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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

#61

Post by moepstar »

derefr wrote: post #32
tomtheelder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not being able to find things later is, well, a problem for later, so it gets deprioritized vs the problems of now. Who said anything about finding things later? I want a forum because, for niche topics/questions, slow+indexed is the only way to hope anyone will be able to answer my question at all. I can ask a question on a forum and maybe be answered a week later, by someone who's looking through older open threa…

...as well as the tiring dance of having to explain things over and over and...

In an ideal world, if i haven't found an answer from a previous thread on my own, i could be gently nudged into the right direction.

Mind you, i've been around on IRC for a very long time and know how tiring it can get to basically get asked the same question in different form all the time (and "having" to answer it).

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#63

Post by pteraspidomorph »

drewtato wrote: post #42
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.

Begs the question, why is this locked behind community mode? Most of what they add seems to be these days, and while in some cases it makes sense, in this case it does not.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#64

Post by Night_Thastus »

I wish Discord had a better way to organize servers you're in. I'm in somewhere around a hundred, and have no proper way to categorize/sort/tree them. The best you have is top-level groups (which make the icons unreadably tiny) and that just isn't sufficient.

Discord's UI acts like everyone is in all of 5 or so servers and that's it.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#65

Post by emptysea »

I think it’s pretty common for open source projects and even companies to use a combination of Discord and Discourse. Discord entering the forum space makes a lot of sense.

If they can figure out how to make the forums public / exposed to search engines then it could entirely remove the need for Discourse.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#67

Post by Night_Thastus »

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...

I've had the opposite experience. I've been thoroughly impressed with how I can search a word and find all instances of it going back months and months. It can do somewhat fuzzy searching too which is huge.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#68

Post by culturestate »

mjr00 wrote: post #59
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,…

> 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 ".

We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#69

Post by SahAssar »

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.

I think with the amount of internal linking and original content it would start to rank pretty quickly. At least if the scrape algorithm makes any sense at all.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#70

Post by phendrenad2 »

I knew Discord would eventually try to become a forum. Every new communications paradigm tries to become all things to all people. Sadly, Discord will never be as good a forum as vbulletin/xenforo or even phpbb, and it'll lose some of it's focus elsewhere attempting to do so.
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