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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

#161

Post by mftb »

buro9 wrote: post #134
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.

I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like this https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this http://forum.espruino.com/ Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.i…

Those home pages look pretty good and I like the go, single-exectable approach, but I have to say those docs look like more than I want to hassle with. That said, looks like you might be on a good path.

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

#162

Post by encryptluks2 »

km3r wrote: post #10
dangus wrote: post #7

The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant chunk. Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication. I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge b…

Yeah I could see in a few year Discord/Slack having "chat" channels, voice channels, and "forum" channels. Maybe even add in wikis, or dashboards.

And then people can live in their closed ecosystems where exporting data will be ever more difficult.

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

#163

Post by KennyBlanken »

ejj28 wrote: post #112
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…

Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who's been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone verification stops someone from raiding a server with it enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat…

Discord pushes SMS verification because it a)gives them your identity which is valuable and b)avoids them having to spend money on proper bot/troll mitigation.

VoIP number bans don't accomplish much because there are lots of services that sell real-sim-backed numbers and nowadays there's even eSIMs.

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

#164

Post by judge2020 »

harha wrote: post #155
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 unaccounte…

On the other side of there are bots that impersonate users to send spam or raid servers to overrun moderation and “DoS” the server’s communication. Part of the value proposition of running on Discord or Slack is that they handle offloading a large amount of user verification/spam prevention and moderation tooling. The only one you really have to do is manage rules and have some sort of rotation so at least one moderator is online to handle potential issues.

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

#165

Post by thefedoration »

There are pros & cons of both the forum & chat based communities. Really, it should be determined by the kind of community you're managing and how you want your community members to interact.

Forums are great for debugging & keeping a record of information. If your community works together on projects, chat is the way to go.

I've been curating lists of online communities at the Hive Index. For example, here's my one for programming https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/. In this case, it's about 50/50 split between forum & chat. There are also community platforms experimenting with both forum & chat in the same place, for example circle.so

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

#166

Post by Bayart »

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?

I remember updating and moving VBulletin/IPB/PhpBB being painless 15 years ago.

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

#167

Post by bserge »

ejj28 wrote: post #91

I find googling for existing answers on forums, StackOverflow and Reddit to be great resources when I need to solve a problem, but I really dislike asking questions myself on those kind of platforms. I hate having to write a formal post and then hope someone responds, and then if anyone responds the conversation slowly crawls along post by post. When I need help, I greatly prefer more casual, real time environments l…

So you're actively participating in reducing the amount of useful solutions/answers available for everyone via a search engine.

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

#168

Post by gkop »

aledalgrande wrote: post #71

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.

Isn’t Gitter the one that is fairly well indexed? I wouldn’t lump it in with the others.

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

#169

Post by chillfox »

nirvdrum wrote: post #76
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

I pay for a Reddit subscription, but it’s honestly not a great place for communities.

The communities on Reddit is in my experience always lower quality, more combative and less friendly than communities on discord, discourse and irc.

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

#170

Post by knowledge-clay »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #150
kayodelycaon wrote: post #41

I’ve tried to use forums so many times but I just can’t use them effectively. I don’t want to create accounts and get the notification settings correct so I don’t have to log in to see replies to my messages without getting spammed. The only forum I’ve had success with as a user is Reddit. It isn’t the best forum software in the world but it is miles better than the usual php bulletin boards. Having run a forum befor…

That brings up a good point. If forums are going to work, they need some form of federation that doesn't suck.

Mailing lists!
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