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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

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

#151

Post by KennyBlanken »

errantspark wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: 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 constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Sa…

Yep, the latest example was my credit card company rejecting my GV number. They easily have the means to see that I've been using it for 10+ years and it's definitely me. Luckily they wanted my business more than they cared about that policy; a CS droid was able to "force" the system to allow it.

Requiring cell phone numbers isn't about anti-spam or 2FA or anything else these services and sites claim.

It's about linking your account to a real person identity, so they can sell that to someone - either live, or later when they get bought out (privacy policies almost always have a clause that allows them to just fork over all your info to whoever buys the company.) "Where was phone number 111-555-1212 at any point in time" is really valuable these days.

SMS for 2FA is less secure because cellular accounts are almost trivial to take over. Carriers never intended for their accounts to become so important to security. These days you can get a second password added to prevent shipping out a new SIM or transferring the account, but that's bypassable by a cellular store on the corner, and poorly implemented (my carrier just adds it as a CUSTOMER VISIBLE AND EDITABLE comment on my profile. WTF?)

If you get someone's unlocked cell phone or a SIM card, you can get access to their email account, their bank and credit cards...damn near everything. How fast can you lock and wipe your phone if it was ripped out of your hands while you were using it in a public place?

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

#152

Post by mortenjorck »

Oddskar wrote: post #52
jcelerier wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. The old vBulletin / PHPbb format felt positively archaic once I got over the shock of how different the basic interactions are.

I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.

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

#153

Post by int_19h »

monksy wrote: post #67
dragontamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can remember? Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists. ------- IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / instant messenger style communications. Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker News are async and slow.

IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has

More importantly, I don't recall IRC ever replacing mailing lists / newsgroups / forums. People generally knew when to use either one appropriately. But these days, it's not uncommon to see a project page straight up saying that if you have any questions, Discord is it.

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

#154

Post by the_pwner224 »

PeterCorless wrote: post #126
dreyfan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://xenforo.com/ — Paradox Interactive uses it for their Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities. edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...

Xenforo is also used for a lot of vehicle-specific forums. It works very well; modern design / features while still having good usability & UX.

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

#155

Post by harha »

jedberg wrote: 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 have a regular phone number in Singapore from a new range of numbers that doesn’t work with many services, even with some government services.

Customer care typically replies by having me first prove that the number is real (by showing a phone bill for getting an verification OTP, think of the irony) and then goes silent because they can’t work around their (human) robot way of thinking when something is unaccounted for in the handbook. (Already shifted a significant portion of my regular spend on groceries to a different provider, but they don’t seem to care)

It’s very frustrating because there are other ways to prove my identity (government even provides a digital Id / signature app) and contacting me.

Services should work with the minimal needed set of properties from the user, discord and slack are very annoying , there’s no need for all this hassle for a small question. I would spend the extra time looking for an alternative product where I can than signing up.

What happened to people caring where users drop off in the funnel?

Losing a user or customer once you’ve spent all that time, effort or money acquiring them by having barriers that don’t have any benefit is just silly.

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

#156

Post by HWR_14 »

Oddskar wrote: post #52
jcelerier wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you ever use forums for asynchronous communication?

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

#158

Post by int_19h »

api wrote: post #125
KennyBlanken wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing a web forum is one click in damn near any web hosting/VPS provider's admin panel...

What about updating it? What happens if you need to move it? What happens if something breaks? Who fixes it? Who monitors it?

You open a support ticket for your web hosting provider, and they do the upgrade/fix.

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

#159

Post by bserge »

badwolf wrote: post #34

This 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...

But they'll register for Discord/Reddit/Slack.

Then presumably complain about the Internet becoming 6 big platforms and a search engine.

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

#160

Post by dreyfan »

simias wrote: post #94
Oddskar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.

I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading. Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.

Curious what you mean by lack of proper threading in phpBB and vBulletin? Are you talking about threading of responses within a broader "Thread" (top-level post entry)

e.g. for a refresher some random vbulletin site: https://forums.devx.com/forumdisplay.php?105-VB-Classic

Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.

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