Prompted by this reddit comment, I am wondering what should be the officially recommended venue for asking questions about rust-analyzer (ie, "how do I setup rust-analyzer with vim").
My current hypothesis is that a separate category on users.rust-lang.org would be helpful, like help+rust-analyzer or, more a general one, like help+ide. So, I'd like to ask admins to create it cc @mbrubeck ? Maaaybe this can even be a top-level category, as I can see it being used, for example, for sharing workflow tips and not just only for asking for help.
I also have relatively little practical experience with these things, so I am open to alternative proposals.
Here's my reasoning for why I think discourse topic might be a good fit:
I think an Q&A/mailing list format would work better than a chat (like Discord), as most questions are the same, and there's a lot of value in having answers being longer and indexed by google. Additionally, I personally don't enjoy using Discord that much.
Leveraging existing channel (like urlo) nicely solves moderation issues (that is, for example, why I am not thrilled about the beta github discussions). Additionally, it avoids fragmentation and gives an opportunity for asking more general rust questions
I want to have an easy way to point to the forum from the docs, and to read the questions. Topic links like https://users.rust-lang.org/c/help/5 seems perfect for that. I think I can even get new posts in topic be delivered to my mailbox, which might be useful?
I really want to leverage awesome Rust community for support questions (which is a round-about way to say that I don't really have resources for answering every question myself ), and urlo seems like the best way to do that.
I guess the main reason is actually that I love discourse sooo much. Really, it's such a great piece of software.
I think it's difficult to decide what crates are special enough to get specific categories, but help+ide seems more reasonable. You could also use the new GitHub Discussions in your repo, like ripgrep just announced. Edit: oh, you mentioned that with moderation concerns -- but then, is it fair to add burden to urlo moderators?
People will inevitably ask questions about Rust IDE/editor setup on URLO. Making a dedicated space for this seems reasonable to me. I have no objection to projects like rust-analyzer directing people there, especially if it encourages rust-analyzer experts to read and respond to the questions!
As an aside, URLO has grown about 50% by almost every metric (posts, page views, users...) since one year ago. It's a challenge to keep up with the increased traffic, but I think we're managing it.
If user-created tags were enabled on URLO, then users could create any tag they wanted. TL3/4 users are allowed to change tags on posts, the same way they can change categories, so I expect that any questions about a crate would quickly be tagged with the crate name, even if the original user didn't do it.
Yeah, I guess urlo is still the best option here. https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/2912 is also looks like it would be merged soon, which hopefully should clear some concerns about rust-analyzer vs offical rust spaces.
@mbrubeck could you create ides and editors category on URLO? Don't know if we should nest it under help>, my gut feeling is that it doesn't really matter that much in the end.
cc @mbrubeck ? Maaaybe this can even be a top-level category, as I can see it being used, for example, for sharing workflow tips and not just only for asking for help.
), and urlo seems like the best way to do that.