We are very excited to introduce the Seqera community forum - the new home of the Nextflow community!

community.seqera.io

The growth of the Nextflow community over recent years has been phenomenal. The Nextflow Slack organization was launched in early 2022 and has already reached a membership of nearly 3,000 members. As we look ahead to growing to 5,000 and even 50,000, we are making a new tool available to the community: a community forum.

We expect the new forum to coexist with the Nextflow Slack. The forum will be great at medium-format discussion, whereas Slack is largely designed for short-term ephemeral conversations. We want to support this growth of the community and believe the new forum will allow us to scale.

Discourse is an open-source, web-based platform designed for online community discussions and forum-style interactions. Discourse offers a user-friendly interface, real-time notifications, and a wide range of customization options. It prioritizes healthy and productive conversations by promoting user-friendly features, such as trust levels, gamification, and robust moderation tools. Discourse is well known for its focus on fostering engaging and respectful discussions and already caters to many large developer communities. It’s able to serve immense groups, giving us confidence that it will meet the needs of our growing developer community just as well. We believe that Discourse is a natural fit for the evolution of the Nextflow community.

The community forum offers many exciting new features. Here are some of the things you can expect:

• Open content: Content on the new forum is public – accessible without login, indexed by Google, and can be linked to directly. This means that it will be much easier to find answers to your problems, as well as share solutions on other platforms.
• Don’t ask the same thing twice: It’s not always easy to find answers when there’s a lot of content available. The community forum helps you by suggesting similar topics as you write a new post. An upcoming Discourse AI Bot may even allow you to ask questions using natural language in the future!
• Stay afloat: The community forum will ensure developers have a space where they can post without fear that what they write might be drowned out, and where anything that our community finds useful will rise to the top of the list. Discourse will give life to threads with high-quality content that may have otherwise gone unnoticed and lost in a sea of new posts.
• Better organized: The forum model for categories, tags, threads, and quoting forces conversations to be structured. Many questions involve the broader Nextflow ecosystem, tagging with multiple topics will cut through the noise and allow people to participate in targeted and well-labeled discussions. Importantly, maintainers can move miscategorized posts without asking the original author to delete and write again.
• Multi-product: The forum has categories for Nextflow but also Seqera Platform, MultiQC, Wave, and Fusion. Questions that involve multiple Seqera products can now span these boundaries, and content can be shared between posts easily.
• Community recognition: The community forum will encourage a healthy ecosystem of developers that provides value to everyone involved and rewards the most active users. The new forum encourages positive community behaviors through features such as badges, a trust system, and community moderation. There’s even a community leaderboard! We plan to gradually introduce additional features over time as adoption grows.

Online discussion platforms have been the beating heart of the Nextflow community from its inception. The first was a Google groups email list, which was followed by the Gitter instant messaging platform, GitHub Discussions, and most recently, Slack. We’re thrilled to embark on this new chapter of the Nextflow community – let us know what you think and ask any questions you might have in the “Site Feedback” forum category! Join us today at https://community.seqera.io for a new and improved developer experience.

Visit the Seqera community forum