 Hi everyone. My name is Raghavendra Kamal. I'm an illustrator and designer from India. I use Krita for my work and try to help the team in testing and documentation and maintaining the website KritaArtist.org. Today we are going to talk about how we built a community forum for Krita. Let's talk a bit about Krita and its community. Krita is a digital painting application and it started as K-image shop in 1999 and then it was renamed to Krita in 2009. Initially it tried to be a general-purpose image manipulation software and then since 2009 the team shifted focus to digital painting. Since then Krita is immensely improving with each release and today it is a solid contender in the market rivaling with other giants in the industry. Each release of Krita adds more and more number of users to its community. The current estimate of the Krita users base is about 5 to 6 million users worldwide. Its community consists of a diverse set of users from amateur painters to professionals from school kids to art students, users from windows, Linux, Mac OS, Android, users speaking different languages. It targets the concept artist, made painters, comic book artists, game developers etc. History and existing community channels. Krita is powered by volunteers from the community. Existing channels and community spaces were started by these volunteers. The developers do a wonderful job of being present in every space as possible. The initial community was based on Linux users and free software enthusiasts on IRC mailing list and KDE sub-cordons. The first release which was ready for professional use was in 2012 and since then Krita has established its presence on various social media websites and forums like Devintart, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc. Some of the icons are officially managed by the developers and some are managed by the volunteers. When the Windows version was released in 2004, Krita started getting more and more users from the Windows site and it is also from the largest user base come from. This added to the increased user interactions in the existing community spaces. Krita community also has adopted new mediums for the new mediums. For example, Krita has an Instagram page and also an unofficial Discord channel run by volunteers. Then what we learned and what was required. With the increasing number of users, we also got increasing number of questions and users seeking help and also a lot of users seeking help. We also noticed that there are more and more generic user support questions which were spilling onto the bug zealots. All the existing spaces, Reddit, Twitter etc. saw increasing duplicate questions and even if we prepared some FAQ page, it was not that effective. The developers do an excellent job in answering all the questions wherever they encounter them but it affects the time they spend on the development. There can't also be a disconnect between the users and the developers. We really needed a way to solve most public user questions easily. In 2018, we tried to solve this with a website model on stack exchange where users will post their questions and also help other users with their questions. This website was called ask.frita.org. The questions could be upvoted so that most frequent questions would be at the top. Initially, the team seeded the website with some frequently asked questions and also answers to them. But this website lasted for about a year until May 2019. We learned that apart from regular developers and few passionate volunteers, nobody was staying on the website to help others out. There was also no engagement factor and users didn't have any incentives to spend time on it. A few months later, during an IRC discussion, the krita maintainer had an idea of having a community website similar to Blender. It was called blenderartist.org. So I volunteered to set up and post this website. I was not a developer so I asked my friend Amaya to help me in the process. We researched a bit about blenderartist. It was using discourse software to host the community. But unlike typical discourse community, it had few plugins which ended in highlighting the art aspect of the community. This is the factor which holds the users to the website. Users get to share their artwork and users get to share their artwork with krita and have a discussion about it. The feedback from the fellow artists and krita enthusiasts encourages them to return to the website. It is kind of like a mixture of Reddit and forum combined into one. So we released kritaartist.org on October 2019. Setting up the website was not that hard. The person running blenderartist.org, blenderartist also answered some of our questions about the setup. The website has been working great. Until now it has around 10K users registered with about 1000 active users per month. There have been around 85,000 posts in these last two years. You can call it a success if I say so. So how it is hosted? Let's see the setup. We host the website on a Hedzner VPS. There are two servers. The first server has the discourse instance. The official docker image is used to install the discourse. The second server hosts mailing a box. It is a utility to host your own mail server. Using this we send the admin email, system email and handle the DNS etc. The discourse server has 80GB of space and 4GB of RAM. They are running out of space since the forum is a bit heavy on the image side. Users do like to share a lot of images and artworks etc. They don't precise it is often high resolution artworks. Now we can see