If you visited the Eclipse Vert.x website recently, you might have noticed a couple of novelties on the community page:

• the Stack Overflow vert.x tag for user questions
• the vertx-users Gitter channel to chat with other users and module maintainers

Wondering why?

Answering questions wherever they are asked

In order to help us support the community, we (the core team and module maintainers) have tried so far to stick to a few rules:

• user group for questions
• IRC to chat
• bugs and issues reported on GitHub

These rules were documented on the website, but admittedly they are hard (if possible at all) to enforce. And let’s face it: many new users like to ask questions on Stackoverflow and GitHub.

So we now answer questions wherever they are asked. We keep the user group as the main channel though: some conversations just don’t fit the Stack Overflow model, and not everyone in the community watches the GitHub repositories.

Moving from IRC to Gitter

The #vertx channel is recorded on echelog but it’s not convenient to search or browse. And sharing code, logs, issues is simply awful compared to modern alternatives like Gitter or Slack.

Gitter got our preference because:

• it’s free, without limits
• it’s not resource hungry (on a browser at least)
• it’s well integrated with GitHub
• it supports advanced formatting

Since the channel was opened, new people are joining every day. At the time of writing, there are 74 people registered already. We hope you will be the next one!

See you soon online.