So long as we don’t lose sight of its utility as a chat app. I like that projects have that sort of communication channel.
Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
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Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#12[flagged]
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#13Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity's sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#14So long as we don’t lose sight of its utility as a chat app. I like that projects have that sort of communication channel.
Why? I think chat is a terrible way to organize this information. I don’t understand why people so readily accept working in that medium. It is all for the sake of people who don’t care enough to find the proper channels, or worse yet set them up in the first place. Even for small side projects, GitHub issues is just so so so much better than an unorganized chat history. There is no reason besides laziness to not impose at least a minimal structure on your forum/support channels.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#15Terrible 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.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#16Roll 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.
https://flarum.org/ is a nice modern alternative, also free.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#17I'm building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0] [0] - https://shpong.com/shpong
Looks very neat, how feature complete is it?
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#18I 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.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#19I 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
Github Discussions is free
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#20Terrible 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.
plus the main advantage of discord is you can easily knock up a free Q&A bot that answers all the questions people ask because they didnt rtfm or search the forums.