I personally don’t remember to come on here heaps It’s sooo much quieter than the “main forum”.
Do folk still feel like this is a worthwhile separation? (This will need ot be a Q for the mods in the main forum too).
Essentially: I forget to check here as there’s not a lot going on normally… I can’t speak for other devs… 
What do folk think/feel on this?
I prefer a single forum for sure. There’s just too many sources of info out there and one forum is best. Folk on the main forum ask dev questions anyway so this one means there are 2 places for essentially the same thing.
My vote is kill this one off
I suggest we wait until things hot up. I prefer the separation regardless, but if the network starts getting attention I think it better that there’s a little friction between random people arriving and starting to post question on topics where devs want to work.
It would be like opening up the MaidSafe slack to everyone. Sometimes you need a more focussed place and I think this is one such case, and will be moreso if things take off.
We would/could have a new category (?developers corner?) in the community forum and can limit access to those of TL1 or more. That way new people don’t see it until they are more familiar with the forum.
I also vote to to move to the one forum. I know a couple years ago I was behind keeping the 2 forums running, but now I have changed my mind as we see all the dev conversations happening on the community forum anyhow.
Also I don’t know the current situation with Francis and if he even wants to remain the sole admin of this forum. As a mod here I am limited in administration abilities and if this forum was to become heavily used again then I’d expect the admin would need to be active a lot more than now.
I think a dev category could do on the main forum, where you can go into that category and separate the noise.
Also, is it possible to move content from this forum to the category on the main?
This has been considered. The content here is now quite old and I’d expect that we will simply point people to this forum for anything prior, with this forum being made read-only
That would be a barrier to new devs which is a definite no no IMO.
The amount of time to get to TL1 is short
It should not be a barrier. And if needed a mod and give them tl1 and save them a day of reading. But it would help those eager people who are not familiar with the forum and whats where from posting unnecessarily in the dev section.
Its not that easy. To hide those topics you hide them (e.g. keep them off the front page) from both the masses and developers or others who happen to arrive looking for dev related info.
Safe Network aims to be a product and set of third party services for the masses. To not have a space just for developers makes no sense to me. If this is to scale it will need its own team of moderators, a different ethos and so on.
I don’t think it makes sense to try to cater to two such different communities in a single forum.
There was a suggestion at one time to post in the community forum rather than duplicate threads etc.
But I agree that as SafeNet grows and more users join, there may be a need for a forum to quietly discuss new technologies, applications or problem solving in a more focused group.
If this is not a huge problem,it is worth keeping the forum for now.
Maybe a poll on this might help you understand what people might think even if they don’t have anything specify to comment on.
Also it might show just how often they actually visit. Considering no posts on the dev forum have occurred since Xmas last year seems to be telling.
Please choose “candy” if you do not wish to vote so that an indication of how many visit the dev forum exists.
Keeping a record of number of votes over time.
27/1/2024 Poll created
27/1/2024 1 vote
30/1/2024 2 votes
11/2/2024 3 votes
Basing usefulness on responses at the moment is not a good method IMO.
The point of a separate space is for when there is a lot more activity on the regular forum, in order to create a barrier that enables devs to focus and not be distracted by random things. Keeping things more on topic, concise, technical and so on.
Separate topics helps a bit, but is not necessarily going to be effective if very large numbers of people begin using the regular forum. So any decision about usefulness can’t really be made until things are flying. Once the network is proven, getting a lot of interest and we have an active community of developers, the value or otherwise will be much more easily determined.
I imagine moderation will become much more challenging on the main forum at that time, and again a smaller focused forum for devs will be much easier for a separate small team of mods to handle.
But we’ll have to wait and see.
I think it’s good to have separate space, but without someone monitoring it regularly, it will not be used. At least team members should get notified of all activity here, especially if there’s not much activity at all.
(ref) older poll:
One of main forum topics, where there this was discussed:
