Introducing the Stalwart Support Portal
For most of the project’s life, support has happened wherever the community already was: GitHub Discussions for users following the repository, Discord and Matrix for real-time chat, and Reddit for the wider conversation. That worked well when the project was small. It does not scale.
As Stalwart has grown, we have started receiving hundreds of questions per day across these channels combined. A meaningful share of them have already been answered, sometimes more than once, on a different platform. Tracking four parallel inboxes, deduplicating threads, and making sure no one is left waiting has become a job we can no longer do reliably. The result is the opposite of what a support channel should produce: slower answers, repeated work for the people helping out, and good information buried in chat scrollback where the next person with the same question will never find it.
There is a second reason, raised by users themselves. Several community members have told us they would rather not open a GitHub or Discord account just to ask a question. That is a fair concern, and we agree that asking for help should not require signing up to a third-party platform that the user otherwise has no use for.
What the support portal is
Section titled “What the support portal is”support.stalw.art is a Discourse instance that we operate ourselves. It is hosted at Hetzner in their Germany datacenters and is GDPR-compliant, so the data stays in the EU and under European data protection law.
Discourse is open source, it indexes well, and it is built around the idea that a question and its answer should be permanent and findable. Threads are easy to link to, replies have stable URLs, and the search is good enough that the next user with the same problem has a real chance of finding the existing answer before opening a new topic. Over time, this should turn the portal into a knowledge base that the project actually owns, rather than one scattered across platforms we do not control.
How to sign in
Section titled “How to sign in”Registration is open. You can sign in with the account you already use:
- GitHub
- Discord
Or, if you would rather not link an external account, you can register with any valid email address and a password. The choice is yours, and the experience inside the portal is the same either way.
What happens to the existing channels
Section titled “What happens to the existing channels”GitHub Discussions, Discord, Matrix, and Reddit are not going away. They remain useful for casual chat, announcements, and community conversation, and we will continue to read them. What is changing is where support questions are answered: from now on, the canonical place to ask is support.stalw.art, and that is where our team’s attention will be focused. If you ask a support question on one of the chat channels, expect to be pointed at the portal so that the answer ends up somewhere durable.
Enterprise support
Section titled “Enterprise support”Enterprise customers with priority support will shortly receive an email with instructions for accessing the Priority Support area on the portal. Priority Support tickets stay private to your organization and to our team, with the response-time commitments that come with your subscription. Nothing changes about the support entitlement itself; the portal is simply where it now lives.
Looking forward
Section titled “Looking forward”Thank you to everyone who has helped one another across the old channels over the years. The portal is built on top of that work, and we are looking forward to seeing the conversation continue in a place where it can finally accumulate.