There needs to be an official community slack for all atlassian subjects that anyone can join!!

[James Franklin]

As someone unaccustomed to forum style discussion and more familiar with using chat rooms like slack and discord, I would really appreciate it if there was an official community chatroom I could join and ask questions and talk about things I can do with different products with people that use them and not need to write longform forumposts that may or may not fall on deaf ears or contain too little information at first post thus when checking back after a few hours you need to re edit your post..

I've joined some community discords but the largest one I found, its last post was 2 weeks ago. https://discord.gg/FzrDWQ . This seems really unbefitting of a company the size of Atlassian that is so tightly involved in the open source community.

[Erica Moss]

@James Franklin Hey, James, thanks for the feedback! We have intentionally kept our discussions in a forum-type style because we find that's the best way to increase knowledge-sharing — other folks can read members' answers and also Google solutions to their issues. In Slack, information exists behind a wall and can be hard to search for and re-find. One of our Community Leaders, Thomas, wrote this great article about how to write questions that get an answer: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Feedback-Forum-articles/Some-reasons-why-you-don-t-get-an-answer-and-how-to-avoid-them/ba-p/657908

[James Franklin]

I really think that forums aren't the right place to go to with 'stupid questions' that need to be shot down fast. I go to chatrooms to ask the stupid questions because they will otherwise pollute good boards with amateur questions.

If I had a whole lot of questions I wanted to ask all at once to figure out a product, I would feel bad making a new post for every very basic question and would feel like I am flooding a board. Feels antisocial to bury good threads, as well with the natural flow of a chat room, I'm more comfortable burying my older questions as my understanding grows, whereas a forum is really for more pertinent questions.

As for when you're more initiated, forums are better for very specific questions that push the limits of what a subject is about, but for the repeated every day things where I don't need a complete subject matter expert, I really just want to ask the general channel of a slack.

[Erica Moss]

@James Franklin I think what we try to emphasize here is that there are no stupid questions, as our members run the gamut from novice to advanced. So if you have a question, the odds are pretty great that someone else has already asked it (so you can search for it and find a quick answer), or that a future member will have the same question (and in that case, you should pose it as a new question). I cover this in a bit more detail here.

[James Franklin]

but i feel strongly that this is the nature of forums, and a slack doesnt suffer from that, so it would be complimentary to the community and help newbies get confident and ready to give back when they feel ready to post on forums. for those that are comfortable asking noob questions on forums, power to them, but that is not all of us, and i feel that an untapped atlassian community is out there waiting to be made, if just a slack were around. just look at the success of the golang community discord. its fantastic, theres always dozens of professionals coming together sharing their best knowledge and helping each other grow, smalltime users get to casually network with the big guys. when I was starting out with golang, it accelerated my learning of it tenfold. I really feel passionate that it is worth having and it really isnt much to manage from a community manager point of view, and really provides a lot for users, and it offshores support tickets to users. Really cant see why its a bad idea.