New community channels

If you vis­ited the Eclipse Vert.x web­site re­cently, you might have no­ticed a cou­ple of nov­el­ties on the com­mu­nity page:

• the Stack Over­flow vert.x tag for user ques­tions
• the vertx-​users Git­ter chan­nel to chat with other users and mod­ule main­tain­ers

Won­der­ing why?

Answering questions wherever they are asked

In order to help us sup­port the com­mu­nity, we (the core team and mod­ule main­tain­ers) have tried so far to stick to a few rules:

• user group for ques­tions
• IRC to chat
• bugs and is­sues re­ported on GitHub

These rules were doc­u­mented on the web­site, but ad­mit­tedly they are hard (if pos­si­ble at all) to en­force. And let’s face it: many new users like to ask ques­tions on Stack­over­flow and GitHub.

So we now an­swer ques­tions wher­ever they are asked. We keep the user group as the main chan­nel though: some con­ver­sa­tions just don’t fit the Stack Over­flow model, and not every­one in the com­mu­nity watches the GitHub repos­i­to­ries.

Moving from IRC to Gitter

The #vertx chan­nel is recorded on echelog but it’s not con­ve­nient to search or browse. And shar­ing code, logs, is­sues is sim­ply awful com­pared to mod­ern al­ter­na­tives like Git­ter or Slack.

Git­ter got our pref­er­ence be­cause:

• it’s free, with­out lim­its
• it’s not re­source hun­gry (on a browser at least)
• it’s well in­te­grated with GitHub
• it sup­ports ad­vanced for­mat­ting

Since the chan­nel was opened, new peo­ple are join­ing every day. At the time of writ­ing, there are 74 peo­ple reg­is­tered al­ready. We hope you will be the next one!

See you soon on­line.