://digitalmars.com/NewsGroup.html   (old page?)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3592769
(old news about the new forum)

* Go
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/golang-nuts
https://forum.golangbridge.org/
https://forum.golangbridge.org/t/welcome-to-the-go-forum/8
https://golang.org/help/

* Rust
https://users.rust-lang.org/

* Nim
https://forum.nim-lang.org/
https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum (run by this program?)

* Julia
https://julialang.org/community/
https://discourse.julialang.org/
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/julia-users (not used now)
https://gitter.im/JuliaLang/julia

* Python
I'm not sure which is the "official" forum... :-)

* Fortran
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.lang.fortran

* Swift
https://forums.developer.apple.com/community/xcode/swift
https://www.reddit.com/r/swift/

* C#
A lot ... (from Microsoft)

* Kotlin
https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/
https://kotlinlang.org/community/

* Scala
https://www.scala-lang.org/community/
https://users.scala-lang.org/?_ga=2.236677193.918504109.1498691960-1666919074.1495278134
https://contributors.scala-lang.org/?_ga=2.200825261.283844884.1498692014-1666919074.1495278134
https://gitter.im/scala/scala

------

As for my experience, I used Google Groups sometimes to
ask questions and feature requests before. IMO, a good point
of Google Groups is that the "(mental) threshold" for posting
something is very low (and, depending on moderation setting,
also attracts spam!). A not very good point is that it does not
support Markdown etc, so the feature is not very rich.

# But looking at the Google Group pages for C++ and Go,
code decoration might be possible to some extent
because some people post a code in an enclosed box etc.

As for Discourse, I have no experience of using it (e.g.
ask questions etc), but its features seem pretty rich.
Many languages seem to be using it recently (sometimes
together with Google Groups).

IMHO, I feel it would be very nice if there is some central
forum(s) at which users can post almost "anything" (trivial
questions, feature requests, news, etc) at a much lower
level of strictness and threshold to write something.
In particular, I think it would be great if more user <-> user
discussion will be made in addition to user <-> developer
or developer <-> developer discussions (because
user <-> user discussions are not much suited to, say,
Github issue pages nor StackOverflow.)

# This user mailing list (from SourceForge) is also probably
desinged for that purpose (partly for user <-> user), but
but a threshold or ovehead for posting something might
be somewhat higher than usual web-based forums.

As for the desired features listed in
https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/6440

 -- ideally, an easy way to preserve the SourceForge mailing list archives

I have no idea whether Google Groups or Discourse offer
a "migration" feature like this... But as a simple workaround,
it might be sufficient to put a URL link to the SourceForge mailing
list page, e.g., at the top of new forum pages or an introduction
page to facilitate the search for old topics?

# I will copy (some of) the above URL if necessary to the Github
issue page (6440); in that case please let me know.

With best regards,
Takeshi

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