Today I was thinking how beginners could know the existence of this forum. It seems that at least on ocaml.org, we have no reference to this forum. Here are some suggestions:
Any comments?
Good points, at least for (2) I’ve seen discussions here to the effect that the RWO authors want to use this Discourse site as the main comment system for the new RWO version. So readers will automatically be driven here.
Also, after this discussion, I’ve started planning a few blog posts to get beginners started with OCaml, and I was planning to point to the Discourse.
These posts aren’t likely to have the greatest visibility on their own, but if they were to become a bit popular, they might help bringing the Discourse to new-comers. 
I was thinking about this today. I run a few check and indeed this discuss visibility is very low. It only has a few links pointing to it, most of them come from mailing list archives and Caml Weekly News.
As a result it does not even rank on first page on google for “Ocaml” keyword !!!
Kudos to ocsigen for having a direct link to discuss.ocaml.org. I think it could be a first step if several project adopt the same approach.
I don’t know a great deal about SEO, and it has a bad reputation in programmers community, yet i believe some small steps could help.
We could for instance think about what beginner audience might be interested in, and target that. Probably beginner audience is split in several sub-categories but you see the point. Then we could have some advises for authors/reddit posters/Hacker news/etc and try to link to discuss as well as ocaml.org as much as possible, with the right terms in the link context/anchors.
This way it could improve visibility from referring traffic and increase visibility from google search with target audience.
It seems that RWO has good visibility. Shall we mention this forum in next version of RWO?
That’s quite right, and somehow it is already helping this forum, which is ranking for “real world ocaml” search.
This is just random ideas, and community probably should not bother about it too much. But now marketing is everywhere, even in programming languages…
I’m preparing a pull request for ocaml.org. Nobody moves.
Pull request here: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.org/pull/914
The idea of explicitly pointing people to the discourse in RWO sounds like a good one. I’ll think about what would be a natural place to do that. As was mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the commenting for the book will hopefully end up here as well, which will naturally point people in this direction.
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