The volume of posts on our blog has continued to increase as our company and community have grown. While all of the content has been awesome, we’ve received many requests for a dedicated channel about security and release announcements.
Today, we’re excited to say we’ve heard you and are adding two specific communication channels to provide clearer communications about security and release announcements. From now on, all release announcements and security alerts will be posted to dedicated Discourse categories instead of on the Chef blog.
This change applies only to downloadable Chef products. No changes are being made to the Hosted Chef notification model – they will continue to be communicated through the status page.
Releases
Going forward release announcements will:
- Be posted to the ‘Chef Release Announcements’ category in Discourse. The Discourse post will contain a list of new features, bug fixes, errata, contributor recognition, etc.
- Have limited users who can post (or reply). The ‘Chef Release Announcements’ category is intended only for Chef-managed projects, but other projects important to the community could also be announced here at moderators’ discretion.
Security Alerts
Going forward security alerts will:
- Be posted to the ‘Chef Security Announcements’ category in Discourse. The Discourse post will contain pertinent information regarding the security event or vulnerability.
- Have limited users who can post (or reply). Posting to the ‘Chef Security Announcements’ category will be restricted to Chef employees. Customers and community members will not have the ability to post new questions or reply to existing posts, but can have follow-up discussions in the Chef category if needed.
Note: In the event of a security-related release, a posting would be made in both the ‘Chef Release Announcements’ and ‘Chef Security Announcements’ categories.
Join the new Discourse lists
There are two ways to consume the posts – either anonymously via RSS feed or by creating an account on Discourse and setting the level of notification for each category as well as tuning email preferences.
A couple things to note:
- By default new user preferences are set to ‘opt in’ for all categories. So by default you will receive notification emails for new posts to all topics. You have the ability to adjust the notification level to what is optimal for you.
- The ability to post to these two categories is restricted to a subset of Chef staff and a few open source project maintainers.
RSS Feeds:
- Chef Release Announcements: https://discourse.chef.io/c/chef-release.rss
- Chef Security Announcements: https://discourse.chef.io/c/chef-security.rss
Configuring Discourse email notifications
Discourse can be configured to act more like a mailing list than a web-based forum if you prefer. After creating an account on Discourse, there are two important settings related to email notifications. To configure these settings, log in to Discourse, click your user profile icon in the top right, and then click the gear icon to configure preferences.
- Under the ‘Email’ heading, the ‘Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)’ option will enable and disable email notifications for new posts.
- Further down under the ‘Categories’ heading, type the category names into `Muted` that you don’t want to receive notifications for. A drop down list provides you with the list of categories. For example, if you just want release and security announcements, type the names of the other categories into this box.
