Confluent Community’s Forum and Slack
Welcome to Confluent Community, where anyone can join our forum or Slack to ask questions, get help, or discuss all things streaming - from Confluent, real-time streaming technologies, and event-driven architecture, to multi-cloud data systems and Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink®️. Join today to connect with fellow developers and experts around the world.
Before joining these platforms, feel free to read our etiquette guidelines below on this page.
When to use the Forum and when to use Slack
For the best community experience, we recommend you join both Confluent Forum and the Slack channel. Slack provides real-time chat with peers and experts, while the Community Forum is a great place to ask questions, get in-depth answers, and search all existing, previously answered discussions. See below guidelines for when it’s best to use each.
We value the participation of each member and want everyone to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. View our code of conduct, community rules, and etiquette guide, or report misconduct here.
Learn the differences between Confluent Forum and Slack.
Forum Benefits
- Permanence in searchability
- Better for deeper technical issues and long-form articles
- You can win badges and gain trust levels!
Slack Benefits
- Capacity to DM people
- Real-time nature of chat interaction
- Better for short, quick answers from fellow community members
When should you take it to the Forum?
Our Slack has a short message retention period (about 2 weeks), while the Forum lasts forever. So if you’re asking general questions that would benefit other community members over time, it’s worth asking in the Forum instead :) We also encourage you to explore the forum before asking, as it might be already answered there!
When should you take it to Slack?
When you prefer to chat directly with peers and community experts, network, or have a live, real-time discussion regarding a particular issue, Slack is your best option.
Behavior and Manners
All community participants should feel welcome, regardless of their personal background. Please be polite, courteous, and considerate to fellow participants. No offensive comments regarding gender, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion will be tolerated.
We expect all participants to be respectful when communicating with other participants, even when differences of opinion arise. Participants are expected to work together to resolve disagreements constructively and respectfully. Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. Please be patient.
If you are being harassed or notice that someone else is being harassed, please inform our community staff immediately by filling out the Misconduct Report Form.
We expect participants to abide by these rules during all community-related activities and events. Please see our general community code of conduct for more information.
Online Community Etiquette and Best Practices
IMPORTANT: Save conversations that could be useful for you in the future
Messages in this slack space are not permanently kept. We have a 10k message limit, so older messages will be wiped out when that limit is reached. Because our slack community is so active, this usually only takes a couple of weeks to reach. If there is a conversation that you may want to refer back to, please ensure that you save it in your own drive, so that you don’t miss it when it’s gone!
Choose the best channel for your question, idea, or statement
We have lots of channels covering all kinds of topics. Find the right one to ask your questions. You are already in a good number of ‘default’ channels, but there are also a bunch of channels that you can browse too.
Also, do not post the same question in multiple channels (otherwise known as ‘cross-posting’).
Use threads
The community has thousands of posts every single month. Using threads allows users to browse through channels and find solutions. It also allows multiple conversations to happen at once!
- Keep your question to one message so that it doesn’t create multiple threads for one conversation (Shift-Enter creates a new line in your message)
- For any questions with lengthy code segments, please post them as a reply to your original message, this helps keep the feed tidy. It also allows users responding to see everything in one place.
- Replying to a question: Click the thread icon to reply.
- Seen this question answered elsewhere? Link them to that thread
directly, so that the conversation can continue and all interested users can view and contribute to the discussion (and it can be saved, if people want to keep it for future reference). - Interested in a question? You can follow a particular thread without having to actually participate in it (see screenshot below).
Be clear
Ensure your messages are easy to read. For example; use code formatting when posting code snippets.
Think about how to ask your question clearly, whilst providing enough information and context. A precise and well-formed question is much more likely to get an answer (see tips here).
When asking a question, post one message with line breaks (shift-enter) to separate lines, rather than post a set of several messages as a stream of consciousness with each as a separate message. This way people can easily reply to your entire question in context in a thread.
Ask questions so the whole community can see them
No single person is obligated to answer your question. Do not tag people who aren’t part of your conversation already. Our community is lucky to have a large number of experts who frequently answer people’s questions on slack. However, regardless if they are Confluent employees or not, no one is obligated to answer your questions.
In general, keep your questions away from direct message (DM). The whole point of a community is that multiple people can help with, and benefit from a particular conversation. If you have a 1:1 discussion then you are relying on that person to reply directly to you, and other people won’t benefit from seeing the discussion and learning from it.
Support disclaimer
This is a resource for the community to help the community. Whilst there are a number of Confluent employees who are helpful and contribute to discussions, they are solely doing it as community members, themselves. There is never an obligation for any Confluent employee (or employee of any other company, for that matter) to reply to any post or message, despite the space being called the ‘Confluent Community’!
Need help, and you have a support plan with Confluent?
You can head straight to the Confluent Support Portal. You can also access the portal directly, or navigate to it from the Confluent Cloud Console by selecting the Support menu, identified by the help icon in the upper-right, and choosing Support portal.