The Atlassian Developer Community

[#1]

As part of the move to our new community, we took the opportunity to introduce some changes:

1. Firstly, we separated our developer and user communities so as to be better able to tailor each community to the needs of its members.
2. Secondly, we're doubling down on our investment in the developer community!

Enter The Atlassian Developer Community - a community designed to cater to the specific needs of the developer.

 

 In the Atlassian Developer Community you can:

• Share and expand your technical expertise around building on the Atlassian products.
• Learn about our REST APIs.
• Discover how to build a Cloud or Server app.
• Learn how to publish apps to the Atlassian Marketplace.
• Network with fellow developers and Atlassians.
• Get the latest Atlassian Developer News.
• and much, much more!

After considering all options, together with experienced community members, we decided to launch the community fresh so we can focus on creating up-to-date, correct, and great content for all developers.

We do acknowledge that this will cause issues in the short term but strongly believe that the community will benefit from this decision in the long term. 

If you have any questions about this, feel free to reply below.

Cheers,
Peter Van de Voorde
Developer Relations

[Jeff Louwerse]

This is rather frustrating.  "we decided to launch the community fresh so we can focus on creating up-to-date, correct, and great content for all developers."  

Trying to develop a plugin and I see people who had the exact same problem as me.. but now that answer is gone.  I think you underestimated how much developers relied on this data to work aorund 10 year old bugs.

Flastly you jack up your fees for Fisheye/Crucible and quote an increased commitment to it, but you don't even add a catagory to this section.  

[Peter Van de Voorde]

Hey Jeff,

I can understand your frustration and I can assure you that we have had many heated discussions about this before deciding to not migrate that content.

The challenge we faced was to find those few gems of information in the sea of no longer relevant or incomplete information that was the developer content on Atlassian Answers. We decided that we wanted to invest our resources in building a better developer community focussed on our developers instead of using those resources to find those few gems of information.

I'm sure that if you post your question on the Developer Community that you will quickly get an answer or find somebody who can help you out.

I do understand your frustration and the inconvenience this causes in the short run, but I strongly believe that in the long run, we will all benefit from this decision.

I'm open for suggestions on how to improve the current developer community, so feel free to send your idea's and suggestions to me or post them on the community.

[Konrad Garus]

Peter,

two obvious answers:

• Migrate all data from the old thing.
• Keep the old thing, but make it read-only, prevent posting new questions there, put up some huge "check out the new thing" banner...

Either way: Do not throw away that massive knowledge base with tons of useful information accummulated over all these years!

[MattS]

It's a periodic thing, every 4 years or so I think. Before a.a.c was the Forums, which are mostly unfindable now. In the short term it makes writing add-ons much harder. In the long term the current information does become easier to find, as Peter noted. 

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130501212718/https://answers.atlassian.com/ may help for a while but I also wish that Atlassian had chosen to leave the old site up as read-only.

[Vik Solem]

It's moves like this that cause me to lose the battle for Atlassian products.  I have to answer questions like "Why go with Confluence instead of Sharepoint?"  The un-answered yet still useful discussions about problems with Atlassian products are now gone.  To figure out where we were I'm re-inventing the wheel, costing my customers time and money.  I don't know that Microsoft would be better at not wiping out documentation, but the very notion that such change is acceptable indicates a lack of long term vision on the part of Atlassian as a whole.  This is similar to when they unilaterally decided to change the name of Stash to Bitbucket.  This does not speak to a mature way of thinking.  It causes problems for consultants trying to defend Atlassian products in a competitive marketplace.

The Google indexes remember the question that I asked on Atlassian anwers, but Atlassian blew it away. Now when I try to explain that a particular plugin has been causing problems for a long time I can't explain precisely how long, because the postings are gone.

There were a number of ways that Atlassian could have made this move without wiping out history.  None of them were done.  I can't recommend such products/support to any company that plans to grow.  How long will community.atlassian.com be around before it has to change to a different name and wipe out all of history again?

This is extremely disappointing.

[wkennedy]

It may be a little late for a suggestion from the Peanut Gallery, but Apple have done this move many times.

Old links never die, they just get redirected.

Answers links mostly drop me at Communities pages without a hint of what I was searching for.

Granted, Atlassian don't use "Article Numbers", which made that reference and redirect so easy.

[Leslie Lee]

Your feedback was heard and we will be migrating back all the old Answers content that didn't get moved in the next 2-3 weeks. Stay tuned... 

Also, we're also looking at what content should belong in the developer community vs the user community because we know that the delineation isn't always so clear. If you have feedback on where that line should be, please chime in. 

[Adrien Ragot 2]

# we know that the delineation isn't always so clear.
# If you have feedback on where that line should be, please chime in.

You don't mention the tags/labels on each question such as "confluence-development", "jira-development", etc – Is it because you don't know about them, or because they don't seem relevant enough to you?

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Many thanks for listening to our feedback and reconsidering @Leslie, this is veeeery much appreciated :)

@Adrienb - those tags alone won't cut it I'm afraid, here's what I stated in my reply to my own question Can you please clarify your migration algorithm/policy? (still no links to answers nor quotes here, thus inline):

"[...] While I completely understand your thinking behind this, I have to say that I strongly disagree with the execution and result of this conceptually reasonable strategy:

Just a random sample across a few of my included/excluded answers, plus a few of fellow community members in my mail archive seems to confirm that the presence or absence of a *-development tag is pretty much arbitrary regarding the classification of the content being primarily developer focused. And I think that's not all that surprising, given tags have been community curated, if at all.

Accordingly, the IMHO highly questionable net result seems to be that a lot of potentially valuable user/admin oriented content is lost, whereas quite some strictly developer oriented content has been migrated.

Given it seems inconceivable to properly classify the questions into either category (except for some fancy machine learning sentiment analysis eventually), is there any chance you might reconsider this and simply migrate the answered yet skipped *-development questions too?"

Despite rapid advances on AI commodification, I'm personally not in a position to execute on such a sentiment analysis, so I can see how properly classifying the content automatically, and ideally having a manual curation step for everything deemed fuzzy is admittedly a non trivial problem ...

[Jon Mort [Adaptavist]]

I agree with @Steffen it isn't possible to use *-development as a simple huristic here. IMO all content that was on AA should be here. Lost content is worse than content in the wrong place.

[Leslie Lee]

Completely agree with all of you - it was the wrong call to remove all development-related tags and so the decision has been reversed and all content is now back in the Community!