Reign for open source projects. Open source contributor community.

Reign is the WordPress theme for building a complete community site: social network, courses, member directory, marketplace and job board on one install. An open source project uses the forum, the profiles and the recognition layer.

Jetonomy gives you spaces, threaded discussions, Q and A with accepted answers, voting and reputation, plus a moderation queue, free. BuddyNext supplies member profiles and a feed where people show what they built. WB Gamification adds points, badges, levels and leaderboards earned from real activity, with no paid tier. If you also publish tutorials, Learnomy can host them as courses.

On BuddyPress, the BuddyPress Community Bundle kit is the packaged route and the private community build guide covers access control for maintainers-only areas. The plugins page shows the split, and the forum picker compares options.

A user hits a problem, searches and finds a thread. If not, they ask and tag the area. A maintainer or an experienced user answers, and the author marks the answer accepted. That thread is now a search result for everyone else.

Contributors answer a question on a weekday evening, receive a badge for their tenth accepted answer and see their name on the contributor list. Some graduate to writing documentation or fixing a bug, and the path from user to contributor usually runs through support.

Maintainers check the queue briefly: new questions in their area, threads that suggest a bug and discussions that should become an issue. The rule is that issues track work and the forum handles everything else, which makes the issue tracker readable again.

Maintainers are the scarcest resource in an open source project, and a community that adds to their workload will be switched off. The test of the site is whether it removes repeated questions from their day. Everything else is secondary.

Start with the questions that repeat. Look at the last few months of issues and chat and list the ten questions answered most often. Write each as a thread with an accepted answer, and link to it from the README and the issue template. Maintainers can then answer with a link.

Share the answering. Invite the helpful users you already know to become regular answerers and give them recognition. Jetonomy supports reputation, and WB Gamification can award badges for accepted answers, so the work is visible without asking maintainers to praise people by hand.

Keep moderation light. A short code of conduct, a clear route for reports and one or two moderators who are not the main maintainers will cover most needs. Maintainers should be able to read the forum when they choose, not be on call for it.

Report back on the effect. Once a quarter, note which threads were linked most often and which topics keep recurring. Fix the documentation where the same question appears again and again, because the best answer to a repeated question is a clearer doc.

If your project is a commercial product with paying customers, see the SaaS companies page. If you are mainly a developer audience looking for work, see the tech job board page.

If your project has a handful of users, GitHub Discussions or a chat room is enough for now.