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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

691–698 of 698 posts

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

#691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it starts with: "Hello."

I wish it wasn't suicidal to point people to nohello.net in professional contexts.

In cases like this I reply "Hi" in 10 minutes and close, so people see it would be easier to start with actual thing instead.

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

#692
This resonates as true to me - chat software encourages urgency over quality in responses. The archives are mostly unusable because they're so stream-of-consciousness where context is essential to understanding messages.

Forum software is just so difficult to use and manage. It often requires setting up a server from scratch, and take some technical chops to run or manage.

I've wanted asynchronous forum software for my groups - whether professional or personal - for some time. And, I've wanted something that's as easy to set up as a Notion or Slack - meaning no domain tinkering, no custom server, and easy for less-technical folks to use.

So, I'm attempting to build it! My project is called Booklet, and I am trying to make it a better Google Groups - with a focus on asynchronous, threaded conversations alongside a robust member directory. I'm a few months into building in the open, and hope to be ready for some early testers before the end of the year. If you're interested in trying it or following the journey, check it out: https://bookl.et

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

#693
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Like sibling says. This hasn’t worked for months.

I’ve tried looking a bit for others. Most discord bots seem to be for the same few things

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

#694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>That's something like $70/mo just to host some git repos on a major cloud provider. Don't use a major cloud provider. That's $20/mo with Digital Ocean.

Okay, host it wherever you're comfortable, but 4GB of RAM is still an absurd requirement for hosting a few git repos.

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

#695

After a long time spending my free time helping out in the C# discord before leaving due to extreme ego and staff cliques and then more recently the Vue discord and getting nothing but grief in return and zero thanks for the 4 years helping on the Vue discord after a couple of moderators unfortunately became jealous at my message count in comparison to them (yeah, immature as hell), I couldn't agree more. What a wast…

The C# discord became a lot better after lloyd left due to his "extreme ego" lol. "if it seems like it's everyone else, then it's probably you"

This individual targets people online with abuse that were once part of aforementioned server. I hope they get the help they need one day.

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

#696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is one of the greatest fallacies in modern data science. We only know what we can measure. There's no data on the opportunity cost of design decisions.

In other words Discourse only has metrics on people who use Discourse.

I think this is probably why sign-up metrics are so common but those are perverse as well. How much do you set yourself back if you only work for people willing to sign up?

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

#697
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had this happen to me with my Microsoft/Minecraft account. I had migrated my mojang account 2 days ago and today I was told that apparently they "detected some activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" and locked my account. They did not explain what the violation was and apparently it would magically go away if I verified my phone number (which they did not have before). Never doing any buissness…

>"Never doing any buissness with ms again." No github for you then ;)

I was not planning to get a paid account there anyway. And regardless I prefer gitlab (due to the ICE stuff).

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

#698

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…

Wait what? You literally put a sim card into a phone for it to be treated as a cell number? Thats odd and interesting to me how does that work?

> You literally put a sim card into a phone for it to be treated as a cell number?

Well of course -- the SIM is the (as others have pointed out, "currently assigned", yada yada) phone number. So what else would any device with a working SIM slot be treated as, than a cellular device?

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