Why a forum?
While this was initially overlooked, we now realise that a nice and friendly support-dedicated forum will be a great asset combined with Dokuwiki for documentation and direct emailing for private or security issues. After looking into Discourse, a very popular and modern FOSS forum solution, we got disappointed by their almost Docker-only installation policy. After looking into alternatives, we stumbled on Flarum, another modern and sleek forum solution with a steadily growing community.
Kudos to the 2 main developers, Toby and Franz, for working on Flarum on their free time, they have achieved a tremendous amount of work already!
Still fresh
Flarum is still in a beta version, so things may break or misbehave a bit. We will also need to get rid of the various calls to googlefontapi before the official adoption announcement.
However a quick proof of concept was promising and we are now looking for a plugin to integrate the authentication mechanism to our directory. The good news is that some work has already been done in that direction. However so far we could not get it working. We are hoping the original developer of the plugin will soon find time to get the plugin working.
Officially the Flarum project is currently at 70% completion for stable release. If all goes well, the first stable should reach around September 2018. In the meantime, at NOMAGIC we will probably start using it officially as soon as we have found a solution for the integrated authentication mechanism.
Members only
When ready, only NOMAGIC users will be able to participate to the discussions. However, we are currently planning to keep the viewing public. We anticipate that most of the discussions will be around how-tos and general questions on the services. This kind of information could be useful to anyone using those solutions as a complement to the official documentations.
Use your best judgement
This will not be a drop-in replacement or central point for any kind of bug or feature request. Obvious application bugs and feature requests should still be opened on their respective project’s official support point of contact (most of the time, a dedicated forum or a code repository manager).
