Chia Network has finally launched a mechanism for communication with the team other than Keybase. They actually did this last week but I am, of course, behind on everything. What they have built is a forum ChiaDevs, primarily aimed towards developers and that looks an awful lot like ChiaForum.com.
Because its been a few days we can see how much activity is happening there, and its not a ton yet. What is there seems focused and Rigidity, in his new role at Chia Network, is answering questions and providing really good answers but its just not very busy yet.
This isn’t very surprising though. This forum isn’t being created to solve a problem that exists today, because all the Chialisp developers have already had to install Keybase and get setup there to communicate with the Chia team. So why would they suddenly start using a forum? The purpose for something like this is to provide an easy avenue to new developers to find resources on Chialisp without having to jump through those hoops.
I really do like the idea, and I hope that it starts to pick up steam. One thing I would recommend to the Chia team is to start “seeding” questions and answers from Keybase, like an FAQ, into the forum. This will give it a kickstart in search results when new developers start Googling for the answer to specific questions that have already been asked and answered long ago in Keybase. It might feel like astroturfing, and you might even have some of them documented at chialisp.com or docs.chia.net but you definitely want a critical mass of content on the forum to make things useful for new developers trying to learn. (edit: They actually already did that. Shows how good an idea it was. I just needed to hit “more” on the latest posts page.)
