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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

#581

Post by texasbigdata »

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?

I had happen after a promotion that changed my LinkedIn title to something more prominent.

Still can’t prove what happened but someone ported my number from my carrier to Sprint and it took easily 18 hours to undo it. And it required convincing sprint, which I had no affiliation with, that the original transfer was not intended, and that yes I want to reverse it out.

Crazy painful.

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

#582

Post by ptman »

jeroenhd wrote: post #276
encryptluks2 wrote: post #150

Earlier 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…

Yes, matrix is designed as a distributed database and chat is just one application. Check out https://matrix.to/#/#beyond-chat:matrix.org

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

#583

Post by jrootabega »

masklinn wrote: post #526
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…

> Never ever ever ever give your phone number to Google for verification or authorization. You literally do not have a choice, last time I checked you had to setup SMS 2FA first. Once you’ve done that you can setup a better method and remove the SMS, but you have to remember to do it. > If my antiquated bank that is insured and doesn't really care can understand this, so can you, if you care just a bit. My bank certa…

Even if it looks like you can disable it, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they'll still let you recover access with the phone number if you fail to log in enough times. They want people using their accounts, searching and using other Google $ervices.

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

#584

Post by gsich »

jiggunjer wrote: post #304
gsich wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or SMS. Calls may also work, depending on the modem.

For calls and sms you'd need a client configured for that modem. I think this is what callcenters use?

SMS are easy, you can do that with AT-Commands. Voice calls, I don't know, haven't tested that. ModemManager has support for it though, and for SMS.

https://github.com/freedesktop/ModemManager/blob/master/NEWS

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

#585

Post by EdwardDiego »

account42 wrote: post #569
EdwardDiego wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and…

> What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. For me there is also c) I can browse the content that is already there without signing up. Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.

Oh yes, that's an amazing reason.

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

#586

Post by dusted »

marceldegraaf wrote: post #580
dusted wrote: post #578

Sooo, back when I was growing up, phpbb was the shizzles.. What is the new style of persistent/web forums?

Discourse ( https://www.discourse.org/ ) seems to be used very frequently, at least for open source projects. EDIT: forgot to mention that Discourse is self-hostable, if that's your thing: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...

Nice, thank you! :) I will investigate this. Self hosting is very very much my thing indeed.

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

#587

Post by Pyrodogg »

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 have real anxiety about being locked out from "digital self" someday due to issues like this. Sometimes I really think this just isn't worth it anymore and I'm far too invested in "the Internet".

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

#588

Post by KronisLV »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #563
KronisLV wrote: post #514

So what's everyone's favourite forum software? Which of the many packages out there would actually be suitable to replicate the usability of Slack/Discord, without making all of the messages disappear like in a black hole? 1) Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ Looks pretty modern and also offers managed instances if you'd like, but i can't help but to feel that it's pretty JS heavy and there is perhaps too much wh…

Do yourself a favor and avoid SMF if possible. It "works", but has terrible code quality (prime example [1]) and the addon/module system operates by diffing the original PHP source file and then patching in the needed changes. As you can imagine, this quickly leads to a lot of issues when updating or using multiple addons. [1] https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/blob/release-2.1/So...

Ahh, it seems like they didn't have access to a router and just did everything within a super long procedure as a consequence, i've seen that very same anti-pattern many times and it's always a nightmare to work with and debug. I can easily imagine myself doing something like that 5 years ago: starting small but the project eventually growing in scope and this being the end result.

That said, at least the code is documented in some capacity with comments, which isn't always the case in some projects out there.

As for updating, as more time passes, i become more and more convinced that if you can't find software within a container where bumping versions is as easy as changing the image tag, then you'll run into problems of some sort sooner or later.

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

#589

Post by mhd »

WalterBright wrote: post #272

Vladimir Panteleev wrote the forum software D uses: https://forum.dlang.org/ It's all completely searchable, it works with NNTP (yes!), and I wrote a program: https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver to turn the message database into simple, fast loading static web pages: https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html It has served us well.

I really wish more systems had a NNTP bridge. If we can't have nice things with regular federated Usenet servers, something RSS-like where you could subscribe to different "proprietary" servers would be awesome. For the web interfaces people can do all kinds of things, be Web X.0 etc., as long as the conversation format maps well enough to NNTP.

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

#590

Post by jrootabega »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #473
jedberg wrote: post #70

Oh 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…

What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and…

Slack is great for the masses to get someone's attention. Not much else. I'm betting most of those requests start with:

"Hey, I have a problem, can someone help?"

No actual information follows, just minutes idle, waiting for someone to respond.

Slack is like a bird's nest. Baby birds chirp loudly, open up their mouths, and hope you'll regurgitate some worms into them.

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