Create npmx Community Support Discord Server #1583
Description
Before our alpha launch on March 3rd, we need to organize how we will support our users.
We're going to have a lot of people with questions that aren't interested in contributing to the project. We could make an effort to welcome them in our current builders discord server, create some help forum channels for them and try to help some of them get involved long term. This is what we did in the Vite discord, and the normal way other open source projects are doing it (nuxt, vitest, elk, svelte, and so on).
In our experience, mixing the builders side and user support in a single discord server didn't work well. We actually discussed in Vite moving all support to GitHub discussions, and close the help channels. But real time chat for support is useful for a lot of people. The problem is that the group of users seeking support and the group of people interested in collaborating are very different. Users that are only interested in getting support and moving end up being the biggest group of the two, and they start taking over all the public channels, forcing the contributors into private spaces. Not matter how much care is placed in documenting and explaining where help requests should be sent, new users will not take the time to understand the builders etiquette.
Some OSS projects like Volar ended up closing their public discords, and starting a new invite only for devs. Vue has a similar setup, with Vue Land being a community support discord server, and the vue team working together in a separate private discord.
To let both groups (support community / builders collaborating) create their own rules and etiquette and avoid one of the groups running over the other, we should create a new community support discord. There are people in our community that enjoy doing support, teaching users, finding common pain points and help users while improving our docs and reporting back issues. They could also identify when someone would like to get more involved, and invite them to join our builders server. We are also going to be able to spread across different channels as needed, and not collapse all support discussions in a single #help forum as we did in previous OSS servers. Both discord will have cleaner default channel structures.
It is important to note that people in the new support community discord should do an active effort to surface common questions as improvements to the docs (probably a new FAQ section), so repeated questions can be answered with a link instead of rewriting explanations. Common paper cuts should also be surfaced as issues to improve the product. There is a lot to learn from the pitfalls where users are falling into.
We don't need to make our current discord server private. Our docs and the production deploy at npmx.dev will link to the support discord (help.npmx.dev or support.npmx.dev). And from the GitHub readme the staging deploy at main.npmx.dev will point to the dev discord. This should be enough to guide people to the right space, and we can have connecting doors in both for people to flow from one to the other.
I'll be creating the new discord server this week, and we can start reaching out to folks that would like to help us build the best possible support community for our users.