Moving toward better support through the Community forum
As the Nextflow community continues to grow, fostering a space where users can easily find help and share knowledge is more important than ever. In this post, we’ll explore our ongoing efforts to enhance the community forum, transitioning from Slack as the primary platform for peer-to-peer support. By improving the forum’s usability and accessibility, we’re aiming to create a more efficient and welcoming environment for everyone. Read on to learn about the changes we’re implementing and how you can contribute to making the forum an even better resource for the community.
One of the things that impressed me the most when I joined Seqera last year as a developer advocate for the Nextflow community, was how engaged people are, and how much peer-to-peer interaction there is across a vast range of scientific domains, cultures, and geographies. That’s wonderful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that whenever you run into a problem —or you’re trying to do something a bit complicated or new— it’s very likely that there is someone out there who is able and willing to help you figure it out.
For the past few months, our small team of developer advocates have been thinking about how to nurture that dynamism, and how to further improve the experience of peer-to-peer support as the Nextflow community continues to grow. We’ve come to the conclusion that the best thing we can do is make the community forum an awesome place to go for help, answers, and resources.
Why focus on the forum?
If you’re familiar with the Nextflow Slack workspace, you know there’s a lot of activity there, and the #help channel is always hopping. It’s true, and that’s great, buuuuut using Slack has some important downsides that the forum doesn’t suffer from.
One of the standout features of the forum is the ability to search past questions and answers really easily. Whether you're browsing directly within the forum, or using Google or some other search engine, you can quickly find relevant information in a way that’s much harder to do on Slack. This means that solutions to common issues are readily accessible, saving you (and the resident experts who have already answered the same question a bunch of times) a whole lot of time and effort.
Additionally, the forum has no barrier to access— you can view all the content without the need to join yet another app. This open access ensures that everyone can benefit from the wealth of knowledge shared by community members.
Immediate improvements to the forum’s ease of use
We’re excited to roll out a few immediate changes to the forum that should make it easier and more pleasant to use.
- We’re introducing a new, sleeker visual design to make navigation and posting more intuitive and enjoyable.
- We’ve reorganized the categories to streamline the process of finding and providing help. Instead of having separate categories for various things (like Nextflow, Wave, Seqera Platform etc), there is now a single "Ask for help" category for all topics, eliminating any confusion about where to post your question. Simply put, if you need help, just post in the "Ask for help" category. Done.
We’re also planning to mirror existing categories from the Nextflow Slack workspace, such as the jobs board and shameless promo channels, to make that content more visible and searchable. This will help you find opportunities and promote your work more effectively.
What you can do to help
These changes are meant to make the forum a great place for peer-to-peer support for the Nextflow community. You can help us improve it further by giving us your feedback about the forum functionality (don’t be shy), by posting your questions in the forum, and of course, if you’re already a Nextflow expert, by answering questions there.
Check out the community forum now!