It’s a tried a true channel that can lead to a great communities. (See rust and Haskell reddits)
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I like the current focus on the forum, things are very searchable and it forces you to engage with the community in a more thoughtful way at your own pace. A good change from the norm in the rest of the thousands of chat servers and communities IMO.
I do understand and value the chat servers, but mainly for casual discussion around specific topics, like gamedev, or other miscelaneous topics. For Q&A it is usually more immediate but the knowledge always gets lost to the sands of time.
If somehow the chat server rules and question answerers encourage the askers to make a forum question, and link it in chat and then provide the answer here as fast, it would be a nice addition.
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I think this makes a lot of sense. Especially with a small, unpaid core team we need to be as economic as possible with the time and attention the team has to offer.
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Hey, Gage here 
, I wrote the article that @chenglou mentioned. I have a few thoughts.
Forums & Longform writing have an impact!
I’m amazed that my article had such an impact! I think this kind of proves to me the power of a forum. I wrote that a while ago and didn’t realize it would help reshape the community. If any of you have a big idea, write it up! This is the place.
RE: Forums are Scary, Chat less so
I 100% get that forums are kind of scary looking. I think forum software just kind of has a “look” for whatever reason that’s hard and unwelcoming. You can see the sharp buttons, the complex stats on posts and I do also think the length of posts that people write is perhaps intimidating, but still feel that it’s valuable.
And for all the people that normally spend time on chat but wrote up their thoughts here about why they like chat, welcome 
and I’m glad you wrote it on a forum so that I could actually know this topic exists and read through your comments 
.
Answer Quickly
The experience of people getting answers quickly is on us, right? There’s nothing stopping us from taking every beginner question and handling it carefully. Be the change you want to see in the world 
.
If you forget to check the forum due to it being a PWA you can add it to your desktop using this button:
Zulip
Zulip is actually pretty good, perhaps not on mobile but I think most people who are programmers are on a computer trying to get stuff done for work when they are needing to ask questions. Maybe that’s wrong 
. I don’t think it’s as good as Discourse for longer-form discussions. BUT it’s far better than normal chat! I think that would be a cool thing to try out.
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Maybe leave the channels as they are and let them be reason specific. Rescript topics can leave the current discord without touching the reason stuff. Having spent a lot of time working on ReasonReactNative I have not yet thought through how I feel about both the channel closing AND the project being renamed. We could have easily forked the reason code into rescript focused repositories and let reason focused code live on. Feels like the code for Reason on the browser is getting cut off when, without doing else its perfectly viable code with a compiler. Not to mention someone might decide to keep working on it. Thinking out loud…
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I agree with a lot of the reasoning behind this.
I do wonder about the impact on the barrier to entry for people giving it a first try though. As a newbie it’s both hard and sometimes maybe embarrassing to write carefully focused forum questions.
Maybe an explicitly rescript-newbies focused discord is worth an experiment? Make it clear that it’s for first fumblings only, and don’t be afraid to send people to the forum very quickly once it gets past the sort of “but why does this even” questions that require some quick to-and-fro to avoid very early discouragement or never picking it up in the first place? (or some other chat system – personally I like element.io / matrix and it seems to be growing from my uninformed casual observations – I guess the merger with gitter helps)
Of course a problem with ideas like this is that the thought is easy, but the same small handful of people tend to provide the majority of the work to actually do these things, so I hope that those people especially take this just as an idea, not a demand!
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I think the type of culture we want to foster and strife for in our community is far more important than the choosen communication channel.
There is only a barrier for new users to the lang / forum if we choose to have a culture of overly formal communication and such, but this can be shaped accordingly.
I would personally miss the Discord chat a lot, especially as a beginner. When I’m starting out I don’t really feel like advertising my ignorance in a forum, but doing it in a live chat room isn’t so bad.
If a question doesn’t get answered in a chat room then that’s fine; I never expect them to be, but if someone happens to see a question and happens knows the answer then great. If they are bored and fancy a geeky discussion about something, also great. If no-one answers I wouldn’t take it personally and would either forget about it or maybe post it on the forum. For me, that’s why talking about “response times” on a chatroom isn’t that important.
I would be a lot less comfortable in these languages without the helpful Reason/Rescript folks on the chatroom (and the folks on the Elixir chatroom which is another great example of a helpful livechat community).
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Hi all! I’ve just received r/rescript moderator privileges. Rescript core team: feel free to private message me and I can add you as moderators.
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I agree with all the reasons for moving fully to forums. But forums are boring, Discord gives a sense of liveliness, of people working alongside you.
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Agreed. Forums are good for breadcrumbs and archival purposes, discord gives you realtime feedback.
Not sure what we’re waiting on, a lot of dev communities are on discord, so let’s make a server for rescript so we can speed up collaboration.
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There is a telegram group: Telegram: Contact @rescriptjs
But I second creating an unofficial RS discord! I don’t think it will steal that much traffic from this forum, and for a lot of people it will be an added benefit.
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Id like to voice my opinion on the seriousness feeling of a forum.
Ive been struggling with a minor design issue / language feature for a while. I’ve rewritten a draft post for it several times over the last few days, but keep closing it. I don’t know how to explain it, but I just get a feeling of “is this good enough?” “Did I explain it fully enough to get a response?” “is it getting too long for a simple question?”
There’s just some additional pressure to write a post right the first time, compared to something like discord where things feel more casual
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I also want to put in my 3 cents, as I was more a chat person, and thanks to the Rescript forum, I switched entirely to liking the forum more. I got a lot of help on Discord when Rescript was Bucklescript & ReasonML, but now I changed my perspective. Partially because documentation is much better.
I’m still a Rescript beginner.
- I ask fewer questions on the forum than I would on Discord for a particular reason. I try to replicate the problem in isolation on my own to describe what kind of help I need. In 80% of cases, I found solutions. Thanks to that, I learned quickly. Also, I didn’t occupy the rescript community with unnecessary questions.
- I can easily search for my previous questions (and I do that sometimes). In huge chats it’s impossible
- Chats for huge communities are just pure chaos. Not sure how it works now, but I remember asking questions on Rust Discord. Looking for a response to your question was quite a challenge.
- I was afraid of how long it will take to get responses, but I learned to be patient. Also, if an issue that requires community support blocks someone’s workflow entirely, probably something went wrong in planning.
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i like discord, because my questions are short and fast to respond, i dont like to write a forum post for just little things