Community at Auth0 begins a new chapter

Gardening 101

Say you want to have a garden. You need to plan it, and plant it. Once that seed gets planted, it’s going to need something else: water. Without that, the seed will struggle to be put in a position to grow. You’re often not going to know how that seed will perform, whether it will yield a lot of fruit, some fruit, or none at all. But you have to give it water - without that it won’t be able to take advantage of the nutrients that are in the soil.

Communities are like gardens. The seed gets planted, often by a company with a fantastic product that people actually want to use, but it needs something else: water. And that’s where the Community Manager comes in.

Managing the (Garden) Community

The responsibility of the Community Manager is to water it and make sure the ground has the nutrients necessary to facilitate growth. You likely won’t know what the outcome will be, but for me that is part of the excitement of community. Nothing happens though unless people participate - and that’s where you come in!

Over the past year or so we’ve gone through a few iterations of what community looks like at Auth0. We have an already vibrant user base, but the challenge has been bringing together that user base in a way which provides opportunities to collaborate and share with other developers in the Identity and Access Management space. In addition, empowering developers seeking to implement Auth0 into their ideas, platforms, and products has always been our motivation in the community. Today we set out meeting that challenge head-on with the unveiling of our new Community.

One might say, “Gee, that looks a lot like what we used to have,” and they’d be correct. We’re moving away from the Q&A-centric AnswerHub and back to the community- and discussion-centric Discourse, upgraded from our previous iteration. This move provides you with opportunities to share what you’re working on, provide feature requests, be notified of upcoming changes, collaborate on events, and receive support directly from our engineers and others in the community. Plus, I’m sure a cat picture or two and a healthy debate about which movie franchise is best will be found.

The current community will go into read-only mode at 8pm EST on March 1, and we should be back up and ready to go with the new platform by 1am EST on March 2. A few items of note as we transition:

• All threads from our previous platform have been moved over to Discourse.
• You’ll notice that thread ownership still remains, but we do ask that you update your profile as not all of the profile information, like avatars, was migrated over. This is also a good opportunity to tell others in the community about you.
• When creating a new topic, you’ll have options to place into a relevant category (like SDKs/Frameworks, Feature Requests, and APIs) and tag the topic with the relevant technology or subject matter (like nodejs, react-native, or roles). Please make use of them as it helps the community better collaborate and find relevant topics.
• Search is much better now and you’ll be prompted upon topic creation to review other threads which may be relevant before creating the new topic.
• A new category was added, Show Your Auth0, where we encourage you to share what you're working on using Auth0 with the rest of the community.

We’re excited to embark on this new direction and look forward to working with you to make Auth0 the identify platform of choice for developers. If you haven't already looked at what Auth0 can do for you, `sign up for a free account to get started.