We’re thrilled to share our two official community sites with the world: our Cloudinary Community forum and our Discord server.
There’s a lot of discussion (and no consensus) about whether forums or chat servers are the right solution for a community’s needs. Some people have strong preferences for one or the other. Others don’t care as long as they get what they need out of the community.
Forums and chat servers aren’t interchangeable, though. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Forums are great for search and discoverability, and sharing information that’s important to larger groups of people or for a longer time. Chat servers are great for smaller groups, informal discussions, privacy, and relationship building.
We thought long and hard about how we wanted to provide tools for our community and concluded that the best way to support our community’s needs is by hosting both a forum and a chat server. So we’re doing just that.
The Cloudinary community forum fills the gap between problems which can be easily solved by a Google search, and problems that require an account or personal data access and can only be handled by support staff.
If your problem is challenging or in-depth, we recommend using the forum as a starting point. The forum is also a great place to share how-tos, tutorials, and other long-form community content.
We also have some fun roles and badges that only forum users get access to. Over time, we’ll be adding special benefits for the most dedicated forum users.
Our community Discord hosts real-time conversations with smaller groups of community members. We’ve been doing this for some time now with our Media Developer Experts [MDEs] and attendees at our online Cloudinary Academy courses. Now all of those conversations (and more) will be in one place.
Whether you prefer a forum, a chat server, or a little of both, we want to make sure you have the tools you need to help you build more amazing visual experiences. Please visit our sites and let us know how it’s working for you.
