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Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

discord.com

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Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#191

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

mmcdermott wrote: post #107
culturestate wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want people on the internet to be able to drudge up out of context statements I made 10 years ago by googling "site:discord.com ". We’ve had public and private forums - or more often, private sub-forums within larger public forums - forever. I don’t see why you can’t achieve the same separation on Discord, as long as they allow admins to explicitly set indexability(?) for each channel.

That seems reasonable enough technically, but I doubt it would work out that way in practice. Most users would probably treat all Discord channels alike. Those who don't understand the setup would carry on as they always had, many of those who do would find it easier to treat all alike (if for no other reason than that the setting could always change).

Users aren't nearly as stupid as most technical people think they are.

What they are is ignorant, which is not the same thing.

The solution to this problem is to have a very clear indicator on each channel that it's public or private. If you really want to, make it a link that explains what that means.

And you're done.

This is a problem in the same way that copy/paste is a problem. There are well-known solutions, it's just modern software that went to crap, not the users.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#192

Post by datagram »

jmyeet wrote: post #126

Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights: - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious; - Multiple places where you set settings; - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anyw…

> - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anywhere) your identity is linked or can be leaked. Why is there no cohesive model for pseudonymity?

I'm not sure I understand; pseudonymity is the norm on Discord. If you're worried about your identity being leaked, then why not make the pseudonym your username and use your real name as an alias on the few servers where you want it to be known?

Also, I feel like the Quick Switcher (Ctrl/Cmd + K) would alleviate a lot of your problems finding things.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#193

Post by acedTrex »

philippejara wrote: post #25

As long as their search feature continues being so monumentally terrible to the point where you can't even reliably search for specific words(and straight up is unable to search for exact strings[0]) I doubt any kind of forum-like usage will be pleasant. [0]: https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600430...

Discord search? terrible? I've been ludicrously impressed with it over the years. one of my favorite discord features

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#194

Post by acedTrex »

danr4 wrote: post #71
spankalee wrote: post #28

My OSS Project (Lit - at https://lit.dev ) just moved our community chat from Slack to Discord[1] and we couldn't be happier right now. one of the main reasons is the velocity that Discord is moving to add useful community oriented features like this. Assuming this means that Forum Channels are GA now, we're going to us them for our #ask-for-help channel to make them more organized and searchable. I think it's a grea…

The velocity????? Discord’s product has barely changed, they move so slow, but thanks to their market dominance no one has been able to compete

What? discord is iterating so rapidly API lib/bot devs can barely keep up

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#196

Post by acedTrex »

jmyeet wrote: post #126

Is Discord's UI/UX just hideously awful or is this just me? Here are a few highlights: - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious; - Multiple places where you set settings; - You can create an alias for a given server but you have to do this manually. If you forget (or possibly people can see it anyw…

> - You can follow certain channels in another server. Or sometimes you can't. No idea why. Did the owner block it? I have no idea. Sometimes you just don't have the option and there's nothing to tell you why. Overall this is just a bad experience also

Server owners have the option to create announcement channels (different from text channels), you can subscribe to those and the owners of the channel can choose to publish posts. You can tell which channels you can subscribe to by the megaphone instead of the hashtag on the left of the channel name.

> - Icons for the servers you're on. I know what it's called. I don't know the name. Maybe there's a way to search for that? If so, it doesn't appear to be obvious;

What does this mean? if you are looking for a server that you are in by name you can do ctrl-k to open the command palette and search with that

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#197

Post by kmeisthax »

jotm wrote: post #92
kmeisthax wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searchable? Yes. Indexable? Absolutely not. Even public servers are only public to human accounts and only server admins are allowed to invite bots. If you try to scrape Discord with a human account you will be banned.

That's AIcist :D But really, you can't tell human accounts from bots.

Given what I've heard about people getting banned for "self-bots"[0] they seem to err more on the "ban humans that look too bot-like" side of that dilemma.

That being said, while there is some overlap between the two, it's not terribly difficult to detect specific things that bots would want to do, such as scrape a Discord channel, and ban any human accounts that match that profile. A regular human is going to be sending lots of messages and querying message history only rarely; a bot is going to hit the message history API as quickly as the rate limits allow and never send a single message.

Browser fingerprinting could also be used to sus out bots that don't look like a web browser enough. Most bot developers are just making HTTP requests rather than firing up a real browser and attaching to it with WebDriver[1]. Once you do that then you have to play walls-and-ladders[2] with the Discord user-interface team. Oops, your bot just clicked on the fake invisible "please ban me immediately" button that we snuck in right next to the link that opens #general! Oops, we decided to obfuscate all message content so that incoming message JSON is unreadable and outgoing HTML requires having your specific Discord CSS loaded to view it!

Just as there's unlimited ways to disguise a bot as a human, there's also unlimited ways to unmask them or frustrate them while remaining usable for human users. Turing completeness is a harsh mistress, and scrapers only work because people find economic value in being scraped - not that scrapers have an inherent advantage.

[0] Scraping your own Discord client token and using it to authenticate a Discord bot with your own account

[1] Writing a WebExtension content script to inject input into a browser would also work to self-bot

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120117-00/?p=85...

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#198

Post by BrainVirus »

cyral wrote: post #111
BrainVirus wrote: post #88

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…

> but then scrubbed every mention of games There is a gaming area with a list of all the popular gaming discords, and it still shows your gaming status if you are playing a game. Was there anything more to it than that?

Branding. Discord had references to games, gamers and gaming both in their client UI and official website. Placeholder images, Easter eggs and so on. All of that was scrubbed or replaced. Above all, it was a change in whom they consider their real target audience.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#199

Post by jacooper »

BrainVirus wrote: post #88

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…

Honestly, matrix.org is the best alternative.

Its basically the new chat standard.

Re: Forum Channels: A space for organized conversations

#200

Post by jacooper »

judge2020 wrote: post #146
BrainVirus wrote: post #88

I regret ever supporting Discord with Nitro subscription. At the time it seemed user-funded model would make them less dependent on external money. That simply didn't turn out to be the the case. They are obviously yet another wannabe big tech company based in California. Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. They routinely suspend inconvenient servers without giving it a second thought. They've used gaming…

> Their privacy policy (and practices) is awful. Like?

https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/rsxeee/you_should_neve...
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