Our current help system is limited and is not considered very effective. Some limitations are:
- initial email contact is limited to small group of people
- answers only get seen by the person sending the question
- emails can be missed and then nothing ever happens
PMB has asked that we setup a forum and use this as our main communication with users.
This document will not follow the usual design document format but will be used to track choices/decisions made about various options.
- Can signup/signin easily (M)
- UI must be simple enough to not need any documentation sfor simple use (M)
- Responsive from all mantid partner facilities (M)
- Search (M)
- Easy for the dev team to - Notice new posts (M)
- Easy for the dev team to - post replies (M) - markdown support would be beneficial
- Easy for the dev team to - Include images (M)
- Easy for the dev team to - Include links to our documentation (M)
- Low maintenance effort (M)
- Price (S) - Free is easiest, but a moderate price would be acceptable
- Easy for the dev team to - Include formatted python, that is then easy to copy out (S)
- Ad hoc topic/thread creation (S)
- Significant user community (S)
- Could allow Anonymous posting (C), the need for this decreases the easier it is to sign up/log in
- Posts to mantid-help will have to be inserted (manually/automatically) (C) - we could otherwise just redirect people to the new forum, and change links in Mantid and website.
- If cloud hosted it would be better to not add additional servers to administer / maintain contracts (C)
http://mantidtest.createaforum.com/
A bit restricted by the hosting platform. Ad free for 30 days then $5pcm to stay add free.
- Open-source version does not have all PRO features
- Email hard to get working
- Looks poor out of the box
http://mantidtest.icyboards.net/
A bit restricted by the hosting platform. Ad free cost is $10pcm.
Sandbox that is reset daily - http://try.discourse.org/
- Offer a one off install on DreamHost for $99 then monthly fee to Dreamhost. $10/$20 would be sufficient
- Other hosted packages are available at higher cost.
- Open-source project and free version contains all features
- Simply Docker-based install with good documentation
- Options for login via GitHub, Google, Twitter, Facebook
- Supports pinned topics
- UI layout non-standard for forums but posts support
- code-highlighting
- drag-n-drop image uploads
- Markdown, HTML, BBcode
- Inline previews
- Notification settings can be set after post is created. Not required to post - defaults operate like GitHub
- No anonymous posting
- example implementation is here - http://198.74.56.37:8081/
Create a "mantidproject" tag.