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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

#101

Post by posix86 »

hitekker wrote: post #82
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…

Most internet community rules seem to spawn from a fear of authority. A mutual fear from the rank-and-file and the rulers. Endlessly debating a million little rules is safer than questioning each other's judgement. Authority resolves both those situations efficiently, but it demands a morality: a fair standard applied across all people. A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that stan…

You might be describing how the Bible got created

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

#102

Post by mushufasa »

uoaei wrote: post #99
mushufasa wrote: post #57

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

It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip. I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapp…

Discord has a network effect that Zulip doesn't, meaning a lot of times audiences are there whether creators like it or not.

Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community

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

#103

Post by uoaei »

mushufasa wrote: post #102
uoaei wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip. I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapp…

Discord has a network effect that Zulip doesn't, meaning a lot of times audiences are there whether creators like it or not. Sometimes there is choice though, and it takes choices from many folks to switch a community

If the wrapper is an extremely ergonomic Discord bot (which is probably what the other commenters are imagining or would settle on if they tried to implement it) then it might work but it still seems like a worse solution with a lot of extra overhead compared to software that already does what it's meant to (and crucially, can't do what it isn't meant to).

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

#104

Post by Roark66 »

At least IRC is usually logged.

However, I've noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it's return policy and form linked on the main page/menu. Right along side its terms&conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with "chat with us" things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).

I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because "we're having higher than usual support volume" (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.

So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn't spread everywhere.

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

#105

Post by Gigachad »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #9
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.

phpBB all the way. It gets the job done, and just about every host supports PHP.

How are shared hosts at all relevant these days? For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS that you can install anything on.

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

#106

Post by justsomehnguy »

mooreds wrote: post #32

I wrote about this a while ago for Slack/forums: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 but the points still hold. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29154216 I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/ Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $). Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.

> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/

TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.

Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).

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

#107

Post by kynetic »

0xpgm wrote: post #92
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.

Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software. When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a…

Woah this is an incredibly good point I hadn't even considered before now. After years of finding solutions to problems in obscure threads on forums I'd never have visited otherwise, I had never even considered the fact that the only way to do similar with discord is to not only have an account, but be a member of the specific discord guild, and then search that specific guild for specific keywords.

That's actually mind-blowingly horrifying.

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

#110

Post by hitekker »

posix86 wrote: post #101
hitekker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most internet community rules seem to spawn from a fear of authority. A mutual fear from the rank-and-file and the rulers. Endlessly debating a million little rules is safer than questioning each other's judgement. Authority resolves both those situations efficiently, but it demands a morality: a fair standard applied across all people. A lot of rules seem to be trying to create that standard on paper, when that stan…

You might be describing how the Bible got created

Possibly. I was thinking more about Bay Area tech people who can't handle deep conflicts and outsource morality to their managers. But hey what do you know there is a Bible verse for this: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A15...
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