Sunsetting Technical Support on the Forum

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Hi folks,

By way of introduction, because this account may not be well known to forum readers, I’m Brian Whippo, Head of Developer Relations at the Algorand Foundation.

As part of a holistic strategy for how the Developer Relations team provides technical support for Algorand developers across various communication channels and platforms, I’ve decided to close down the technical sections of this Algorand Forum and direct people to leverage other platforms. There will continue to be governance and general categories for discussing other topics, but this site will no longer be recommended as a place to get help with Algorand technology or software development.

The forum is simply not functioning well today as a place to get technical help for a few reasons:

  1. Forum traffic has dwindled to nearly zero, which creates two issues: A) it makes it look like there’s no one around, which is quite far from the truth, and B) it means there is a slim chance that dev questions will get answered by another community member, leaving the Foundation in a position where we would be providing the vast majority of the support on a transactional basis, which is unsustainable in the long term.
  2. Old technical content that remains on the forum actually pollutes search engine results and LLM knowledge with outdated and incorrect information.
  3. We are under constant attack by bots and scammers on the forum, but the moderation tools available here are suboptimal to manage the issue.

Going forward, we encourage Algorand community members and developers to seek technical help through the following channels:

  • The Algorand Developer Portal is a wealth of resources, including an AI chatbot that can help answer questions 24x7. This portal is also in the process of being completely revamped in a number of ways for launch later this year.
  • The Algorand Discord server has the largest collection of developers in one place, so technical questions get answered faster there than anywhere else in the ecosystem, either by other community members or the DevRel team. The server has forum channels that operate much like this forum, there are lively discussion channels, and the AI bot can also be engaged there for dev Q&A 24x7.
  • The Algorand Foundation website has a Contact form that can be used for technical queries that get routed to my team and tracked by our CRM platform. This should be used primarily for sensitive issues that cannot otherwise be handled in Discord.

Regards,

Brian

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