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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

481–490 of 698 posts

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

#482
Forums are awesome for this context. It is most of the time better for privacy as well.

But is it just me or whenever I use Discourse forum, my FB container in Firefox shows it has blocked something which FB uses to track me! This is in multiple discourse forums self hosted and otherwise. So am assuming it is bundled with Discourse. This bugs me the hell out. And Discourse is everywhere too since it has an open source version.

I think Flarum is awesome and maturing! (https://flarum.org/)

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

#483
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 discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop" The only people I see unironically talking about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people that talk about _other people_ supposedly proclaiming the year of the Linux desktop. "This recurring discussion reminds me of a decades-old strawman/dead meme" is not a good way to introduce any straight-faced argument. > Nobody wants to register o…

[deleted]

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

#485

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…

Never ever ever ever give your phone number to Google for verification or authorization. People just don't understand how easy it is to find someone's phone number and then steal it for long enough to steal e.g. emails. Has happened, will happen etc. Like ssn, phone numbers were never made for this purpose. In fact phone numbers and services (e.g. SMS) are just the front end and are setup to be easy to redirect.

We had incidents in the past just because the colleague had given the number to Google and those were corporate accounts.

Every time a service moves to SMS or phone calls for 2FA a cry can be felt across the universe by any security engineer/cryptographer.

If you are a person responsible for this: please don't. If my antiquated bank that is insured and doesn't really care can understand this, so can you, if you care just a bit.

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

#486
Running a Discord "server" is a lot easier than running a forum.

Most paid forums suck (they try hard to not look like forums, which also makes them not usable like forums).

The alternatives are PHP (why are they all PHP?!) open-source dumps you get to install on an Apache node yourself. Or you can get a generic VPS and use tools like softaculous to set up the forum app. Most of these projects don't come with CAPTCHA out of the box, or proper GDPR compliance, or other things you'll want.

That all said, running a forum is DEFINITELY worth it, and your customers will thank you (if not in actual words, in traffic).

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

#487
post #482

Forums are awesome for this context. It is most of the time better for privacy as well. But is it just me or whenever I use Discourse forum, my FB container in Firefox shows it has blocked something which FB uses to track me! This is in multiple discourse forums self hosted and otherwise. So am assuming it is bundled with Discourse. This bugs me the hell out. And Discourse is everywhere too since it has an open sourc…

It may be Facebook login. They don’t have native support for a Facebook pixel or like button to my knowledge and it’s not likely that every discourse forum is manually adding those things - it almost seems antithetical to have a self-hosted forum and be promoting a Facebook group/page.

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

#488
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…

>Just pick something already old-fashioned today but that somehow does not die. Sounds great. Do people have recs here?

Zulip is a good one.

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

#489
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially nice when traveling. I was once asked by a client to do something while I was in other country about 5k km from regular location. Couldn't login to the apps account for this reason (no backup email or phone set). So I didn't do the work. I suspect it's some work-life balance enhancing thing. :D I don't really mind, since it also helps me bash Google services in front of my clients who still use them,…

If you look at the gmail login page, you may notice that they specifically recommend you sign in in incognito mode when using a device that doesn't belong to you. Their expressed policy makes an interesting contrast with their behavioral policy of freaking out and locking you out of your own account if you ever try to sign in on a device they suspect might not belong to you. And of course, they're godawful at recogni…

Can relate on the freak out part. Recently I logged in and generated an app password and it triggered 3 emails per action and to 2 different emails I had as my backup.

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

#490
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if it's open source or aimed at developers in some way, it wasn't built for you . It was built for everyone. It works by everyone helping everyone else use it. Maybe you should get out your credit card and call a commercial software vendor if you want personal attention?

I am a developer and I understand the need for person-power to continue the development of software. But that doesn't mean I have unlimited time (or money) to support the development of all of the software I might engage with. If a new user (including devs using libraries) needs to join real time chat in order to get help with a "I tried X and I thought I'd get Y, but I saw Z instead" type problem then that seems pre…

> Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Just last week I saw a GH issues post in which someone was reporting problems with the HTML output of an MIT licensed email template editor, and someone had replied that he fixed all of the tags/CSS, and then edited his link to a gist with the changes, saying that "his boss told him that was proprietary."

What was surprising was not that a random corporate stooge is both a complete scumbag, and thinks table tags are valuable, but that everyone else in the thread accepted the response without mockery, and no one bothered to look up who that guy worked for and harass the company on social media.

> But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.

I don't think community denotes real time communication. Community is also when Theo was widely praised for dropping all Adaptec drivers from a release version of OpenBSD quite a few years ago, to punish them for giving him a run-around on drivers about 'iNtElLeCtUaL pRoPeRtY' (despite the fact that they were a hardware company). Community is also when people find a hidden daemon in OSX that contacts an NSA / CIA server and post it publicly rather than anonymously to a journalist without the details of the process used to uncover it.

Community was better 15-20 years ago than it is now, by a wide margin. All those "transactional" had people better pick the right jobs with valuable equity, otherwise they'll find themselves short of keeping their kids and grandkids middle-class when everyone else has "transactional'd" themselves all the way to slums and soylent green patrolled by Amazon-branded Ring / Terminator cops.

edit: while I'm at it... the company who is using an MIT licensed email template editor but doesn't think employees should post PRs for it to fix bugs is https://www.linkedin.com/company/flexmr/about/

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