ejabberd code has been evolving at a tremendous rate during the past year. We have release 5 new versions of ejabberd community edition in a year. We introduced better performance, new support for XMPP extension, change in the build process, better testing to avoid regression.
At the same time we dramatically improved the business edition and used it to build ejabberd Software as a Service platform our most ambitious project to date. All this is a huge amount of work and code produced.
The fact is that while we produce code, we are not working on improving the ejabberd.im website. And the truth is that we now also want to change this, as the site does not do justice to the current state of the project.
So, it is time to spread the word and for that we need a long overdue rework on the website.
There are obvious fixes, like iterative improvements on the site design. However, we will need to go further. At the moment for example, having the community discussion spread over so many forum is not very practical and is preventing nice contributions from users. It is also confusing as we already have a mailing list and for the team, the forum is just another channel to monitor.
So, we are thinking about archiving all outdated content in a legacy area and power the community site with something else than a forum tool. After all, forum are so 2004.
We have our ideas and plans but are still pondering choice about a few options. However, send us your feedback in the comment. This may give us idea we did not consider possible or desirable.
In the meantime, do not forget that you can also meet ejabberd Dev team (well, part of ) IRL (in real life) at ProcessOne Tech event in Paris, on the 4th of december: Seabeyond. If you are an ejabberd developer this is a great opportunity to meet. You will find more information on ProcessOne website:
TL;DR: Go ahead! I agree it's
TL;DR: Go ahead!
I agree it's much better to discontinue the forums than to have them rotting away. I also fully agree that community support shouldn't be split up into more than one or two places.
Personally I still prefer mailing lists over web forums, but they're quite old-schoolish of course, so today's youth doesn't like them much. Maybe it would be easiest to just move everything to GitHub indeed? Then again, there might be some value in keeping bug reports and support requests separated ...
Another thing that might be useful would be a wiki, where content doesn't just sink into some archives but can be improved over time. However, I think that only works well if it's actively maintained, so it might be (too) much work again.
Either way: One thing both today's youth and me like is using chat for quick support and discussion. So whatever you choose as the main platform for community support, I'd appreciate a prominent link to a conference room like
ejabberd@conference.jabber.ru.