Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

kraktoos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 355 posts

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

#71

Post by csnover »

barkingcat wrote: post #52
spankalee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Right or wrong, it can be a really difficult thing to do when the problem behaviour is not due to malice. You’re taking away a community from someone, and in my experience, usually it’s someone who doesn’t have many other social outlets. It does not feel good to get pleading emails from these sorts of folks, knowing that you have to stand firm and say ‘no’ for the health of the wider community.

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

#72

Post by croes »

spankalee wrote: post #29

This article (and the comments here so far) don't mention Discord Forum Channels which solves the two actual usability/discoverability concerns listed Forum Channels FAQ: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-... Forum Channels are a type of channel that's structured as a more traditional forum. It's similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better. * The to…

I can read forums without joining anything.

That's not possible with Discord.

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

#73

Post by glaucon »

postpawl wrote: post #5
glaucon wrote: post #4

I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects". [1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

Oh, OK, I didn't know that. That does at least suggest that it's on a par with hosting phpBB, or similar, yourself.

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

#74

Post by codetrotter »

nvy wrote: post #3
sysadm1n wrote: post #2

Roll your own, like early and industrious folks in the 2000s did with PhpBB or Invision, or vBulletin if you had the money to fork out for VB.

I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool. I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. O…

I ran phpBB for a while just for myself, partly out of nostalgia for the online forum days.

I even used it for password management, because I was the only user, and I was not exposing it directly to the open internet. Instead, I had it listening only on the Wireguard interface of my computer. That way I could connect to it from all my devices anywhere in the world, while no one else could even attempt to reach it.

However, because I was keeping those passwords on it I did not want to copy the data to any rented computers. And so I was running it from a computer at home without any redundancy.

After a while, the SSD started to malfunction. No fault of phpBB of course. It was an old SSD I had bought several years ago. But because of that I gave up on running phpBB for myself for now.

Maybe when I can afford some new, more reliable hardware and a spot in a data center for hardware that I own, I can one day return to running my own private phpBB instance accessible only to me over Wireguard

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

#75

Post by heavyset_go »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #59
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 shoul…

I feel like it's different on more asynchronous mediums than just chats.

Forums could have thousands of personalities and never really feel dominated by any of them, but IRC channels became dominated by a relatively small percentage of regular users.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

barkingcat wrote: post #52
spankalee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by RHSeeger »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #30
Operyl wrote: post #18

I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.

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…

> There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history

At least part of that is that the search in Discord is horrifyingly bad, and isn't available via search engines.

I don't mine Discord as a place to ask questions / discuss; but it's far less dysfunctional when combined with a wiki.

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

#79

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

Dlang did it right, a mailing list that act like a forum [1] with various instant messaging bots (IRC, Discord, Matrix)

I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2]

[1] - https://forum.dlang.org/

[2] - https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/

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

#80

Post by croes »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #15

Terrible post. 1. This is what the "Ban" feature is for. 2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience. 3. This is what the Discord API is for. There's a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved. 4. See 3.

1. Ban who? The other users just for posting.

3. I think he writes as a user. Do you expect the user to export every discord chat history.

4. See 3.

Post reply on HN