Discord is nothing new, chat forums have been around forever, but using it to replace info and help forums is not adequate. It's just chat.
Discord is a black hole for information
351–360 of 396 posts
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using IRC for decades at this point and Discord is, seemingly, a modern, proprietary version of IRC so I assumed I'd feel at home the few times I've been invited to participate on it, but in practice it was an overwhelming, rather unpleasant experience and I never stuck with it. I think the main difference is that on IRC you'd usually be invited to a specific channel and you'd slowly work your way to other…
I'm 38 and on something like 50 discord servers. I'm only really super active on two or three of them though. You don't need to absorb everything on every server and their are plenty of ways to control what notifications you get. I don't think making a vague claim that it's for young people only is useful.
Yeah I'm on lots of servers too.
It's annoying that it can't show the server names down the left... only their icons.
I can't remember what they all are, so I need to slowly hover my mouse over them one-by-one every time I'm trying to find a certain server.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#353Discord never promised, to anyone, it'd be an indexable source of information. Funnily enough, neither are electronic mailing lists. Great effort was required to publish them for search crawlers. Electronic mail is fundamentally private communication. Discord is a chat app for chatting with your buddies, privately. Private conversations? Remember those. The issue here isn't that Discord is bad at its job. The issue i…
The problem with Discord is it fails to provide any way at all to move from chat to forum, or perhaps a better phrase would be "plazas and warrens" https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... . Discord nails the 'fast' part but there's no way for good stuff to 'percolate up' into slower long-term mediums ( https://www.gwern.net/Backstop#internet-community-design ). Usenet had FAQs, IRCs had associ…
I think with most chat mediums it's hard to escalate / archive a chat thread into a post somewhere that could be useful as a support reference for example. And there is nothing in discord preventing people from escalating into associated mailing lists, forms and bug trackers like IRC, it just isn't culturally done, except maybe a few with github issue trackers.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
>a project other people use? they can google answers or use forum search can you give example?
not mine, but forums I frequent: https://users.rust-lang.org/ https://discuss.emberjs.com/ https://github.community/
but what makes the format better other than you dont like discord?
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#355As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful conte…
I'm more likely to go into Github issues or Discussions. If I join your discord, there's no guarantee I'll get an answer. I'm not staring at your Discord for a few hours trying to see if anyone decides to answer the question when they log back in
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Timestamp instead of page number?
The problem with growing content is that either the location changes because you either see newest first or you autos roll down to the latest on entry. Navigation through a time based ToC seems like a compromise but not one I love
Forum pagination locations never change unless a whole bunch of stuff is deleted. Page 0 is always the oldest.
Even with deletion, and traditional pages, you could make pages immutable in several ways. actually creating explicit page objects in the database, saying "page 40 starts at N time and goes until the next page object"
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/ It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
Is composer a problem for shared hosts? Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
I never thought of doing like you said. I've tried composer in a few shared, and it's been a hit or miss.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Discord search is unfortunately garbage in my experience, so it's almost like not having history.
What's your issue with it? I'm surprised how well it works, how you can search for something and quickly jump to the context.
I sometimes search for messages that I definitely said a few weeks ago, and it can't find it. In comparison slack's search is way more reliable.
Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#359Re: Discord is a black hole for information
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience Slack just doesn’t work as well as Discord does, generally speaking. It’s good enough to put up with for work chat, but the bar for the general public is higher.
Slack works better for finding information as bad as it is at that.
How? I look through my discord search settings and it’s pretty straightforward. I search for something a friend posted some months back and found it pretty easy. The only difficult part is knowing which server it’s on.