Welcome to the new Zettlr forum! After many years, Zettlr finally has a community forum again. We look forward to many enriching discussions among our community and hope that this forum will serve as a vantage point for serving the community. We wish that new users can find help in getting started with Zettlr here, and that existing users can discuss and improve their workflows, tooling, customization, and many other topics revolving around the app.

Please, take this as an invitation to register for an account and start to post questions here. As with the old forum, we have a set of rules that govern interaction here on the forum as well as a set of terms and services that apply to using this forum.

Let me say something about the decision to start up the forum again.

Motivation

Update Dec 16: Read more in-depth on my motivation here.

In the end of 2019, I decided to open a forum for Zettlr for the first time, but I decided to close it down sometime in 2022. The reason was that, back then, I was alone and felt that the burden of maintaining a forum mostly by myself was a daunting task — balancing the need for keeping user data safe, the forum up to date, and developing Zettlr, all while working full-time.

I had hoped that pivoting to GitHub Discussions and Discord would prove fruitful. However, over the past years, I have realized that neither GitHub Discussions nor Discord can adequately replace a forum. GitHub Discussions is mostly an arena where users would ask whether some obviously unwanted behavior constituted a bug, which then was merely an extra-step to opening a bug request. Also, I believe that the layout of GitHub Discussions and the very fact that it's on GitHub — a platform targeted at developers — were detrimental to user engagement, too.

Discord, on the other hand, has become quite active, with many asking questions. However, there are three drawbacks that have become obvious only over the past years. First, users have to verify their phone number to create a Discord account. While I see the need on the side of Discord to implement this check, I also recognize that this is an off-putting factor that has likely kept many users off the platform and thus out of the discussion. Secondly, Discord is mostly aimed at gamers, and this is visible in every corner of the app. I think that the core target group of Zettlr probably is only to a small part familiar with the platform, and many may not feel that this is a good place to ask questions — especially since it is essentially a real-time chat, rather than a forum. This is the third reason why I believe Discord is unsuited for the purposes of a help forum: It becomes borderline impossible to search for already-asked-and-answered questions, adding another part of friction on my side.

With this forum, I hope to mitigate all of these shortcomings. This forum requires only a username and an email, and as long as you aren't a spammer, troll, or bot, I don't really care what your name or phone number is. Also, a forum is easier to search. Since it is public, the Internet Archive is capable of scraping and retaining the contents for the next generation. It does not require everyone to create an account straight away, and instead first find some solutions to problems here.

In the past weeks, I have found that I very often look at forums (or forum-like software) that provides me exactly with what I need to use some piece of software, and I believe that this will also greatly benefit Zettlr, too.

So here we are, again. Welcome to the Zettlr Forum 2.0 — this time running atop the software “Flarum”. It seems to be stable, open, and close to the most popular forum software, Discourse (which I decided not to use, because the data is locked away in a Docker container). Also, they just announced a big beta, so I'm honestly looking forward to any new features coming to the forum in the future.

With that out of the way, welcome, and remember: be excellent to each other!

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