Copying from https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2020-July/093642.html :
In January 2018, an experimental instance of the Q&A platform "Discourse" was set up for developer support at https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org . See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T180854 .
Since its launch, the usage of this instance has declined: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T247010#6270883
On average, there are two users who are engaged daily.Other support venues which exist in parallel are much more active, such as IRC, mailing lists, [[mw:Project:Support_desk]], [[meta:Tech]], local technical village pumps, newsletters, Zulip for outreach programs, or other third-party sites such as mwusers.org, StackExchange.com, or Reddit.
Discontinuing the least frequented venue (which unfortunately is Discourse though it seems to be a great communication platform) would keep us from further fragmenting our conversations and efforts.
Planning, implementing, establishing and running a centralized Wikimedia developer support venue on production infrastructure (puppetization, data backups, uptime, etc) would require significant technical and "social" capacity. If Discourse was to be further evaluated, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T155678 and its subtasks list part of the remaining needed work.
I propose to make discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org read-only by the end of August 2020.
Random other links:
- Historically speaking, stalled T180853 stated that moving discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org to a production instance was at some point a proposed FY2018-19 Q4 goal of SRE (but dropped again)
- T180853#4844720 and T155678#4844716 from late 2018 states that this experiment has been passed (?) to Developer-Advocacy.
- Discourse (any instance, I guess?) has several open Phab tasks.
- https://openstack-browser.toolforge.org/project/discourse
- Only for the bigger picture: Space was the name of another Discourse instance which has been canceled in March 2020.