Community

The easiest way to engage with the community is through the free

Zulip chat platform


All kinds of questions, suggestions and comments are welcome there. We particulary invite new users to join this platform for getting started and quick troubleshooting with question authoring. See also the Quick Zulip how-to below.

Teams and networks

STACK has a very active user base, with a wide variety of colleagues in different roles. Some particular groups are

  1. The STACK Software Development Team;
  2. The STACK International Advisory Board;
  3. The African STACK Community Leadership Team;
  4. The STACK Professionals Network;
  5. The STACK Researchers Network.

Quick Zulip how-to

The Zulip chat is structured in channels, like #community announcements or #question troubleshooting, and threads within these channels. A thread is like a topic in a classical internet forum and should be about a single topic. Zulip allows threads to become resolved once everything has been resolved.

When you first join the Zulip chat, you will be subscribed to a number of default channels but we also invite you to explore other channels. New members are encouraged to give a short self-introduction in #new members and to ask questions in #beginner's questions

To get an overview what's going on, the Recent conversations view shows you a list of topics sorted by recent activity. This list can be filtered in various ways if needed.

Zulip offers various options for notifications and subscriptions, e.g. to set up automatic e-mails if there is activity in a specific channel or thread. You can also follow or mute threads to receive more or less notifications.

You can also send direct messages to other community members if required. Please only use this feature for very specific requests and not for asking questions, as it is much more unlikely that you'll get an answer.