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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

#31

Post by EdwardDiego »

nonethewiser wrote: post #11

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.

I'm in a few FOSS chats, and I tend to find there's a lot of people who a) need an answer right now and b) need relevant information pried out of them with a crowbar.

And then they'll DM you if you look helpful.

I do appreciate the ability to on interact in real time, compared to mailing lists, but yeah, it tends to attract a certain segment of "whatever it takes to ship" instant gratification devs.

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

#32

Post by mooreds »

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.

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

#33

Post by esafak »

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 )

That's because those platforms provide instant gratification, which attracts people with too much time. Busy, conscientious people are not going to loiter around and repeatedly answer questions that newbies ought to be able to solve on their own with proper tools (i.e., not Discord, Slack or IRC).

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

#35

Post by Operyl »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #30
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.

I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there” In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings. For the record I…

So like IRC? It's not like this was a new problem, we've had this problem in the past. Not everybody liked mailing lists/forums 20 years ago either.

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

#36

Post by EdwardDiego »

nvy wrote: post #3
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.

I know phpbb isn't fashionable these days but if you set it up correctly it can be an amazingly useful tool. I know a guy who uses a private, single-user install of phpbb as his project management software. He's got all the bells and whistles enabled like file uploads, media embeds, and markdown rather than bbcode. One subforum/top-level category per project, and different threads tracking bugs, documentation, etc. O…

I was going to ask how he handles account creation fatigue, but then saw you'd specified single user.

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

#37

Post by World177 »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #28
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 )

It's like that on a FOSS project Slack I'm on. He's not the most... ...personable person, and tbh I think it's a control thing.

I’ve done it in different communities. I don’t think it should be discouraged even though it can seem strange. There’s a person who wants their question answered, and someone who wants to answer it. Why make the sever worse by stopping it?

At times, they might be wrong, but they’re going to realize they’re a problem if they’re always wrong. I do think sometimes incentives seem misaligned, like, I was in an enterprise linux related community, where their income is related to providing support to enterprise customers. In that scenario, it seemed like someone answering questions for free could be problematic to their business.

I don’t know, I don’t think it’s an issue, but I’ve noticed it does seem strange being that person.

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

#38

Post by jrflowers »

MitPitt wrote: post #26
jrflowers wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don’t see why anyone complains about Discord user experience when you can just manually implement basic functionality that the Discord devs didn’t see fit to put in. Why would anybody post on a forum when you could just write a…

What are you talking about? You can't write a custom client and the official one is closed source. Scraping chat history is also against the TOS and get get you blocked.

That’s even better. Why would anyone post on a forum when learning the minutiae of the Discord API and its strict TOS conditions in order to implement functionality that’s broken in the client while avoiding getting banned is an option? It’s a dead simple solution!

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

#39

Post by TylerE »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #30
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.

I found that part of it is the informality of it all. There is no expectation that someone will search the chat history for an answer. When you don’t get an answer, but someone after you does, you can ping on it maybe once more. Those who don’t know the answer might chime in with “hey, I don’t know but look there” In general it has a much lower barrier of entry. With all the good and bad that brings. For the record I…

Some degree of informational amensia is a good thing. We've all hit the "I need to do X, but every page on google tells me how to X in Version N-1, and it doesn't work like that any more".
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