Redirect Drupal support forums to Stackexchange Drupal Answers

We shouldn't get hung up on SEO. As JohnAlbin says, Google is sending traffic to the place where the most relevant answers are.

The added benefit of D.O pushing traffic to SE is this effect is amplified AND SE has other software support forums. There is a good chance that people will discover Drupal as a consequence of being on SE for other reason. Having Drupal support forums on D.O is siloing the content.

Having a canonical forum (at SE) means anyone wishing to help in a support manner gravitates to one place. This has to be good for the project.

An important point would be to have links from D.O which stamp a clear endorsement on this external forum.

That's a great datapoint; added to the summary.

Thanks for responding here; glad to see some forum users in this discussion! :)

Can you please edit the wiki page to make sure your points are enumerated in the "Risks" part of summary up above? Ideally, people coming into these idea posts could understand the full picture without having to read all X comments.

I agree with Jaypan, all what he has written. Yes this is very interesting than if we create a method like giving points to best answer, it will encourage user to answer and moreover if we awarded the best user of the year, it will be overwhelming. This is already in Yahoo Answers. Our Drupal forum will become more helpful.

What is being proposed here is uninstalling Forum module from d.o in effect deleting all of the forum content.

No, that's not a part of the suggestion at all. We can (and probably shoud) keep the old forum content as a read-only historical archive.

and basically saying we're not doing a good job providing support so go look somewhere else for it.

That's nonsense. People don't really care what the domain name is of the place they're getting help. It's not like everything in the Drupal community happens on Drupal.org – there's also IRC, Twitter, mailing lists, etc.

I just want to be clear what impression this may convey.

Weasel words. Don't do FUD.

[...]outdated results. I think this could have been resolved with better forum pruning.

Yeah, that's also a huge problem with the current forums. And the exact purpose of the Stack Exchange engine is to enable good community moderation. They've spent several man-years building and tuning a great system for that. No way we could replicate that.

SE does not work for everybody but it works for most.

You may have been frustrated asking or answering a question on SE but I will bet you the next beer that you have discovered more excellent answers or questions on SE than on drupal.org.

I am often surprised when great questions that need more debate (IMHO) are closed down by 'rock-star' members who are SE reputation millionaires.

But these same people are the ones who are most willing to answer or improve a question and they put much effort into this because their reputation is at risk.

If you ask a stupid question (one that has been answered) or provide a stupid answer (sometimes called an uninformed opinion) then you can expect to be challenged and collect some down votes.

SE is a amazing free market model for harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.

Drupal.org should learn from this. It is time to stop behaving like Microsoft or Blackberry. The world is changing. Realize that you may no longer be the Smartest Guys in the Room.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room

The last time I looked, there was not one link on drupal.org to Drupal Answers. This is so wrong.

I'm comfortable leaving it wide open while we're in this brainstorming phase. It's good to check in with the community* and understand things they are/are not comfortable with, the specific features and functionality that are critical to them vs. nice to have, etc. The last time such a check-in was done was about 2 years ago, and community has doubled in size since then.

But fear not; as mentioned in the original announcement, the D.o SWG isn't just going to take the top N features and say "Yep, that's what we're doing in 2014." (For one thing, idea 2 and idea 3 are the exact opposite of each other! :D) What we are going to do is take this feedback into consideration when putting together the 2014 roadmap. We'll also have to balance other priorities, like essential maintenance, improving tools and processes to allow people with "itches to scratch" on Drupal.org to do so more easily, and business-friendly features that will actually allow us to pay for these improvements. :P Since Drupal.org has been in "feature freeze" for over a year, we're most likely going to be starting with smaller, easier-to-implement features while we perform detailed discovery/analysis on some of the thornier problems identified here to determine the best way forward.

Also, remember that we'll be doing another round of ideation in mid-2014 with a much longer lead-in. Not sure exactly what form that will take (voting or surveys or etc.), but hopefully it can be way more inclusive and representative of a larger spectrum of the full Drupal community (right now we're hearing mainly from the "insider" crowd, and mostly developers).

But yes, "What will Drupal.org be like in 2018?" is a very interesting thought exercise. If we want it to be both the centralized collaboration hub of the community, as well as a shining example of what Drupal can do, we're going to need the DA to increase revenues significantly in order to afford a team able to create improvements apace with community needs, and we're also going to need dramatically more community volunteers working on these tools than currently do. If we want it to just be a simple "brochureware" site that links to elsewhere where the community actually interacts in small, separate buckets (SE, Github, etc.), well, then we don't need either of those things. But that would definitely gut one of the main benefits of Drupal, IMO.

• A SE site is not a forum. One of the premise of SE is that a forum is a bad solution to implement a Q&A site. And while Drupal is certainly capable of being configured/extended to implement a solution much more like SE, it would require a substential amount of work.
• There is actually a lot on control given by SE to the community. Much of the governance of a SE site is delegated its community via the accompagning meta site.
• If I remember correctly, there is an API usable to create an external backup of a SE site. There is actually a lot of junk sites that re-publish complete SE sites with added ads. Should Drupal officialy uses Drupal.SE as its Q&A site, peridiodic backup and an exit strategy in case SE fails the community would be required.
• Dicussions are better kept on a forum, the idea of the suggestion is to use SE as replacement for the support forum(s). That said, answering your own question should be an accepted practice accross all SE sites (see https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/12513/should-i-not-answer-my-ow...). One of the example given would make a good self-answered question.
• The decision of were to redirect the user has already been made by Google and numerous search engines. Drupal.SE is the clear winner. The problem is mostly that Drupal.org invite the newcomers to uses the support forum(s) on drupal.org when Drupal.SE is seen by many (me included) as a better place (better answer, more active users, better structure, etc.).
• Yep, moderation on SE site can be harsh and can be dismissive, but they never are insulting. I actually think this is one of their strength because it tends to keep people who don't want to invest the time required to be helped out of the site. The lack of this kind of moderation on a lot of forums (and I don't speak of Drupal.org's forum as I don't use them) usually leads to a flood of badly written questions with badly (and usually wrong) answers. It drives off the people who are willing to help with Drupal issues, not those poor communiction skill issue and unrealistic expectations of how community support works.
  Sadly it also have a bad side effect, some users can be overzealous when it comes to moderations. And sometimes it makes some newcomers feel unwelcome. Shall Drupal.SE be used, that' s something that would have to be closely watched and managed through the SE community management tools (including the meta site).

I've have not noticed what you describe... yet I've asked questions that have never been answered by moderators (so we can assume that any moderator that have seen them was not able to answer them). On both Drupal.SE and the original SO.

On Drupal.SE, you don't get reputation by asking and anwering your own question. You only get points by getting your questions and answer up-voted and accepted or by getting a suggested edit accepted. However, you loose reputation when you downvote anything. So there is no reputation incentive to vote things down. And there is no reputation gain in moderating anything since you don't get reputation by moderating.