Concerning bug reporting, there’s this additional issue of language: You might have a strong community in Germany for example, but of course want bugs to be reported in English to be useful for your development staff and your international dev community. There might be people within your German community who feel uncomfortable writing in English. Here again, you need to invest time and e.g. ask them to first post the bug in a German-speaking forum so that you can translate it and turn it into an English bug report. Later, there might be community memers who can help you with that.

When it comes to the type of community (dev or user), it’s often quite hard to draw the line. It should be quite easy when speaking about platform components such as a database, but a community that forms around a CMS or productivity software is much more diverse. Such communities need to take into account that developers also wear the hat of users while developing the core app or custom solutions. Additionally, there should be processes how to translate and transfer input from users e.g. in a forum (“this is really hard to use”) to the mailing list where the core devs need crisp information that allows them to understand how to actually solve the issue.

If you want to be very proactive about it, you could even enter the forum discussion by stating that you submitted a bug report about this on behalf of the user. But this is of course a time-intensive thing to do and only works for the bootstrapping phase of a project. Therefore it’s probably a good idea to set up guidelines for users to know where to post what.

And yes, I was wearing my community relations manager hat when thinking about Mailing lists vs. Forums (and of course other communication platforms). Now that users can create their own discussion groups on so many platforms, it has become quite a challenge to stay up to date with the various conversations on all of these. I haven’t used GMANE a lot, thanks for reminding me of it.

And agreed, devs usually feel more comfortable with a mailing list. Having a platform that support both sounds like a Good Thing, but it may also cause a culture clash (e.g. discussions about quoting style may arise). It probably depends on which community you want to address first and foremost. Do you want to foster a developer community or rather build up your user community? Both may have different needs.

thanks for your valuable comments!

Re forum/mailinglist involvement:

Very true! From a strategic point of view, the whole sense of having a community is to make your company and product better. Hence, you actively want to engage in conversations with your community. For example, someone who posts an issue with installing your software to the forum can help make the installation process easier or perhaps you might find out that there’s actually a bug.

When setting up new discussion channels such as forums or mailing lists, you should start the discussion by proposing e.g. new features, suggesting changes to the community portal, etc. to kick-start the discussion. This will show that you are serious about openly discussing a whole variety of topics. After about 3 months, community members start to help each other and you can gradually retreat from answering basic questions and concentrate on the more complicated issues. This means that setting up new discussion channels requires you to be very active for about 3-6 months until the community engages more actively and understands how to use the new channel.

Re focal point of discussion:

Are you speaking from a community manager’s perspective? It would indeed be great if there were an integrated communication environment that allowed community managers to manage mailing lists, forums, blog comments, Tweets, etc. Concerning community members, the idea of converging mailing lists and forums always comes up, but in the end turns out to not really be necessary. Usually, GMANE does the trick. Developers prefer mailing lists, users prefer forums. Forums might be better from an SEO perspective, but what good is a dev forum that no one uses because they prefer mailing lists?

I wholeheartedly concur with your assessment and summary. I would like to point out one more thing: it’s not enough to just set up a Forum or Mailing list and hope for the community to take care of it.

You need be become actively involved in the discussions in order to make it successful. Your community needs to know that you are approachable and the communication is in a bi-directional fashion.

Also, having a separate Mailing List and a Forum can be quite time-consuming to monitor and follow. It’s probably a good idea to set up a forum software that also supports posting and reading messages via email (or even NNTP), to have one focal point of discussions.