If you’ve been reading the Community blog, you’ll already know: AskFedora has moved to Discourse! Read on for more information about this exciting platform.

Discourse? Why Discourse?

The new AskFedora is a Discourse instance hosted by Discourse, similar to discussion.fedoraproject.org. However, where discussion.fedoraproject.org is meant for development discussion within the community, AskFedora is meant for end-user troubleshooting.

The Discourse platform focuses on conversations. Not only can you ask questions and receive answers, you can have complete dialogues with others. This is especially fitting since troubleshooting includes lots of bits that are neither questions nor answers. Instead, there are lots of suggestions, ideas, thoughts, comments, musings, none of which necessarily are the one true answer, but all of which are required steps that together lead us to the solution.

Apart from this fresh take on discussions, Discourse comes with a full set of features that make interacting with each other very easy.

Login using your Fedora account

Users accounts on the new AskFedora are managed by the Fedora account system only. A Fedora account gives you access to all of the infrastructure used by the Fedora community. This includes:

This decision was made mainly to combat the spam and security issues previously encountered with the various social media login services.

So, unlike the current Askbot setup where you could login using different social media services, you will need to create a Fedora Account to use the new Discourse based instance. Luckily, creating a Fedora Account is very easy!

Go to https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/user/new Choose a username, enter your name, and a valid e-mail address, a security question. Do the “captcha” to confirm that you are indeed a human, and confirm that you are older than 13 years of age.

That’s it! You now have a Fedora account.

Get started!

If you are using the platform for the first time, you should start with the “New users! Start here!” category. Here, we’ve put short summaries on how to use the platform effectively. This includes information on how to use Discourse, its many features that make it a great platform, notes on how to ask and respond to queries, subscribing and unsubscribing from categories, and lots more.

For the convenience of the global Fedora community, these summaries are available in all the languages that the community supports. So, please do take a minute to go over these introductory posts.

Discuss, learn, teach, have fun!

Please login, ask and discuss your queries and help each other out. As always, suggestions and feedback are always welcome. You can post these in the “Site feedback” category.

As a last note, please do remember to “be excellent to each other.” The Fedora Code of Conduct applies to all of us!

Acknowledgements

The Fedora community does everything together, so many volunteers joined forces and gave their resources to make this possible. We are most grateful to the Askbot developers who have hosted AskFedora till now, the Discourse team for hosting it now, and all the community members who helped set it up, and everyone that helps keep the Fedora community ticking along!