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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

posthog.com

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Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#171

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

popinman322 wrote: post #119
andrepd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.

I believe they meant "not searchable from an external search engine", which is a serious issue in many people's view (including mine). I would also suggest that it's a problem that chats are not browsable, because if you're new to a particular problem, you may not know what keywords you need to search for. With a forum, there are categories you can browse and usually discover the keywords you need much easier.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#172

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

sholladay wrote: post #106
andrepd wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Not entirely. 3rd-party search engines still can't reach these, thus reducing discoverability.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#173

Post by ryanSrich »

pronik wrote: post #157
ryanSrich wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI. Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.

The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!

The list of things I hate about it is longer than the list of things I like about it. Certainly the workspace selector is miles better. Almost everything else is worse.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#175

Post by watwut »

LorenDB wrote: post #120
watwut wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.

You don't need a phone to do 2FA. You can use a TOTP desktop app or a Yubikey.

I do not want desktop app nor Yubikey either. I do not want to risk loosing account when I loose the stupid key or whatever secret. My use case, which would be participating in low key low risk projects, discussions, bug reports, feature requests or searching through source code does not need any of that.

As would be most people case. So, having discussions in place that requires it is just wrong choice. I do suspect github did that intentionally so that they dont act like free storage place for unpaid projects, so going elsewhere is not even hurting them.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#176

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #55
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model. I would never use it for something professional/business related.

[flagged]

Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it.

But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen.

Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since.

The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly.

Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on.

Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case.

I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free? I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#177

Post by mathgladiator »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #94

It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum. Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?

Why is it insane? I'm thinking of hiring an intern to build a forum for my saas using my platform. I can have fantastic integration and make it open source to educate on my platform.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#178

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

ssivark wrote: post #49
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack. Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work? 2. What is the way around the free plan message limit? 3. What do you use Slack for?

1. Discourse. Might be different for others but I had 0 time to manage the deployment, and upgrades took a lot of time.

2. I used https://www.linen.dev/ but I think there are others. It turn Slack conversations in a searchable static site.

3. Developer community for an open source software product.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#179

Post by mbirth »

kijin wrote: post #59
rtpg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity. I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform. Not perfect for many reasons, but ha…

Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform. Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other…

Tapatalk was/is great to heighten the experience in that regard. But I’m not sure whether it is still supported with recent versions of forum software. Also many admins didn’t like it as people using Tapatalk didn’t produce ad impressions.

Nowadays, forums should support ActivityPub so I can subscribe to threads from e.g. my Lemmy instance.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#180

Post by makeitshine »

PUSH_AX wrote: post #170
makeitshine wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standard in what way? It can't even do partial matches or words with close spelling. It's pretty much exact whole words only or nothing.

Which, is pretty standard..

On what platform? Every single social media app I use has some form of partial matching in the search boxes.
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