Moving the forum from Google Groups to Discourse

​ Niklas Winkels

​ 2018-06-05

 

We have used Google Groups as our method of communication for several years now and it’s time for an upgrade!

Bloomreach's products are growing together and so should the developer community. After careful consideration and lots of discussions, Bloomreach is considering Discourse as the tool of choice for a new forum.

Discourse is fully open-source, flexible and open and therefore fits the Hippo DNA perfectly.

We strongly believe this move will enable us to have deeper conversations and get more people involved in Hippo. We base this on the lessons learned from other open source projects who also use Discourse.

The big five advantages that Discourse offers over Google Groups are:

 

• Ability to build sub-forums to enable more focused discussions (e.g., HST, Enterprise features, beta releases) where interested parties can talk in detail without the entire community being notified.
   
• Ability to highlight contributors (e.g., badges for most answers to questions, profiles with links to business) so we can recognize folks who have been major participants in conversations and helped others.
   
• Ability to reduce duplicate posts by showing related questions, stickied posts, etc. + a much better search.
   
• Ability to add features like FAQ, voting for features, @mentioning relevant parties.
   
• Ability for folks to keep using Discourse as a plain old mailing list.
   

To see Discourse in action, check out ReactJS or Docker and see how they're using it to bring developers, implementers, and users together.

I wanted to run the overall idea by you to get your feedback. Your comments, concerns, and ideas are welcome! Just shoot me an email.

Thanks,
Niklas