Community channels
Contents
We run more than one community channel, and they are not interchangeable. Each one has a job. When a channel tries to do every job, it does none of them well.
Two channels, two jobs
Discord and the forum are our two homes. They work differently on purpose.
Discord is for real-time chat. Conversational and hands-on. It's where people show what they're building, react to each other, and where superfans hang out. The value is in the conversation happening at all – not in it being findable six months later.
The forum is for lasting answers. Asynchronous and searchable. A question, discussion, or article posted there keeps paying out to everyone who finds it afterwards. It should be owned by builders, not staffed by PostHog.
The behavior we see in each channel is channel-shaped, not user-shaped. The same person banters in Discord and writes a careful question in the forum, because that's what each space invites.
Channels we maintain but don't grow (for now)
GitHub. The public workbench – claimed and routed, not staffed. Issues get triaged to an owning team. We don't try to turn it into a discussion venue, and we're not driving community members to contribute PRs or issues right now.
Reddit. A reputation surface, not a home. We show up and reply when needed, but we don't try to move our community there.
Pull support out
Neither Discord nor the forum is a support channel, and the single most valuable thing we can do for both is stop letting support define them.
Being blocked is a support problem. It deserves a support response, and it should be routed as one rather than absorbed into whichever channel it landed in:
This isn't about being unhelpful. It's that a space defined by blocked users never becomes a space where unblocked ones want to hang out. It's also the slowest way to get help because it's not set up for that.
Change the container, not the behavior
We don't get the community we want by asking people to behave differently. We get it by changing what the space invites. Pull, don't push.
If a page invites people to write in, they'll write in. If it invites them to search first, most of them will.
If the only thing a channel is good at is troubleshooting, troubleshooting is what it fills up with.
Prompts beat rules. A weekly "what are you working on?" thread does more than a posting guideline ever will.
For PostHog team members
Joining Discord
- Join at discord.gg/posthog with your usual Discord account.
- Post in #team-builder-relations so we can give you the teammate role.
- Once you have the role, you'll show up as a PostHog teammate in the server.
How to show up
In Discord, be a person, not a support desk. React to things so people know they've been seen. Share what you're working on, and ask what other people are working on.
In the forum, follow the guidelines for answering community questions. Use the moderation tools to escalate to support, delete posts, or flag feedback to the right team.
Route, don't absorb. If something belongs in support or on the roadmap, send it there rather than answering it in-channel.
What we're working on
Community channels are owned by 
Brittany JoinerBrittany Joiner on the
