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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

discord.com

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Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#41

Post by SteveMoody73 »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…

I've run a forum and worked on a couple of others. First one was for lactose intolerance when there was very little information available. Others were technical sites. In that case more information became easily available and in others, it's moved to platforms like facebook and twitter.

I do mourn the loss of these forums as there was a lot of good information, and more importantly some first hand experience in some of the posts. A lot of these things now are view or click driven so they lose the personality. While there are still a lot of good forum sites around and do well, I think the rise of spam posts and increasing work of moderating the smaller sights was too high and eventually killed them off.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#42

Post by drewtato »

capableweb wrote: post #36

Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text" and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be possible? Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled out to everyone, so thinking something…

I think this is a feature for community servers, so make sure you've converted yours to a community.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#43

Post by Buttons840 »

aliqot wrote: post #3

Are they searchable and indexable? What made PHPBB and all that cool was that it'd turn up in search queries. As a hobbyist, this was an incredible wealth of information for me that has mostly dried up with the advent of walled gardens like slack, discord, etc. Some might point at BBS and IRC and say that those were the same, but I'd argue that they had lower volume, and less rich media, and I'd go one further to say…

It's important for a forum to be both externally searchable and internally. A lot of the old forums had internal search tools that really sucked, and external search engines didn't seem to cover everything.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#45

Post by sphars »

capableweb wrote: post #36

Following the guide at https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... it seems I cannot add a "Forum Channel" to my own Discord channel. I only see the types "Text" and "Voice" when trying to add a new channel. Is this something that is rolling out over the next couple of days or should be possible? Seems strange to announce something before it completely rolled out to everyone, so thinking something…

Same here, I imagine they'll roll it out to all servers over the next few days/weeks.

Edit: from the blog post, it's working it's way out and is for Community servers:

> Forum channels are slowly making their way to Community servers starting today — keep an eye out on your own server to see when you’ll be able to create Forum channels! Don’t have Community enabled? Check out what features enabling Community brings to you and your server here.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#46

Post by boredtofears »

whateveracct wrote: post #15
xena wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do it because Discord has a fundamentally better UX. It's bad for long term archival and the like, but it is an earth-shatteringly better UX than with traditional forum engines.

It's not actually that much better. It's mostly chat + sugar (aka good branding and emotes)

Strong disagree. Usability and improved UX isn't sugar.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#47

Post by spankalee »

capableweb wrote: post #39
spankalee wrote: post #28

My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev ) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this. Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a grea…

Just a curious question: Why Discord instead of something like Zulip? I myself use both for different projects, but for OSS I tend to gravitate towards Zulip, and for closed-source ones Discord.

In large part because it seems like just about every other OSS project is on Discord these days, and Discord makes it very easy to see all your servers at once and switch between them seamlessly. We're already seeing more activity even with only some users having migrated so far (it's only been a week for us).

I looked into options a while back, and had also considered Matrix which seemed to fit with open-source a lot better, but it had a relative lack of features and momentum compared to Discord. Zulip seems more like Slack, and since we liked Discord's approach and feature set too, Zulip wasn't that appealing.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#49

Post by shagie »

matkoniecz wrote: post #17
moepstar wrote: post #5

I wonder why information-heavy communities chose "knowledge storage" in the form of Discord. Example: i'm looking to build a PrintNC - they've got a really good Wiki, however with all the options i'm a tiny bit overwhelmed, especially since for newcomers like me, there's so much to wrap my head around... Anyways, if i could look up the answers to my questions very probably someone has asked before on a forum, i would…

Is it possible to setup within two minutes forum that will be hosted for free and has decent interface with minimal ads (to the point that many will not recognize them as ads)? Right now Discord has great usability and many people have Discord accounts.

Does GitHub discussions fill those requirements reasonably? https://docs.github.com/en/discussions

An example of this - https://github.com/nodejs/node/discussions

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