Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 698 posts

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

#531

Post by Thorrez »

ejj28 wrote: post #228
novok wrote: post #189

Earlier 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.

Less unhappy than the current situation where they can't use the site at all.

Also there's precedent of sites doing this. MetaFilter charges $5 to create an account. The bitcoin wiki used to require a fee (in bitcoin)[1]. Something Awful forums have a fee.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/10932

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

#532

Post by heisenbit »

vanviegen wrote: post #521
eftychis wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Is it really that easy to steal a phone number and/or intercept SMS messages? Isn't the SIM supposed to hold all sorts of secrets to prevent that?

It varies by country and the US is not very secure. In a lot of technically more secure countries social engineering and corruption are available for a determined attacker.

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

#533

Post by arp242 »

curun1r wrote: post #439
gizdan wrote: post #222

I just wish people would use a system that's integrated into where the code is. I don't want to have to register for a forum when GitHub has a perfectly good ticketing system (and now discussions), and yet I have to register at another place where my details can be leaked from because who knows the technical capability of this one single person who may or may not have done any security. If it's a company, please have…

I’m a believer in just creating a subreddit. It’s free and easy, many people already have Reddit accounts and it’s a much better forum than the ones that would be self-hosted, including moderation tooling and bot ecosystem. The threaded discussions are also better than what Github offers.

The biggest downside of Reddit is that it's so darn hard to find your own posts. The Reddit search seems completely broken for this, so you rely on DDG/Google etc. but this is far from perfect.

I downloaded all my messages with some script, but that doesn't seem complete either since there are messages missing I'm *sure* I posted on Reddit. It's also not very convenient.

Why do I want to find my own posts? Sometimes I write something at length explaining X, and then a few weeks, months, or even years later someone asks about X again and I want to link my previous detailed post.

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

#534

Post by encryptluks2 »

jakecopp wrote: post #400
jeroenhd wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I really like this idea and great work!

I however am not a fan of relying on JavaScript to use comments. Although I guess there are third party Matrix clients, it seems like they are second-class citizens. If Element and Matrix devs focused on a native client like Telegram, I'd have been recommending Matrix long ago. However, for now IRC, XMPP, Usenet, and mailing lists all seem like better options due to the number of clients and lightweight options.

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

#535

Post by Uberphallus »

politelemon wrote: post #515

> Problem #2: Google can’t see inside chats Search engines seem to do well with Gitter. It's very searchable and the search results lead to the exact timestamp where the discussion happened. I used to find decent support for Apache Airflow this way. A while ago they voted to move to Slack, not for any good reasons but because it was the popular place to be; The Slack setup was invite-only so search engines couldn't i…

I hate Gitter with a passion. It's indexed, but it's chat after all, meaning it's painful to read as there are multiple conversations going on, and whatever you're looking for needs to be extracted from below the noise floor.

It always keeps coming up in my search results but it's absolutely never been useful to me.

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

#536

Post by pferde »

politelemon wrote: post #515

> Problem #2: Google can’t see inside chats Search engines seem to do well with Gitter. It's very searchable and the search results lead to the exact timestamp where the discussion happened. I used to find decent support for Apache Airflow this way. A while ago they voted to move to Slack, not for any good reasons but because it was the popular place to be; The Slack setup was invite-only so search engines couldn't i…

And since Gitter is being turned into a frontend for Matrix, you might as well just have a Matrix room for your project. Or several rooms, grouped together in a "space".

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

#537

Post by coldtea »

aikinai wrote: post #385
thaumasiotes wrote: post #212

Earlier 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?

>Or even to intentionally harm privacy or further business goals at users' expense?

Yes (and obviously).

Google, and other SaaS, have used such dark patterns to collect more user identity data (user profile info is what they ultimately sell - even if sold to advertisers "anonymized", the profile is richer and more worth the more data they have on you).

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

#538

Post by theshrike79 »

arp242 wrote: post #533
curun1r wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a believer in just creating a subreddit. It’s free and easy, many people already have Reddit accounts and it’s a much better forum than the ones that would be self-hosted, including moderation tooling and bot ecosystem. The threaded discussions are also better than what Github offers.

The biggest downside of Reddit is that it's so darn hard to find your own posts. The Reddit search seems completely broken for this, so you rely on DDG/Google etc. but this is far from perfect. I downloaded all my messages with some script, but that doesn't seem complete either since there are messages missing I'm *sure* I posted on Reddit. It's also not very convenient. Why do I want to find my own posts? Sometimes…

IMO if you write "at length" explaining something, copy that to your own blog or at the very least a markdown file on your own computer. Don't rely on a 3rd party site for archival.

And this is where you find your own posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/posts/

And comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/comments/

Searching is crap, but it's Reddit so no news there =)

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

#539

Post by gizdan »

majani wrote: post #516
julianlam wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that subreddits have a very low barrier to entry, but all that comes at a cost. Among other things, one of those costs is that your content is no longer owned by you. Should Reddit decide to take itself private, or make ethically questionable decisions, etc., you are locked in due to the networking effect.

Telegram group/channel can take care of those concerns

Right. Good luck having a conversation as the channel grows. There's been several times where I've joined a channel, asked a question, and my question is gone from the screen before anyone is able to answer. Slack/Discord are way better than Telegram for support.

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

#540

Post by theshrike79 »

jachee wrote: post #508
skinnymuch wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you move conversations/posts from one channel to another? I assumed this had to be built in because of so much meme ish talk of discord mods.

I moderate (but I’m not admin for) a ~5k member Discord server, and the only tool I know of to move conversations is to tell the users to take it to #other-channel.

There are bots that can do that: https://discordbotlist.com/bots/movebot

The official feature is still TBA

Post reply on HN