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Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

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Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#51

Post by eddythompson80 »

Operyl wrote: post #35
eddythompson80 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there” In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings. For the record I…

So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.

Sure, like IRC but with a better interface,

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#52

Post by barkingcat »

spankalee wrote: post #45
PaulHoule wrote: post #27

One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy )

This is a real problem. My project dealt with someone who dominated discussions and frequently responded with outright false information. We tried very hard to work with them, but they wouldn't change, and after asking a lot of other maintainers how they would handle it, and giving many warnings, we eventually banned them despite them not really breaking rules per se. What ultimately convinced us banning was appropri…

What's wrong with banning someone you've asked repeated to change their behaviour while interacting in a space that you host? Nothing!

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#55

Post by sircastor »

It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack…

I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#56

Post by TylerE »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #51
Operyl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.

Sure, like IRC but with a better interface,

And no netsplits/nickserv insanity.

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#57

Post by mushufasa »

I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired).

hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.

self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure

Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

#59

Post by squeaky-clean »

PaulHoule wrote: post #27

One trouble w/ things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who "leans in" and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users. (Full disclosure, I've been that guy )

Doesn't the same thing happen with old school forums? There are some avatars I remember (I don't remember their user names) on certain product's forums who I know I can't trust, and they show up in every third thread I find on Google. At least they never change their avatar, if they did I might fall for their BS again.

Also IMO, on forums that show a user's response count, anyone with several thousand responses should be ignored unless their account is over a decade old. They tend to spend more time on the forums than actually using the thing the forum is based on.

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