Who actually develops the Godot Forum and adds new features?

[Demetrius_Dixon]

So this question is going to need a bit of clarification.

For one:

1. I know the Godot Forum is managed by the Godot Foundation.
2. The forum runs on a software called Discourse (NOT Discord, they are completely different).
3. And there is an active moderation team.

Even with all this, there is still a person who calls the shots on how the forum gets updated. If there isn’t, there really should be, as there’s a lot of great feedback in the Forum Feedback category that would improve the experience here by a mile.

If there isn’t a person who has the power to implement changes, why does the Forum Feedback category even exist? There isn’t even a person that rejects feedback publicly.

With Godot’s overall identity as a community effort, are we sure that the forum’s leadership should work in the shadows?

In fact, why isn’t the forum open source either? Discourse is open source, and Godot already has github maintainers and contributors for both the engine and the documentation.

The only piece of feedback that I’ve personally seen implemented is adding a new flag for AI answers.

For context, this is the topic that lead to it:

Rule regarding AI generated answers / posts?

Given the rise of AI tools that are often very questionable in quality, I think there should at least be some kind of rule that governs these kind of answers on the forums. Most people expect another human to answer questions on here, and while I absolutely support the use of AI to help with translation and such, I’ve seen a couple of answers already where someone just blatantly just copy-pasted something off of an AI tool, even leaving in all the nonsense AI generates, such as emojis, unrelate…

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Please don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t want to antagonize the Godot Forum moderation team or anyone else for that matter. But I wanted to bring this is because I care deeply about this forum and the people in it.

This has personally become a second home for me, and I’d like to see it get better. If I got any information wrong or missed something, please let me know.

[hardboileduser]

I do curious about this too

[ximossi]

@Demetrius_Dixon

In fact, why isn’t the forum open source either? Discourse is open source, and Godot already has github maintainers and contributors for both the engine and the documentation.

Discourse, as you correctly state, is just a software. It is not developed here, nor are its features. It is hosted by the foundation and (probably) given an admin doing it.

Discourse has a big set of available plugins that an admin can install and configure. It has no infrastructure for a big team of admins collaborating in this configuration. Most software does not, as far as I know - but feel free to correct me, if i’m wrong.

I recommend to just self-host a discourse instance yourself and see how it works. It’s actually quiet easy to work with.

But, if I understand the intention of your post: I agree, that this forum is in need of a bigger and more open (in terms of who gets permissions) moderation team. This could be handled by introducing a more granular permission set with different levels. But as we see in every online community, it tends to be a double-edged sword, right?