Discord, Slack, Gitter all gate messages so much, they are not well indexed but search engines (if indexed at all) and very chaotic when a lot of people are posting.
Please use something like Github discussions.
Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
71–80 of 698 posts
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#72This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop" Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
The only time I tried to use Discord it demanded I send them my government ID.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#73I 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.…
What PII are you putting on a forum? All I can think of is email and password. Your password should be unique to the forum, and I would hardly say that an email address is PII. If you're super worried about email, just use an alias.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#74Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#75As 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]: ht…
Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not documented?
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#76As 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]: ht…
I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client space.
Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server.
As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#77I 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”?
Cool as a cucumber that has been cut off from every single account they have the moment somebody at Google (or an algorithm) doesn't like you. Good luck!
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#78Xenforo is excellent forum software.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#79Earlier 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.
"I don't want that either."
Then use a password manager. Pick your poison.
Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just phone number/sms verification
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#80YES - I hope we see a return to mid-2000s approaches for web applications across the board. I'll take 2008 Google Maps over 2021 Google maps. Heck, I'll take 2008 Google SEARCH over 2021 Google Search. Things have regressed over the past decade.