Agreed. We see about 25% of our traffic come from our forums.
Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
391–400 of 698 posts
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What am I missing? Intense mistrust of google; a desire for the unattainable: true anonymity.
Fair. A bit beyond the scope of the original article, but fair.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#393Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#394I prefer forums due to similar reasons, but I found asking questions as a user on Discord more "successful", so to speaking. On a forum, the chance of your question being totally ignored is much, much higher. Some do have some staffs that seem to be obligated to reply, and they will just.. copy and paste some templates. On Discord, even the devs and staffs are not always there to answer questions, there are often eno…
+1. Also, IMO many users already use Discord for other purposes, so they're more likely to check your project's channel while checking other things. Meanwhile, nobody really goes out of their way to look at a project-specific forum, not until that project build sufficient momentum.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How does that story have anything to do with being evil, by any stretch of the definition? Are you insinuating that Google has this convoluted verification flow to intentionally harm people in some way? Or even to intentionally harm privacy or further business goals at users' expense? Or are you just using "evil" to refer to anything you don't like?
I think that comment refers to Google trying to know more identifiable information about the user: a phone number. Which adds to Google’s collection of private data, susceptible to more profiling and such.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
How does that story have anything to do with being evil, by any stretch of the definition? Are you insinuating that Google has this convoluted verification flow to intentionally harm people in some way? Or even to intentionally harm privacy or further business goals at users' expense? Or are you just using "evil" to refer to anything you don't like?
The outcome is that they hold your email / data hostage while escalating their demands for your personal information. That sounds pretty evil to me.
That may not be what they intend, but that is result, regardless.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They make your project unreachable, now and in the future (archives). You won't be able to trace the history of your project when you will want to do it. That has nothing to do with the software being open source or not, it's a question of whether you have a robust archival system in place. I use open source software for plenty of things but most of it will at some point be lost to the ether because nobody's backing…
> That has nothing to do with the software being open source or not, it's a question of whether you have a robust archival system in place. With Slack, your only option is to pay per user in order to have access to older messages, which is almost certainly going to be cost-prohibitive for most projects. I don't have a source for this, but I believe using a bot that automatically archives conversations elsewhere is ag…
Self-hosting has a cost as well. Not sure why you are comparing a free-tier to a non-free option.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pay $5 via crypto, venmo, whatever to add a similar cost barrier. Make it separate from nitro.
The difference though is that verification through phone numbers relies on money that you've already spent, which is a lot more reasonable for the majority of users. People would still be unhappy if they had to pay 5 bucks if they didn't own a phone.
Its about increasing the cost of spam right? For some money is better than using your phone number, for others, they can continue to use the phone. Neither is exclusive of the other.
I know for some they would definitely choose the $5 over the phone for very good privacy reasons.
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#399Oh 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…
I tried to log into the IRS.gov portal, but it says I can't because I don't have any credit score. (I don't have any credit because I'm an immigrant)
Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
That brings up a good point. If forums are going to work, they need some form of federation that doesn't suck.
I don't know if it exists yet, but I can see ActivityPub (or even Matrix?) be used as a federated method for content sharing by combining the base protocol with some basic grouping and threading. I'm not well-versed in ActivityPub and the systems interacting with it, but I believe Mastodon can do threading at least. I don't think it can do the categories to build a full forum system out of it, though. Matrix is curre…
Cactus Comments [1] is a comment section replacement, but the comments are just posts in a Matrix room - effectively a public Matrix room viewer!
I've thought it'd be cool to expand on this to build a strictly chronological social network - that just interleaves messages from your group chats (or a group chat that only you can post to, which becomes your "feed").
[1]: https://cactus.chat/