Or something like StackOverflow
ding ding ding!
Only issue with SO is that you (as a company or community) don't have as much control. That may or may not be an issue depending on goals.
Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
51–60 of 698 posts
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#52As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore
In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#53Slack developer here, views are my own.
Prior to Slack I spent many years as an OSS maintainer. I also participated in a Slack channel that discussed my OSS tool's general problem space. That Slack workspace was on the free plan, so messages older than 6 months were memory-holed.
In practice that wasn't too big of an issue. Most developers understood that GitHub was the place for concrete actionable things and long-term discussions, whereas Slack was the place to build relationships and address burning questions quickly. Most developers understood this distinction, though occasionally some would have to be steered towards GitHub when discussing potential bugs that benefitted a proper write-up.
I also worked at a large company that paid for Slack, and it was much more of a long-term memory resource. But as always, whenever I found myself repeatedly searching in the message history for a particular piece of information it always made sense to put it somewhere more defined — in a readme or some other sort of document.
At Slack we have the same basic breakdown — Slack (the software) provides a really useful context for why certain decisions were made, and in a pinch the search feature is great for finding particular nuggets of information, but that doesn't stop us using Quip, GitHub and Jira for tracking longer-lived information.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#54What if you don't need a community? Why does everything have to be a community now?
To that point: slack/discord/irc/whatsapp/pub conversations are a great way to bootstrap a community before you invest in something longer term, if it's needed. Find your like-minded friends and then grow it out.
In fact, I can use my own experience in the mid-2000s as an example: we used existing forums like Gamesradar and rllmuk and neogaf to bootstrap our offshoot forums. Most failed, some succeeded for a while (one was PoopGang IIRC).
Discord servers aren't really so different from that.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#55As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw.
[1]: https://lobste.rs
[2]: https://tade.link
[3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example
[5]: https://lemmy.ml/
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#56I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because: - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.…
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Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#57I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because: - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.…
It’s not extremely hard to set up SSO with the big (tech) providers like GitHub and Google.
Would you be cool with “log in with google”?
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#58I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because: - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.…
If you're putting PII on a random forum, that's your problem, respectfully. I have a specific email account for "random forums" and don't put real info in my account. I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam posts. Y…
what you said
slack doesn't have categories and tags and some search terms in slack bring up too many results without context to be useful
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, Simple fix: add login with google/github. Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great. Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.
I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my google account.
This is what openid (the original) was designed to fix. You get to own your identity and delegate it if desired. But adoption didn't really happen.
But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right way around it for you?
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#60It seems to me Github Discussions does the job for a forum (for open source devs at least). Are there significant advantages to setting up a standalone forum suite like Discourse? I imagine you do have to spend quite a bit of resources to setup and maintain such thing.