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Ask HN: Best way to support community for small open source projects?
1 point by ljw1001 on March 7, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
At some point, StackOverflow is the place for user-to-user support, but with a small project, user questions would disappear in that vast ocean, I think. Github, sadly, has nothing for this.

I have a modest project with a growing user community (https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw), but it would be great if they could talk to each other. I would also love to be able to see what their issues are so I can address.

Suggestions greatly appreciated. (Also, I don't want to host anything, this thing is already eating my life.)



Some time ago I met the people behind SmartGit (a cross platform git client) and they told me that using Google groups worked quite well for this purpose.

Here's a link to their group so you can get an impression: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/smartgit


We had a Google group for Codename One: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/codenameone-discussi...

Google Groups suck as a forum. They flag valid comments as SPAM and miss good comments, they reject and delete posts for no reason and without traceability. They have no SEO value so they don't help product discoverability and to make matters worse they are really hard to search properly.

We still have it but try to focus on stackoverflow which is no panacea due to its own problems but at least it works properly.




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