Introducing discuss.lagomframework.com

We are pleased to announce a new way to communicate with the Lagom community: discuss.lagomframework.com.

It is a Discourse forum sponsored by Lightbend, and co-hosted under the discuss.lightbend.com domain, along with discuss.playframework.com and discuss.akka.io. Each of these domains redirects you to the main category for the corresponding project, so you can go directly to the Lagom discussions by using the discuss.lagomframework.com shortcut, without having to navigate through the entire list of all categories. At the same time, discussions relating to the foundational technologies that Lagom is built on are right within reach on the same site. This will make it simpler for the Akka, Play, and Lagom communities to learn from each other and share ideas.

To further explain what’s going to happen next to the other communication channels, and what their intended use is:

What happens to the lagom-framework mailing list?

The lagom-framework mailing list on Google Groups will be transitioned into a read-only mode. It will not happen immediately, but we’ll try to direct all new questions to the new forum, and eventually flip the switch to mark lagom-framework as a read-only archive.

We took this decision after much thought, debate and considering the various up and down sides of handling it very seriously. We know that a mailing list work-flow is very precious for people used to working with them (plenty of us including), however in order to grow the community as a whole, and also help making the discussions on such forum more searchable and accessible, we decided that this move will be beneficial for everyone involved.

If you enjoy working with mailing lists, and would like to continue to do so with the new forums, please have a look at the hints in the Discuss Meta topics, where we prepared hints on how to set up the notifications to work as-if a mailing list.

What happens to the Gitter channels?

The Lagom Gitter room and Lagom contributors Gitter room will remain as real-time chat channels, but we suggest posting questions in discuss.lagomframework.com if you don’t get a quick response. With the Lagom community and maintainer team distributed around the world, not everyone can take part in a conversation on Gitter at the same time. With Gitter’s linear and conversational format, it can be hard to keep track of concurrent discussions, and it’s easy to miss messages. The new forum will make it much easier to keep track of the conversations you are interested in, and ignore the ones you aren’t. Asynchronous communication is not just for microservices!

What other community channels are there?

• Stack Overflow is still a great place to ask specific programming questions about Lagom, especially when they also relate to other technologies that are not part of discuss.lightbend.com. Stack Overflow has a huge community, and the Lagom maintainer team continues to monitor the “lagom” tag on it. However, Stack Overflow has a strict Q&A format and rules about what is considered on-topic. It is not suitable for opinion-based questions, announcements, or open-ended discussion.
• Of course, GitHub is the center for collaboration on development of Lagom itself, and the issue tracker is the best place to report reproducible bugs and propose new features. If you’re having a problem and you’re not sure if it’s caused by a bug in Lagom, please ask for help on discuss.lagomframework.com before creating an issue on GitHub.

What if I want urgent 24/7 support?

Nothing changes in this aspect. The public communication channels were always best-effort, although we and the community do try to help as much as possible. If you really want the best-in-class, most responsive answers and support, the Lightbend Subscription offers professional development and production support, along with access to consulting services, training, the Lightbend Enterprise Suite of commercial software, and other benefits.

It is important to highlight that the move to the “discuss” forum (as we like to call it) is not the same as commercial support, however we do hope to serve our communities better by making this move. We do not envision any negative impact on the quality of the answers you have been receiving on Gitter and lagom-framework by this move to the new forums.

We hope you’re as excited about the new discussion forums as we are. We look forward to you joining us there!

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