The support page on the website has:

• Search bar. This is supposed to search on the website/mailing lists/tickets. I tried searching for “libfabric”, which was in the subject on an email sent last month to users, but no result popped out, so maybe something is not working as expected. Personally, I remember that I had tried using the search bar in the past but found that it was unhelpful (I cannot really put my finger on why exactly).
• User mailing list. The description invites people to ask questions.
• Commits mailing list. Should this really in the “support” page?
• Cactus mailing list. The link is broken.
• Bug tracker.
• IRC. Half the links in this section are broken and it is not possible to look at the logs. Is anyone actually using this (except Roland)?
• Gitter. The description says that “we are currently exploring” this option. The chat room received only a handful of messages over the past year and doesn’t look particularly active.
• Weekly calls.

I feel that there are too many open support channels, resulting in (1) information being dispersed/made harder to find, (2) difficulty for users to ask questions and receive an answer (I think that this is barrier for users that are unfamiliar with our community and those that are just getting started).

I think that there is benefit in consolidating the support channels, as currently the places where one could ask a question are 6 (ET user mailing list, Cactus mailing list, Bug tracker, IRC, Gitter, weekly call).

In this, I feel that a platform like gitter has a lot of potential and chatting in real-time can be a very effective way to quickly get questions answered. However, users might think that the forum is dead when they see that the last message was sent 6 months ago, if we prune ineffective support channels, we can also consider emphasizing gitter more.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2676/consolidate-improve-support-options