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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

#211

Post by jansan »

personjerry wrote: post #125

This article looks like it was written by ChatGPT tbh. The arguments are kinda weak, borderline nonsensical. > Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages. Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is "Chaos Discord"? Pretty sure it should says "Chaos - Discord..." It also concedes that…

> Yeah I'm not sure how you're going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&A for your own product.

How so? Just add a tag for your software and tell your users to write questions to Stackoverflow tagged accordingly. Then just put a watch on that tag. Almost zero setup effort. At least that is what I am planning to do. Am I missing something?

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

#212

Post by hunter2_ »

TylerE wrote: post #191
hunter2_ wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. How is Discord more social than the other systems you mentioned? I consider something to be social (social media, social network, etc.) when the primary utility manifests as a function of establishing friends, followers, or whatever similar jargon. That is: if the content presented to me is primarily ge…

Pretty sure you self-wooshed the sarcasm.

Oops, I didn't consider that it was sarcasm. I thought it was mocking the actual average HN perspective (which I'm dissenting from, challenging that average user to explain themself).

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

#213

Post by Arisaka1 »

spankalee wrote: post #45
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 )

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…

It's even worse because whoever has enough free time to lurk and misinform also has the free time to network, so those people won't get necessarily banned but sometimes also be rewarded for being active in the community.

For example there's a bot Discord servers can utilize that awards users with points and levels for nothing more than volume. So you see the colored name and the wall of ranks and the beginner thinks "so they're recognized as an authority around here therefore they're correct".

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

#214

Post by bgribble »

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…

> first read the error message clearly and try understand it,

Derail, but this right here is the key to debugging superpowers. I can't even count the number of times I have amazed juniors with my genius when all I did is read them the error message and ask them under what circumstances could that be true.

A corollary that's just as important is "believe the error messages - they are telling you the literal truth." Hard to believe how often we implicitly disbelieve what the compiler or runtime is telling us.

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

#215

Post by david-gpu »

trvz wrote: post #202
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #167

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On d…

> If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. Have you ever seen the GitHub issues of a halfway popular repo? Once a project is big enough to attract all the low quality users, the same question/problem will be asked/reported over and over again. The maintainers will have to deal with a mess either way. They might as well choose…

But surely answering questions in a public discoverable website reaches more customers than a discord server. The utility provided is not the same.

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

#216

Post by numlock86 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #167

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On d…

> On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps.

> On GitHub, I had to log in and search their thousands of issues to find an error message, only to find it's like three closed issues without any replies and there's one troubleshooting step in chinese.

I don't see how this would be an issue exclusive with Discord rather than the project itself.

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

#217

Post by dotnet00 »

another_story wrote: post #134
BanazirGalbasi wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most common reasons I've seen people use to push back on Discord for support, and the article somewhat brings it up in points 3 and 4. It's not publicly scrapable or anonymously accessible, nor can you archive it and host the information elsewhere if it goes down. Even the forum channels they introduced aren't useful in those regards.

You're allowed bots, so why can't we archive it and make it more easily searchable? Those programming channels with QA style threaded answers would be great to log and make searchable. Is it against Discord's ToS or something?

Bots can only be added by the "server" admins. So archiving is only possible (within the bounds of the ToS) if they care enough to do it.

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

#218

Post by omgmajk »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #106
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. Bon…

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

I've never seen this forum before but this I never expected it to be This bad. Is this some kind of mobile only design paradigm?

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

#219

Post by bartread »

david-gpu wrote: post #215
trvz wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. Have you ever seen the GitHub issues of a halfway popular repo? Once a project is big enough to attract all the low quality users, the same question/problem will be asked/reported over and over again. The maintainers will have to deal with a mess either way. They might as well choose…

But surely answering questions in a public discoverable website reaches more customers than a discord server. The utility provided is not the same.

I can see a trade off here: effectively we're talking about different strategies for reducing the amount of noise.

With GitHub you reduce the noise because people who know how to use Google will find the relevant issue and either contribute to it or find an answer to their question. OTOH everyone else submits issues with no regard to what's already in the issues list.

With Discord you do it by putting an auth wall in the way, which reduces the overall number of people reporting issues and asking for help but, OTOH, everybody who signs up has to ask for help.

Even with that, I'd still prefer GitHub issues, but I can see why some owners would get annoyed with it.

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