how it has helped us. This course is a robust forum software. We found that it is designed really well keeping in mind all the possibilities and scenarios that a community needs. It has checks and limitations on new users to mitigate spans. For example, a new user can't repeatedly make posts or he can't edit this post after a period of time. It also has a wide variety of plugins. There is a thriving community support for it. There are various features like badges and you get a badge for spending some time on the forum or helping somebody. If you get some amount of likes you get a badge. There are also likes for the posts etc. It helps in keeping the user engaged in the forum. It is also very feature rich from the moderation point of view. It has features such as slow mode where you can contain a heated debate and by limiting the time to post subsequent posts. Flagging system which helps users to keep the community clean also helps keep the community clean. As a user spends more time on the forum gradually they will be given some more powers to become semi-moderator in the forum. So feature-wise it is really well thought out and designed really well. Whenever we wanted something we saw that this course had it in some way or the other. It is not rigid by any chance. It is very flexible. So how feature-wise it has really helped us regarding actual user support. We have redirected most of our users support to this forum. We also have made the forum as an important step in the blog reporting process. Wherein we encourage users to check the FAQ first and then ask questions on this forum in case they do not find an answer like in case they do not find an answer in the FAQ. They can post questions on this forum. Some users prefer to report things on the forum and then they are guided to the bugzilla in case it is an actual bug. Although not completely but it has reduced some load from bugzilla. User questions are categorized accordingly. Like they can also mark an answer as solved. It helps for other users to find the answer easily. The forum has also a robust search feature which helps in finding similar questions and problems that some other users have faced earlier. We have a category called artist testing and feedback. New betas and are tested and users provide feedback in the forum post. New brushes, blend modes, etc. are discussed and developed in collaboration. For example, Ramon our in-house artist created some excellent charcoal brushes with the input from the community. Developers were able to get good feedback about the new RGB brushes which mimic traditional impasto effect. Our new resource management system also got initial feedback and testing from the community. Some people like the height. There is a blending mode called height in other software. Some people really like that and there was a post about it and there was collaborative research and development. Developers were able to implement a better version of this. This category keeps the developers and users in touch and it helps in quickly getting feedback regarding new features and releases. Talking about feature request, we do have a dedicated category for feature request. This category has seen some heated debate on the forum. Artists post about the features they need. Artists like other users chime in and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their features. For example, a feature for some users might be a hindrance for some other. The feature request gets balanced protein and it also helps in making it inclusive so that it solves everyone's need. Developers do chime in and specify what is possible and what may not be possible or what is priority and if some feature request is not a priority or out of scope and they can discuss that in the post itself. At the end of the debate, most of the time developers get a clear view of what is expected by the user. What are all the requirements and so on. We have, yeah, I think it is not just about software development but it is about artistic development. It is also about artistic development. When we have category for feedback and testing, we also have categories for artworks. This is an important category. It receives almost triple the amount of post as compared to the support category. Users post their artwork and get feedback from the fellow users. There are artworks by professionals as well as beginners and users try to help each other in getting better at painting. Apart from the artwork category, we have a contest and R2L category. While there is not much happening in this category, but we recently hosted an official Krita art contest with a tablet maker who sponsored some prizes. Users were given time to create artwork with a specified theme and after the deadline, the category was locked. The results were declared on the official Krita website. In conclusion, overall Krita artist has been a wonderful asset for us. In addition to the traditional social media website, it has really become a dedicated place where users and developers come together to make Krita better. We have a lot of heated debates, discussions. Developers get to know the demands of the users better but users also get to know the developers and know that point of view about the future. Sometimes we have posts such as I want this feature, copy this feature from this software, etc. But when other users chime in and other users explain their opinion about the future, the features get improved and maybe we get a better alternative from that. We expect it to help the development process and