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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

#261

Post by julianlam »

natdempk wrote: post #176
julianlam wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game. The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today. We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been car…

Not trying to be mean, but I hit a bug within 3 seconds of using this software and figured I'd report it here: On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunc…

Yep! That's exactly what you're seeing. Nice detective work!

Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week.

Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning

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

#262

Post by jedberg »

chii wrote: post #248
jedberg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand why they do it, and I have no problem with that. My problem is their lack of an alternative. Either have an alternative way for me to verify, or a way for an admin to let me into their channel without verification.

what if that alternative was "worse" than the phone number method? Would you then complain that there's no "easier" alternative? For example, a photo-id as an alternative, which imho is way worse? The problem with presenting an alternative is that if it is "better/easier" than phone number, then it gets exploited by the spam bots. If it's worse than the existing phone number method, then you'd have the exact same com…

I would be totally fine with a photo ID alternative or any other "harder" alternative. At least there is an alternative.

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

#263

Post by saladuh »

smusamashah wrote: post #218
DantesKite wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you’re right. It just doesn’t exist. Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape. The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.

If reddit is open source, can't we use reddit's software as a forum interface? Reddit is a great place for discussion chains which are visible and searchable.

It's not open source though. I think it used to be a while back but it hasn't for a long time. There's also the fact that it's more difficult to modify software and self host it when it was never built fir that, vs something that was (i.e. reddit vs Discourse

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

#264

Post by minhazm »

slimsag wrote: post #227
cjaybo wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because you're nowhere near as "locked-in" to GH. You can move your source code and all of its history to another hosting platform in minutes with git. If you want to move your Slack/Discord community to another platform, there is no easy way to export the content AFAIK.

Not true. Good luck exporting the issues, pull requests, comments, discussions, wikis, etc. and bringing those to another platform. Ironically (and I am not defending them), Slack[0] is the only one of the three that has an official way to export all messages. GitHub does not, unless you're counting their API, but then maybe you want to consider Discord things like this[1]? [0] https://slack.com/help/articles/2016589…

Gitlab can import pretty much all of those things from Github.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

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

#265

Post by vultour »

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…

Are you going to host and maintain the forums for them? I'm not a fan of this particular use case for Discord but it's pretty much the easiest solution to online discussions that's currently available.

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

#266

Post by mindslight »

errantspark wrote: post #239
kreeben wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of "phone" do you actually mean "laptop"? Interfacing with a SIM through a computer seems pretty Futuramaistic to me. How does _that_ work?

My laptop has a built in cellular modem, I find that being connected to the internet constantly is much more useful in a laptop form factor. Phones mostly just try to serve me ads in invasive ways and I'm not here for it.

AFAIK cell modems generally have functionality to send/receive SMSs, and you should be able to do that with the right software.

Completely agree about the walls of commercial surveillance closing in though.

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

#267

Post by interroboink »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #212
errantspark wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just a couple of days ago, I signed in to a gmail account using the correct username and password. Gmail intercepted me and claimed to be worried that they couldn't recognize the device I was using. According to the flow, they wanted me to verify my identity in one of three ways: (1) I could verify the backup email address associated with the account; (2) if unable to do that, I could provide the 2FA code sent to tha…

I had that happen, too — even after successfully receiving the passcode at my recovery address, and entering it, they still denied login. Presumably it's a bug in their system (being generous), but who knows when they'll fix it, if ever?

I currently have an old (infrequently used) gmail account, with a valid recovery email, that I cannot log in to at all.

I don't have (or want) 2FA set up for it.

I tried an incognito window just now, and same problem ):

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

#268

Post by selcuka »

jedberg wrote: post #180
selcuka wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? It still limits bot creation (same number can only be used every 6 months). They don't actually want to know if the number belongs to you. Not much different than using a burner number.

Not everyone has a friend with a phone that doesn't use discord that they can use.

> Not everyone has a friend with a phone that doesn't use discord that they can use.

I believe Discord can afford to ignore those 3 people. Not saying it's convenient for the user, but it's not enough of an issue to encourage Discord to find a solution.

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

#269

Post by mindslight »

kiklion wrote: post #241
ejj28 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed verification method. Something better needs to be created, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same or different flaws.

There’s an ID verification service, at least in the US, where you go to webpage A who wants you to confirm identity, A then redirects you to the service. The service asks a bunch of questions like ‘which of these cars have been related to you’ or ‘which of these addresses belonged to you when you lived in town x?’ That generates a score where the service determines if you are who you say you are and returns the resul…

I've had good luck answering those questions by pretending I know nothing about my own life, and using only information I can find from search engines to answer those questions (eg "What city is LAKE STREET in" - search for each option they give you to see if it has a Lake St). The few times this has failed (probably 70% success rate), they usually just want to send you a letter in the mail instead. I'd much rather wait a few days than end up confirming their surveillance records about me.

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

#270

Post by cmroanirgo »

NilsIRL wrote: post #230
Aeolun wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t exactly look active though? Last release was in 2019.

Are we looking at the same page? Because I see multiple releases in 2021: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases

From the readme:

"The master branch is considered a stable branch capable of being released at any time. Reviewed, stable changes land against master via pull-request."

Last update was jul 13.

It's pretty stable and has been around for a while, so i wouldn't expect a flurry of constant changes (durability and stability are exactly what i look for when self hosting)

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