Building in Public: Introducing Our New Community Forum
Tags: community, web3, storage, decentralization
Published: 2023-09-25 14:16:13

---
title: Building in Public: Introducing Our New Community Forum
published: true
date: 2023-09-24 18:00:11 UTC
tags: community, Web3, storage, decentralization
canonical_url: https://blog.spheron.network/building-in-public-introducing-our-new-community-forum
---

At [Spheron](https://spheron.network/), we believe in the power of community and transparency. As we continue to build and grow, we want to involve our developer community every step of the way. That's why we're excited to announce the launch of our new community forum!

## The Problem We're Solving

**Over the past year, our team has worked tirelessly to solve over 300+ tickets raised by developers.** While our initial approach of using a private Discord channel for support worked well, it helped us interact with the developers privately in the ticket because many times for the team, those issues reported were quite new & required in-depth analysis.

Our team noticed that many of the errors reported by users were recurring and could be easily resolved by referencing previously solved issues. However, this resulted in our team manually responding to each query, often duplicating efforts and making it difficult to keep track of solutions. Additionally, since many of these issues were resolved through private messages, sharing resolutions with other community members took time, leading to inefficiencies in problem-solving and knowledge sharing.

Moreover, the lack of proper indexing and organization of messages within Discord made locating specific answers or solutions increasingly arduous, requiring manual searches through lengthy conversation threads. It became clear that we needed a more scalable solution.

## Our Solution: A Public Community Forum

Since we at Spheron were planning to start moving our development efforts in public & share our learning as we are building, it was more necessary to share these things on the forum as well. To address these issues, we decided to create a public community forum where developers can ask questions, and both team members and community members can provide solutions.

By leveraging [**Discourse**](https://www.discourse.org/) **, an open-source platform** , **we've created a space where discussions can be categorized, tagged, and searched efficiently.** This means that developers can quickly find answers to their questions without sifting through endless messages. Additionally, badges will be awarded to active community members, fostering engagement and recognition within the community.

## Why Discourse?

We evaluated several options before deciding on Discourse. Its feature set, including open community discussion pages, categorization, tags, badges, role management, easy signup, notifications, and robust moderation tools, made it the perfect choice for our needs. Its flexibility allows us to customize the platform to suit our unique requirements.

## Benefits of the Community Forum:

By shifting our support strategy to a public community forum, we aim to:

- **Improve response times:** With a public forum, developers can get answers to their questions much faster, as they won't have to wait for individual responses from our team.

- **Encourage collaboration:** Developers can assist one another, sharing knowledge and expertise to resolve issues more efficiently.

- **Enhance discoverability:** All discussions, including solutions, will be indexed and easily searchable, eliminating the need to comb through lengthy conversation threads.

- **Foster engagement:** Badges will be awarded to active participants, motivating them to contribute to the community and helping us recognize valuable contributors.

- **Facilitate transparent communication:** Updates, announcements, and discussions will happen in real time, allowing everyone to stay informed and engaged.

- **Promote learning:** By making our development process public, others can learn from our experiences, successes, and failures.

- **Build trust:** Our commitment to transparency demonstrates our dedication to the developer community, fostering trust and credibility.

## Join Us On This Exciting Journey

**As we take our leap to build in public.** Introducing our new community forum marks an essential milestone in our journey towards building in public. **We will keep posting all of the updates & announcements in public channels for anyone to look at.**

By creating this public community forum, we aim to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration among developers, ultimately contributing to the growth and success of the broader Web3 ecosystem. We believe that this initiative will enable entrepreneurs and innovators to learn from our experiences, build upon our achievements, and avoid pitfalls, ultimately leading to a brighter future for decentralized development.

Join us on this thrilling adventure, and let's chart the course for tomorrow's technology landscape together!

### Link to Join - [https://community.spheron.network/](https://community.spheron.network/)