Make Besu questions easy to find and answer

Owned by Nicolas Massart
Last updated: Jun 07, 2022
2 min read

Goal of this page

  • Get feedback from contributors with experience in Github discussions vs Discord.
  • It looks like we already made an attempt of what I describe bellow at some point in the past, I would love to know why we reverted before making the same mistake again.

Please provide your feedback in comments on this page.

Problem

  • As a doc team and contributors who participate in answering questions in the Besu Discord, we find it hard to follow the messages flow and find questions that need answers.
  • We also struggle to redirect users to previous answers and users don't even search for previous answers as the effort to do so on Discord is outpacing by far the effort to simply ask again... and again... and again.

Suggestion

Activate, configure and use Besu Github repos discussions.

ConsenSys already uses this for instance for https://github.com/ConsenSys/quorum/discussions

Pros

  • have visibility on questions that need answers
  • build a knowledge base in the product repos itself, no 3rd party tool.
  • Search for a previously asked question
  • have a link to a specific question to send when users ask on Discord
  • Have questions sorted by popularity. Users can vote making a question go up or down in the list.
  • subscribe to notifications on a specific discussion, not the whole channel...
  • organise with labels (sync issue, database crash, command line questions,...)
  • lock a conversation if something goes wrong or we already have the best answer.
  • pin questions to provide visibility
  • create discussion from GitHub issue and the other way too
  • get some basic statistics on contributions but at least we have metrics to see if it works
  • Ease search for discussions by sorting and filtering
  • makes the Discord chat a chat again and not a fake knowledge base that doesn't work.

Cons

  • requires a GitHub account to participate
  • requires us to redirect users from discord to GitHub when we have questions (or search for them if we want to point to the same question directly)
  • may require to create a bot later on Discord that could spot questions in the chat and search and post a link to the answer that looks like it can help...

Implementation

If we agree that this is worth trying (we can always revert), then we setup discussions and start sending the link to users every time they asks a questions on Discord.
If you know the answer, but the answer is not yet in the discussions, add it once the user created their question in the discussion.