Introducing the NLnet Labs Community forum

By Alex Band

We're happy to introduce community.nlnetlabs.nl, NLnet Labs' new platform for discussion on our various open source projects.

Over the last years, the number of projects and collaboration platforms we maintain for our community has grown to the point where we wanted to consolidate them. After researching the available options, we chose Discourse. For us, this means a single tool that fits the breadth of our development work. For our users, that means the ability to participate using either email or their web browser.

For this transition, we intend to take a phased approach.

First we will offer so-called Discourse "categories" for products and projects that did not have a discussion platform at all, such as our new DNSSEC signing pipeline Cascade, our BGP routing engine Rotonda, and our strongly-typed, compiled scripting language Roto. Today, we also announced the archival of our RPKI mailing list, dedicated to discussions on Krill, Routinator and RTRTR. This now also has a new home there.

The second phase is to unify the discussion on all tools and libraries we offer, such as ldns for C and domain for Rust, as well as our supporting tools DNSThought, dnsi, dnst, and mimir. Some of these already had a low-volume mailing list, and some had no dedicated place at all. You can already find the new category here.

The last phase is dedicated to NSD and Unbound. These two projects have a long history and valuable mailing list archives with a wealth of community knowledge.
Our goal is to preserve these conversations to make them searchable for future reference. Subscribers to these mailing lists will receive further communication on their respective mailing lists when time comes.

For all the mailing lists that we maintain, we will keep the current mailman archives available at least a year after closing it down for new posts.

Finally, we think it's important that there is a place where our community can collectively discuss and solve issues in the open. The main goal of our community platform is to offer a place where users of our free, open source software can help each other. Please keep in mind that if you want to privately discuss anything regarding our products within your critical infrastructure, we offer support contracts with various service levels.