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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

#51

Post by wil421 »

tomtheelder wrote: post #11
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…

It's because people get a really large amount of value out of real (or near-real) time discussion- in many cases more than they get out of archival reference. Forums slow down the interaction time drastically . I'm plenty old enough to remember using forums and subsequently switching to chat, and the ability to work through things and problem solve increased massively. Not being able to find things later is, well, a…

Lots of forums I belong to have tons of already answered very common questions. I’ve joined a few on various topics from BBQing to NAS building. When I was building my NAS every single question I had was answered and they had plenty of stickies on various topics. IRC or discord would have been a fall back to the searchable knowledge of a forum.

The only time I had a question was when I ran into an issue with my UPS freezing up my NAS during power outages. The guy who figure it out could’ve helped faster on discord, still only took one work day of back and forth, but now the next guy can search my topic.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#52

Post by gpm »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #31
jhgg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is talk about allowing public/discoverable servers to be indexed. I don't know when those plans might materialize, but it is very much top of mind for us that there is ever growing knowledge on Discord that isn't accessible via search indexes.

This would be a huge boost in adoption! But how would it rank on google? At first there would be few to any links to content from discord.

That sounds like Google's problem?

I imagine they'd figure it out pretty quickly given the size and popularity of discord.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#53

Post by nemothekid »

whateveracct wrote: post #26
matkoniecz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real. Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.

>Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice.

This is incredibly reductive. You don't use it because "you don't have a choice", you use it because it's the best. If there was another option out there people would use it. There are plenty of choices out there; you go set up a self-hosted phpBB forum; try to maintain a live community on there; and moderate it. Or forget phpBB, try Discourse.

When you say Discord is "Style over substance" you willfully ignore all the downsides about forums that caused people to migrate to Discord/Slack in the first place. We will never have robust forum software as long as people continue to believe that the reason Discord is as popular is it is is because of "VC marketing dollars".

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#55

Post by capableweb »

sphars wrote: post #45
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 t…

Aah, I see. That wasn't at all clear from the "Forum Channels FAQ" linked above. Hopefully someone from Discord sees this + previous posts and includes the requirements for getting forum channels :)

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#56

Post by jhgg »

whateveracct wrote: post #26
matkoniecz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

Seems so - although forums also seem to gravitate towards slightly more self-hosted than Discord. Which is a feature in a way - own the domain and build something real. Discord basically won because of style over substance. I use it plenty because I don't have a choice. But there's nothing actually good about it besides the VC money they poured into going to market and branding.

All the marketing in the world isn't going to move the needle if your product doesn't solve a problem or offer a better experience for users.

To say that the success of discord was due to "pouring VC money into marketing" completely misses the whole "we also spent a lot of time and effort to build a product that was better than what was out there and solved a problem for our users."

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#57

Post by judge2020 »

matkoniecz wrote: post #19
whateveracct wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is there someone offering decent forum hosting for free?

It's not free hosting, but Discourse is quite popular for server admins that want a modern-looking design and it can be easily ran on a big box with docker-compose. If the admins have the cash, discourse does offer hosting[0], with companies like Cloudflare doing so[1].

0: https://www.discourse.org/pricing

1: https://community.cloudflare.com/

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#58

Post by thrdbndndn »

philippejara wrote: post #25

As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be pleasant. [0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600430...

Discord's search definitely has lots of space for improvement, but it's already among the best in all these new IM services.

For example, Telegram has it 10 times worse than Discord. It (roughly) can only search whole words, which basically means it doesn't work with East Asian languages at all (since they don't have spaces between words).

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#59

Post by mjr00 »

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…

On the modern internet, I don't know that being searchable and indexed is always a benefit.

I like the idea of a semi-private space. I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". I can tell a lot of people are the same way just by their behavior; the discussion that happens on Discord is a lot different than anything on, say, HN or Reddit, and certainly Facebook or LinkedIn.

People are a lot more open when they're not worried about being watched. Discussion that happens on public forums usually sounds like everyone's at a job interview getting scrutinized by a potential employer. Which, in fairness, they effectively are.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#60

Post by Kye »

shagie wrote: post #49
matkoniecz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Discord has almost twice the active users and probably not a great deal of overlap with GitHub. And people won't necessarily want to join a community they would join on one with an account made on the other.
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