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

661–670 of 698 posts

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

#661

Post by z3t4 »

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…

Phone numbers are tied to your identity. You cant buy a mobile sim card without showing your id and the phone number will be registered to your id.

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

#662

Post by int_19h »

Gigachad wrote: post #380
Robotbeat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t we just use normal forum software from the 2000s, but with security patches?

Because no amount of security patches can fix 00s forum software designed without modern security in mind. And the average user _likes_ Discourse. They don't give two shits that Ctrl + F is hijacked because it does exactly what they want. It finds the text. They don't want excuses like "Oh well it doesn't find that text because you didn't scroll down to load it". They don't want to click through 100 pages of thread.

Does the average user likes Discourse? My anecdotal experience hosting a Discourse forum for non-techies is certainly not indicative of that.

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

#663

Post by int_19h »

Gigachad wrote: post #340
Zababa wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a direct consequence of the non efficient infinite scrolling that they implemented.

Their method seems really efficient to me. It infinitely scrolls, feels like it's actually native, and hijacks the shortcuts to make them work as if it was native. I really like their timeline scrollbar as well which lets you easily move through hundreds of posts very quickly and has become a pattern in many apps like Google Photos and Telegram.

It does not hijack the shortcuts to "work as if it was native", because there's no way to know how the native function works in every browser, in most cases.

Let's look at Ctrl+F again. The standard Chrome search toolbar is search-as-you-type, highlighting occurrences immediately. It also shows the total number of occurences found on the page, and has arrows to navigate to next/previous. It also doesn't auto-hide (and thus lose focus) if you scroll the page.

What does Discourse replace it with? A search toolbar that requires an explicit submission to even start searching - and then, instead of actually scrolling to the occurrence of the search term, it shows a dropdown with snippets of posts in current scope that matched the term, highlighting it much like a search engine would.

So it basically has nothing to do with the native function that it hijacks, other than the broad concept of textual search.

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

#664

Post by GoblinSlayer »

eftychis wrote: post #485
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…

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…

It shouldn't be an immediate problem if it's really 2FA: if the second factor fails, there's still the first factor. The problem is that many systems use phone as single factor.

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

#665

Post by GoblinSlayer »

b3morales wrote: post #652
aikinai wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As noted in the parent, in the given scenario the phone number provides absolutely no improvement in security or verification that the person who enters the phone number is actually the owner of the account. At best, granting Google the benefit of the doubt, it is security theater. So, since it isn't effective for its stated purpose, are there other reasons it could be in place?

It's not security theater, they don't verify whose phone number is provided. Whatever number they get is used to unlock the account.

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

#666

Post by rhizome »

thrashh wrote: post #555
ouid wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it has nothing to do with security and is more about tracking. A similar failure mode with apple is that I essentially need to own two apple products with the same account to accomplish things that should only need one apple product, like making a free download from the app store.

These features came online not long after there were news articles about journalists being hacked. The fact that Google is inconsistent about it is probably due to Google generally not being good in UX and frequently making these kind of mistakes where it seems there are multiple teams doing their own things incompatible with each other.

>probably due to Google generally not being good in UX

You misspelled "product lifecycle management." Google's lack of accomplishments in this department is a testament to their research, innovation, and committment to the disciplines of Six Omega (6ω) process strategies.

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

#667

Post by rhizome »

nucleardog wrote: post #518
sildur wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, gitlab is way better. Github is the Facebook of developers.

Gitlab docs say the absolutely bare minimum of RAM to run it is 4GB. And that's just for gitlab, never mind Postgres. That's something like $70/mo just to host some git repos on a major cloud provider. And if you're talking about the hosted solution... we use that at work. We have what are effectively outages once a week on average. I like the way Gitlab as a company is run and I really want to like it but... I use g…

CVS and Subversion still exist!

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

#668

Post by GoblinSlayer »

glenneroo wrote: post #615
TonyTrapp wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone Just in case you are not aware, you can receive verification SMS on your laptop as well! On Windows 10 there is a built-in app simply called "Messaging" which shows you all the SMS received on that number. I'm sure something different exists for other OSes. This is what I do when asked for a verification number and there is absolutely no wa…

There are laptops with SIM card slots?

It looks like this: https://www.amazon.com/Huawei-E3372h-153-Unlocked-External-A...

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

#669

Post by sudotechie12 »

The benefit of a forum is searchability. Answers from a forum can be indexed in Google SEO which ended up driving a ton of traffic.

I think forums struggle when you're building a product that is changing/evolving quickly. The information becomes dated and can even end up misleading users since workflows, terms, feature implementations are always changing.

The success of a forum or any place where interaction occurs depends on engagement. Is there enough activity? Are people responsive? Is it discoverable? If you're not seeing traffic in your Slack/Discord server, then a forum will most likely not do much better. I also think empty forums feel like a graveyard, so I wouldn't expect my question to get many eyes. If you do go with the forum route, you'll need to seed content.

One thing you can do is run both and see what happens. There are tools now out there that help you see all interactions across your various community channels. I work for a company called commonroom.io that shows you all activity, categorizes it, and enriches the user information, making it easy to see what's going on in your community and quickly segment for reporting or segmentation.

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

#670

Post by zippergz »

geektips wrote: post #435
zippergz wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this problem this week too. I have a secondary Gmail account that is forwarded to my main one. I tried to login to it, they demanded a phone number (even though I do have access to the backup email), and wouldn't let me in because the only number I have is one that's already in use on my main account. I guess now you need one unique fully-functional phone number for ever Google account you have?!

I think you can verify 6 Google accounts with a single number.

Hmm. I'm sure I don't have that many, and it told me I couldn't use that number, but maybe it was a temporary issue. I haven't tried again...
Post reply on HN