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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

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

#201

Post by mooreds »

klyrs wrote: post #83
mooreds wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"Throwaway email address" has gotten a lot tougher in the last 10 years. It's not impossible, but many providers demand a phone number or email verification. The ones who don't are used by bots, so those email addresses aren't universally accepted by sites that require email verification.

Fair enough. It depends on your definition of throwaway. I didn't mean totally anonymous, I meant anonymous to who runs the forum (which was, I believe the main objection in the original thread post: I don't want my private data available to the random owner of a forum).

If I set up foobarguy@gmail.com and use email verification because gmail requires me too, gmail can tie foobarguy@gmail.com to another email account.

But if I then use foorbarguy@gmail.com for $RANDOMFORUM, $RANDOMFORUM admin doesn't have any idea who I am. If they spam me or lose my password, I can just abandon foobarguy@gmail.com and set up barbazguy@gmail.com.

What am I missing?

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

#202

Post by Gigachad »

dreyfan wrote: post #121
RHSeeger wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vBulletin is still available, isn't it?

Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.

The last vBullitin site I used was hacked and never came back online. The overhead from running forum software in the age of mass automated abuse is just too great. It's really hard to justify the value of a forum that gets hacked, spammed, costs money, etc when Discord is free and works better for most people.

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

#203

Post by slimsag »

jraph wrote: post #182

Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this. Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable , now and in the future (arch…

I agree with you. At the same time, people use GitHub and see no issue with it.

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

#204

Post by Gigachad »

int_19h wrote: post #132
Zababa wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.

On the desktop, it also hijacks standard browser shortcuts such as Ctrl+F.

It needs to so that it can search on the backend and show you all instances of that search rather than just what the currently loaded DOM elements contain.

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

#205

Post by mjrbrennan »

wvenable wrote: post #21
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…

Who are these people and how do they have time follow synchronous chat on deep technical products all day?

I have the same thought, and not just about technical chats, like who is spending so much time in Discords? Maybe the sibling commenter is right that there are a lot more junior developers now who want instant answers and to move on, rather than longer form forum discussions?

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

#206

Post by Gigachad »

mjrbrennan wrote: post #184
danr4 wrote: 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'm curious why Discourse feels almost as ephemeral as chat to you?

It's probably the UI/design of it. Discourse supports infinite scroll and live updates so it kind of looks like an IM thread with a lot more padding.

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

#207

Post by mooreds »

dmart wrote: post #63

No, please don't. I don't want to make a separate account for a random forum, and I especially don't want to use Discourse. Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much simpler for everyone.

> Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much simpler for everyone.

This is a totally valid choice and I know folks who have gone that path. If you are focused on an OSS project, it is a nobrainer.

From a company standpoint, there are downsides:

  * who owns the user? GitHub
  * who owns the posts you and your community are making? GitHub
  * who owns the links and the other residual benefits from knowledge being shared on the site? GitHub
Weighed against all of that is the fact that there is a tremendous number of developers on GitHub and you are engaging with them where they are. At $CURJOB we try to separate bugs/feature requests (which go to GitHub) from support (which goes to a forum).

Again, it's a tradeoff that anyone trying to foster a developer community should consider.

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

#208

Post by jraph »

slimsag wrote: post #203
jraph wrote: post #182

Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this. Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable , now and in the future (arch…

I agree with you. At the same time, people use GitHub and see no issue with it.

I definitely see an issue with this. Fortunately, at least GitHub is readable without running non-free code and is searchable. I guess you can also participate with one of those alternative clients.

You are still not in control of your community, and I'd like this monopoly to vanish.

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

#209

Post by RNCTX »

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...

This recurring complaint is very "nothing existed before me" millennial-speak.

In fact, no one wanted Reddit outside of Digg users, the vast majority of its traffic are bots and it's a poor substitute for the forums we're talking about.

As for Slack it's basically a rebrand of IRC for corporate Windows users, and Discord is just a testament to the laziness of the author of Ventrilo.

What no one cares about is your opinion on "privacy/data policies" if you think that the whole world being filtered through 4 sites is somehow a net positive in terms of "privacy/data policies."

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

#210

Post by ejj28 »

jraph wrote: post #182

Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this. Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable , now and in the future (arch…

If they want to boycott them, they can go ahead, but I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now and I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC (which in my personal opinion is inferior and a relic of the past) just because they don't like Discord or non-free software.

And it doesn't matter if you can't archive or return to stuff if you're putting important stuff on Github Issues or something and using Discord for the rest.

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