I was talking about needing a solution like this just a second ago. Down from the heavens, descends this. I'll be sure to give it a try!
Send me a message if you have any questions! Happy to help with getting it setup
Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#12While I see the value here, I don't really think most Discord communities are appropriate to be indexed. It breaks the whole cozy web aspect of it. [1] [1] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
Most discord communities that are big enough to get indexed were supposed to be forums anyway, or part of one.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#13Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with? I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#14I was talking about needing a solution like this just a second ago. Down from the heavens, descends this. I'll be sure to give it a try!
Send me a message if you have any questions! Happy to help with getting it setup
This might sound a little bit picky, but from a cursory look around the project, it feels a bit too corporate and platform-ey for my tastes. I'm only interested in two things: generating (ideally static, and seo-friendly) web pages out of a discord forum channel and selfhosting it so we can archive the data ourselves (and won't be bound to content policies of answeroverflow.com). All of the extra bells and whistles with the bot auto-managing channels, analytics, AI and whatever else superfluous and make me sweat a little, as I'll have to comb through the documentation to make sure everything is set up correctly. It's also really a shame to read that selfhosting will be a "Pro" feature. I'll give props for considering users wanting to opt-out, however, and it does at least seem rather simple to set up.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#15While I see the value here, I don't really think most Discord communities are appropriate to be indexed. It breaks the whole cozy web aspect of it. [1] [1] https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
The "cozy web" is out of control these days. A lot of social utility is lost by default because everyone uses Whatsapp and Discord and other such information black holes, places where knowledge goes to die. It's OK if you're using these to chat with your family or friends, but it's kind of... less OK, when every open source project these days, including major programming languages, tells you to join their Slack or Discord for support and learning.
What's happening is that these "communities" demand you to commit first, and deny providing value to passive participants. If that sounds reasonable to some, let me point out that the entire value of the Internet is built on doing the opposite. Wikipedia, Reddit, StackOverflow, everything that you can find through a search engine - those are all resources made available by people and groups that, for various reasons, decided to share knowledge instead of hoarding it, invite passive participation instead of demanding active commitment. The good days of the Internet, the ones people mourn, back before it got fully commercialized? They were built on the sentiment of openly sharing information, giving them "pay it forward" style - not gate-keeping them in webs of trust, and/or demanding people to pay with effort.
Maybe I'm too old, but I hate the "cozy web" with passion.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#16Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with? I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
It makes no sense to index the vast majority of content. You would need to cherry pick really hard among all the noise to find the stuff worth putting online.
Interesting comment. I would think Reddit is similar in terms of content, yet “site:reddit.com ” is common as a general search pattern (pre-blackout)
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Send me a message if you have any questions! Happy to help with getting it setup
This might sound a little bit picky, but from a cursory look around the project, it feels a bit too corporate and platform-ey for my tastes. I'm only interested in two things: generating (ideally static, and seo-friendly) web pages out of a discord forum channel and selfhosting it so we can archive the data ourselves (and won't be bound to content policies of answeroverflow.com). All of the extra bells and whistles w…
Where did you see self hosting is a pro feature? My bad if the website gives that impression. It will be free, the whole codebase is MIT licensed.
For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well for indexing content so now the focus is “what else can we do to improve community support as a whole?”
As for self hosting, if you submit a PR for supporting it I’d be happy to get that merged but it’s not really a priority at the moment. The codebase is setup to be pretty easy to make a self hosted version though.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might sound a little bit picky, but from a cursory look around the project, it feels a bit too corporate and platform-ey for my tastes. I'm only interested in two things: generating (ideally static, and seo-friendly) web pages out of a discord forum channel and selfhosting it so we can archive the data ourselves (and won't be bound to content policies of answeroverflow.com). All of the extra bells and whistles w…
Where did you see self hosting is a pro feature? My bad if the website gives that impression. It will be free, the whole codebase is MIT licensed. For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well…
Haha, that's fair. I'll consider trying to set it up myself and see how it goes.
I got the idea that it was a pro feature out of the roadmap list on the website, where it's listed as "coming soon", and "pro" is only mentioned when you click on the waitlist join link. If it means custom domains, it might be better off being listed as "custom domains" or something similar. That's how it's called on google apps and such. It also doesn't help that the roadmap on the website doesn't match the one on the github page, I thought the roadmap features on the github page might be pro features as well.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#19Genuine question: I love Discord, but how on earth is it possible that such functionality was not built-in to begin with? I really don't understand how the need for indexing and search was overlooked.
It's not made for knowledge discovery; it's for gamers. Just look at that busy UI! The content is assumed to have no historical value.
Re: Show HN: Answer Overflow – Indexing Discord content into the web
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where did you see self hosting is a pro feature? My bad if the website gives that impression. It will be free, the whole codebase is MIT licensed. For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well…
Haha, that's fair. I'll consider trying to set it up myself and see how it goes. I got the idea that it was a pro feature out of the roadmap list on the website, where it's listed as "coming soon", and "pro" is only mentioned when you click on the waitlist join link. If it means custom domains, it might be better off being listed as "custom domains" or something similar. That's how it's called on google apps and such…
Ah I see how that’s confusing, sorry about that! I’ll update it in both places to make that clearer