it helps to get rapid feedback from the users. We also, like some of the developers, provide app images to test the users, test that app image and immediately answer the questions or report any bugs in that app image. Again, the developer goes back and solves this and again shares an app image. So this cycle goes on until the future is full proof. We expect this community to grow more and probably aid in handling the needs of the ever-growing Krita community. I would urge other Krita applications in KD4 to host this type of community with the help of this whole software, like maybe other Krita applications like KD and like etc. can have their own discourse community. It helps in getting in touch with the users like in addition to the traditional social media and other mediums. This is a great space. Lastly, an advice I would give to anybody willing to host such site is that the patient while moderating the heated debates draft a COC right from the start or if you are hosting on the KD infrastructure, then it is very important you are bound by the PDECOC. Use a VPS provider which can give you a flexibility in increasing the storage space when required. For example, now we are experiencing some storage problems. So yeah, that helps a lot. I think I finished my slide earlier so that I can start earlier so that I have some time to give a demo of the website to all of you guys. Please call back. I am open to questions as well. You can post the questions that the website will give you a demo of the artworks and etc. Okay, so are you doing questions now or do you want to do the demo first? I think I will show the website first and then I will take the questions. Okay, then go ahead. Yeah, can you see the screen? Yes. Okay, so like I said we have the top categories support and advice where people can share questions and each question runs like the other community members answer the question and people can also mark a question as a solution then which can later be like people who Google stuff will be landing here directly due to good SEO etc. And the main highlight of the forum is all the artwork that we have. All these wonderful artworks are in one place and people you have this like button and people are giving feedback to you. So it keeps the user on the forum itself. There is some feedback for the users as well so that they keep coming back on the website and while they are on the website they see the questions and that in turn leads to like most users support for the other users. Yeah, then we had an art contest which was sponsored by Huion. So Tiki and the mascot of the Huion tablet. It was a theme. So there are also developer questions. People who want to like hack on Twitter come and ask questions about how to set up Twitter etc. So it is basically a one-stop place for the community and it finds everything together. So I can take the questions now. I guess we do have some time for it. Yeah, we still have time and we have one question so far and this one comes from Paul. He asked how does it compare how does discourse compare to maintaining a mailing list? Is it more work or less? I have not maintained a mailing list so I can't compare the maintenance burden to a mailing list but feature wise it it it blows mailing list out of the water. So you can't compare it's like comparing apples and oranges. Basically you have the ability to write in markdown format, drag and drop images in your post, have a poll right there in the in the thread. If you have an artwork or a future or UI mock-up you can have a poll which like which one the users like then there are notifications for like likes and everything like it has more user engagement than a mailing list. Mailing list has its space and discourse also can be used as a mailing list. For example I said we have a server for handling the mail part of the discourse so it sends digest and daily mail notifications through mail so that users who are not on the website see the read the mail and come back on the website but there is also a feature called reply by mail. We have not enabled it yet but you can enable it and it will work as though you are using a mailing list so it's two in one kind of a thing. Like you can say that mailing list is a feature of discourse so yeah any other questions? I can't hear you. Of course I have to unmute myself I am a professional after all yeah in the demo you have showed a art contest using this right we do have also those from time to time particularly I think yesterday it was announced that we'll be having another round of for the wallpaper for the default wallpaper for plasma so you think discourse is a good place to to have such a contest. Sure sure you can host like a contest and the category itself gives you features such as you can lock the keep a deadline to the category and lock it up like after which users can't post anything on it and there is also a like feature so that users can like like a post and it gets sorted according to the number of likes links some posts and some posts below. There is also you can also do discussions maybe some some improvements are needed to the for example the wallpaper may need some improvement users can edit the post and add the new image etc so in for the art contest thing it works well and you can definitely put an art contest on such forum yeah okay thank you very much no other questions have popped up so leave it up here thank you very much for the presentation yeah I'm sure we'll be looking into our own discourse in the future if possible thanks yeah thank you okay