For years, the global Go community has been coming together through several online venues: golang-nuts, Go+, Gophers Slack, /r/golang Reddit, Go on Stack Overflow, and #golang on Twitter.

Today, we would like to announce the creation of a new venue for our community: the Go Forum. Given the growth the Go community has experienced this year, we expect the golang-nuts mailing list to decrease in effectiveness and usability in the coming year. The Go Forum is designed to handle the current and future size of our community.

This forum is powered by Discourse, which is maintained by the creator of Stack Overflow.

While Slack is great for chatting, it’s not visible to the broader public. This forum, on the other hand, will be indexed and searchable from the Web. Also, the discussions need not be strictly question+answer format like Stack Overflow, and the content can be better organized and filtered than on a mailing list or reddit.

Another important reason for launching the Go Forum is to have a clean slate to moderate the content and activity of the participants. This is our biggest challenge but one we must be successful in fulfilling. We need everyone who participates to feel safe and respect each other in the course of any discussion. We believe it will be easier to build an inclusive culture by starting with a new platform and with the GoBridge online code of conduct.

The use of names that people use outside of the internet is important and fosters more community openness. We value names because our interactions are with real people, not some avatar or a username. We encourage all members use their full name when participating in the Go Forum, but it is not required. People not using their full names will not be treated any differently from those who do.

The Go Forum is also a great place to get programming help. For instance, code is rendered in a nicely formatted, consistent way:

Topic authors can mark a certain reply as the answer to their question so others who read it later can find the answer instantly:

In addition, old forum topics (with no activity for 90+ days) will be automatically closed, keeping conversations current and relevant.

Please feel free to provide your feedback in the Site Feedback category. This is an online community built by and for the community, and we want to hear from you!

Mailing list workflow

We have configured the forum to work like a traditional mailing list. It is easy to set up, so if you prefer to participate by email, your existing workflow will not be interrupted.

In addition, you may sign up using your existing accounts through Google, Twitter, or GitHub.

Range of topics

Feel free to post to the forum about:

Go programming questions and answers

Programming challenges

Technical discussion relevant to Go programmers

Information about meetups and conferences

Announcements of new/updated Go packages

Discussion about, and searching for, projects/libraries written in Go

Other Go-related things

We anticipate the forum can replace most mailing list activity, some reddit threads, and some Slack troubleshooting/discussion, and ultimately serve the community better as a central repository of knowledge and ideas.

Recognition

Several members of the community came together over the past couple of weeks to help make this happen. It is important to us that we mention who they are.

Luna Duclos : @PSG_Luna

Luna is part owner in Palm Stone Games and spent a great deal of time putting all the systems together and installing Discourse. She also helped with the configuration. Her company is paying for the monthly hosting of the systems, so huge thanks to PSG and Luna!

Matt Holt : @mholt6

Matt was instrumental in setting up and configuring the forum for use. Without his help we would not be launching the platform today.

Carlisia Campos : @carlisia

Carlisia assisted Matt and Luna with some of the technical configurations. She didn’t allow any time to waste and was there to help keep things moving forward.

Admin Group

Many of the members of the admin group helped with testing and making sure the system was ready for use. We have an incredible team of people who are serving the community everyday in Gophers Slack and now in the Go Forum.

Check it out

Check out the Forum and we hope you’ll enjoy it.