About the Related Projects category

The Related Projects category includes sub-categories that are dedicated to open source projects within the Swift community that are separate from the Swift language itself.

We invite project owners to propose new sub-categories for projects that have open source repositories on sites like GitHub. Once it is set up, all we ask of project owners is to keep tabs on their category and report any code of conduct issues. Over time, it might make sense to retire certain sub-categories if they are not getting any new traffic—hopefully that won’t happen.

If you’re interested in starting a category for your project, please send a message to the @forum_admins.

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Huge thanks to the Swift team for doing this! We've been wanting a forum for Vapor for a while now. Even better to have a communal one. :slight_smile:

Is there any way we can choose the color for Vapor's tag? If so, Vapor blue (#62CEFD) or pink (#DF44F6) would be great.

Done! Vapor blue it is!

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What constitutes the requirements of getting a sub-category here? I just saw that a library was added and it seems that it has only one contributor and is fairly unknown (I also checked its Cocoapods stats). This is not to say anything about its quality – it might be super awesome.

I mean if this space here is going to be used for self-promotion there is going to be potentially 100s or 1000s of sub-categories for every little Swift framework/library there is, which might or might not be problematic?

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I wanted to suggest to include Sourcery sub-category, but for some reason I'm not allowed to send messages to @forum_admins =(

@ilyapuchka can you try now?

The intention is that the forum is their to host project discussions... which could be a lot of projects. At some point the "Related Projects" category will be difficult to navigate because it has so many projects, but I see that as a good problem to have. It's just means we might need other means to "index" the Related Projects — if that is something we want to do.

FWIW, one thing I imagined when we conceived the "Related Projects" category is that the forum category for a project is not meant to supplement the main landing page for a project. What I imagined is that the main landing page for a project would instead link to the forum category, just as they might for a Slack channel, code repositories, or whatever. If you look at it from that perspective, then the "Related Projects" category just provides a home for these discussions on forums.swift.org, with a shared Discourse instance for the Swift open source community.

I can see the good intentions, but to be honest I am not sure how well this will work out.

We are discouraging people from asking framework related questions (e.g. How do I do X with CoreLocation in my project) and send them to StackOverflow instead (which seems the appropriate place anyway).

Now we basically create something that's exactly the opposite – inviting people to ask questions about specific frameworks here (the idea that only "discussions" will happen here is naïve imho). But when the question involves an Apple system framework – well, we still send them away, as those won't have a category (?).

But of course maybe my concerns turn out to be completely unfounded.

It's an interesting point, and one I need to think about. FWIW, I do see separate concerns here, and it is up to the individual projects who participate in "Related Projects" on how they want to use the forums.

The intent here was to help support open source projects that are using Swift or help support the Swift ecosystem. Many projects, especially as they gain users or contributors, need ways to have "forums" for communication. Some projects might want to exclusively use pull requests to discuss technical work, or use Slack to answer to have a wide range of discussions.

The intent of the "Related Projects" is to allow individual projects to use the forums in much the same way the Swift.org project does: as a means for users to connect with the project and as a means to foster the communication needed in the project's development. In the case of Swift, "development" means both work on the compiler and libraries but also discussion for language Evolution. Many projects may have similar needs, and instead of them hosting their own forums they can have a place on the Swift forums. That's the intent.

Maybe this won't turn out well — and if so, we can look to see what worked and what didn't and adjust. The reason some topics are redirected to StackOverflow instead is that they are deemed off topic. Maybe that is a mistake, but the idea of the User forums on forums.swift.org is to ask questions specific to Swift, and not general (say) iOS development. That's a question about Apple's SDKs and frameworks. Clearly there is a relationship between Apple and the Swift project, but at a technology level there is a separation of concerns here and I think that is the basis for redirecting some topics elsewhere.

If you have specific suggestions on how we can better use the "Related Projects", I'm certainly open to suggestions. This is a bit of an experiment.

Message sent, thank you!

I tried sending a message to the forum admins to have my project added to the related-projects category, but I kept getting a popup saying "Sorry, you cannot send a personal message to that user." How do I get around that?

I sent a message about a week ago but haven't heard back.

@mishal_shah Ping?

We are still waiting for a rely on our related project request. Is there a new/different/better way we should be submitting these requests?

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Hmm. The latest posts in this thread should have been a warning sign, I'm still waiting for a reaction for my request from June. Even though I left the professional Swift world for a C++ job, I still would love to see if my hobby project, RedCat, can actually be of use for the wider community