Why Community Matters

When we started building InfluxDB, we focused on doing it as an open source project because our fundamental belief is that an InfluxData developer community is key to success for any software platform. We knew we were doing the right thing as we saw the number of GitHub stars increase, and we still use this as a yardstick to see how we are doing.

But the over 50,000 active installations that exist in the wild today and the 590 contributors we have to the main TICK repos are beyond my wildest dreams. From the first post on Hacker News that gave us the initial validation to our 1.0 release and beyond we are continually driven by the passionate community that uses our software.

Initially discussion about Influx-y things was confined to github issues and google groups threads. We spread out and colonized a Gopher Slack channel (#influxdb) last year, but our community has long lacked a place to ask and answer usage questions or talk about cool ideas for the whole stack.

No longer! With this post, I'm announcing community.influxdata.com, a discourse forum with an InfluxData flavor.

From today we will begin routing any technical questions on usage, code samples, how to, and general questions to the forum. Our technical team at InfluxData will do their best to try to answer questions, but this is a real community site, and we want anyone to ask and respond to questions. If you want to ask a question just click the sign-in button at the top of the page (we support both Google and Github OAuth) and start a topic!

My username on the forum is pauldix. I'll see you there!

Note: Developers who want to contribute code will still happen on GitHub, same as today, but it will be focused solely on contributors.