Live data from Hacker News

Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

101–110 of 698 posts

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#101

I 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.…

> I 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

Why were you putting PIID on web forums? Why weren't you using a unique password?

> I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.

Discord is a nightmare. Someone mentions you in a busy channel, 6 hours ago? Try to find it. Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was mentioned" feature.

You're forced to use a (visible to everyone) unique identifier across every discord server, ripe for doxxing or stalking people. Targeting someone's account is attractive because their single login gets you into every server they're part of.

Their implementation of threading sucks. They rolled it out with little warning to server mods/admins and it caught nearly everyone off guard, with users going hog wild creating threads because it was a way to get something like "joesuckscocks" into the channel list. The icing on the cake was that threads created before the ACLs were rolled out couldn't be removed by server admins and mods, so they had to go around begging users to delete them.

Every server I belong to, I've had to spend a minute or two making sure I disable all the by-default-on notifications because people abuse the shit out of @everyone, @here, etc; some server admins even abuse roles to push a notification to everyone (ie, they'll create a role everyone is added to, and then spam it with mentions.)

Discord has done little to address problems like server raids and trolls targeting LGBTQ/PoC groups, 'rivals' to their favorite streamers, you name it. They've shrugged and said "we don't have the staff to do it", yet they have estimated profits around $130M/year. As a result people have had to add all sorts of bots to deal with the problem, and nobody has any idea what all these bots are doing with all the chat logs people share.

There's so much fragmentation, too. I play a not-very-popular tactical shooter game and the number of servers I've been added to and have to keep track of is crazy because everyone creates their own server.

Oh, and last but not least: tencent has a significant investment in them.

Edit: since I am on dang's naughty list and only allowed to comment five times per day despite having over 500 karma in a month or so, I have to respond via edit: Discord on desktop does not allow for any way to navigate to where you were mentioned in a channel. I've also found the "scroll me back to what I last read" function works poorly or not at all.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to be useful, though.

I agree with the fact that Slack/Discord are terrible for keeping track of things long-term, but I will say that once you've set Discord/Slack up and running, operating it is typically pretty smooth - you've already likely got Slack and Discord running, and you can check it every so often. Granted, things can completely explode, and moderation is still a requirement, but that's true of forums as well. (Although due t…

[deleted]

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#103
post #70

Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…

every time I sign in at asks me to input my university email address

I cancel it then it comes back next time

I'm in my 30s...

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#104
post #70

Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…

sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than verifying identity

Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative other than "impersonate someone else".

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#105
post #70

Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…

I don't think it's really about identification. Binding user accounts to SIM-based phone numbers is an effective way of limiting account creation as it's effectively binding it to a physical token.

I can only guess why Discord wants to do this (fighting scam bots?), but for example for Tinder this is a very effective way of preventing abuse on the huge early discovery boost after signup or long inactivity.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#107
post #62

There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord group, though.

We use Discourse's hosted solution and it's effectively zero maintenance

Why not use a facebook page? Super easy to maintain and some moderation

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#108
post #28

As 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've yet to see a forum software that works as well as vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a voting audience.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#109
post #15

The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire. (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being instanteous is just a convenience ) What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss techni…

If conversation threading were enforced adequately in a Slack/Discord, a bot could watch threads for a heuristic of usefulness and kick off the archival of some form of read-only SEO-happy forum-like store.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#110
My stance on interaction mechanisms "to support developer community":

For any project size:

1. Issue tracker.

2. Mailing list (or similar mechanism) for announcements (not discussions with the users).

For a larger project:

3. Forums

4. IRC/Matrix channel for chatting ... if core developers are chatty enough to sustain this.

For an even larger project:

5. A publicly-editable wiki and/or a Q&A platform

6. Multiple chat channels, mirroring them on different chat platforms

I'm not saying nothing else works, only that this ladder seems to work well on the projects I have encountered.

Post reply on HN