Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

kraktoos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 355 posts

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

#331

Post by TaylorAlexander »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #254
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…

Totally off topic, but I just got two Xbox Series Controllers working over Bluetooth flawlessly, connected to a Raspberry Pi, using xpadneo driver. Can highly recommend that driver.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am still using my crusty old launch day Xbox One and the original launch day controllers for it. All of the hardware is working great, and somehow I have a lot of those controllers. But that generation of hardware uses their proprietary wireless interface rather than bluetooth. There is a cute little $20 generic dongle you can buy for this, and it works great on for example the raspberry pi I use with steam link. For some reason though the kernel driver did not properly load on my debian system. This is where I encountered the discord based support chat. I did post some info there and got some suggestions, but I really dislike discord for working on software issues. Github Issues works extremely well for me for this.

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

#332

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jhanschoo wrote: post #183
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. Did you try searching for the error message on Discord? If so, what was the experience?

It has been some time so I have no clear recollection. Usually I hate waiting for replies though so I imagine I would have searched if I saw how. I cannot recall how that went.

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

#333

Post by JuanPosadas »

Gigachad wrote: post #105
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For a few dollars a month you get a full linux VPS

For a few dollars a year you get a shared host.

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

#334

Post by TaylorAlexander »

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…

> They might as well choose the platform they themselves prefer.

I guess so, but to me discord seemed a rather awful choice.

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

#335

Post by muzani »

naniwaduni wrote: post #296
yomlica8 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit basically stole all of traditional forums' thunder and removed their weaknesses as the same time. Setting up, maintaining and moderating a forum takes time and money. It takes less of the former and maybe none of the later. And for users creating an account is quick and doesn't even need an email so they can quickly reply even if they just blundered in from google.

Reddit definitely demands an email to register. It's unclear to me whether they verify it (I didn't bother to check), but it's the first thing they ask for.

It's possibly because of abuse from bots and such. It still does a great job of letting you manage anonymous accounts and swapping between them.

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

#336

Post by bsder »

Operyl wrote: post #320
bsder wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your users don't want Discord , in particular. They want something better. Unfortunately, "user login" is an expensive cesspit of failure. Discourse would probably be doing better if they actually ran a login provider rather than outsourcing it all.

Discourse has either integrated logins and OAuth2 third party login. I implemented both. Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.

And what plans do you or your users have for when Discord enshittifies?

As always: nothing.

When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist.

But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new.

And so it goes ...

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

#337

Post by wodenokoto »

KirillPanov wrote: post #201
wodenokoto wrote: post #120

I think there is a culture shift. When I was young all events would be on Facebook. For better or worse that created a source of truth (worse being that obviously we were forcing guests onto a platform that we shouldn't be forcing them on) and a whole structure that kept track of things for you. Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often…

I've noticed this too. Attention spans have shrunk all across society. But it seems worse with the younger folks because they don't remember that it wasn't always like this. I don't think they are affected to a greater degree. It just doesn't seem to occur to them that resisting it might be a worthwhile effort.

I don’t think it’s an attention span issue.

If it was, you’d want the events to be tracked by an app for all invitees.

In my mind we’ve regressed and returned to asking the invited to keep track of where and when, when there was a brief decade where an app did it for you.

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

#338

Post by garfieldnate »

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…

I wonder why GitHub never implemented "does this other existing ticket already cover your issue?" suggestions like StackOverflow. That would probably help in a lot of these situations.

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

#339

Post by rob74 »

garfieldnate wrote: post #338
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…

I wonder why GitHub never implemented "does this other existing ticket already cover your issue?" suggestions like StackOverflow. That would probably help in a lot of these situations.

...instead, they activate the stalebot that deletes "stale" tickets (that may however contain valuable workarounds for a problem) by default.

See also this article that was posted here a few weeks ago: https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/26/stalebot.html

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

#340

Post by Operyl »

bsder wrote: post #336
Operyl wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse has either integrated logins and OAuth2 third party login. I implemented both. Honestly I’m rather enjoying everybody telling me they know my users better than I do. I polled pretty extensively and got a good amount of non power user and power user responses.

And what plans do you or your users have for when Discord enshittifies? As always: nothing. When Discord enshittifies, all your data will go down the drain. Or, if you disappear, all the user data goes down the drain even though Discord will continue to exist. But, hey, logins are easy and nobody needs to learn anything new. And so it goes ...

Please read my other replies, although it is fair to ask me this! Like I have noted, I do have some plans to jump ship if it comes to it. I have the vast majority of my user base on a mailing list for announcements (security related and important administrative, not promotional). If push came to shove I’d use it to make an announcement. I always have a backup for discourse immediately, and I have an archive dump of all threads and chat data from discord. I have a plan to make a simple import script for all “forum” threads in discord to discourse and release that at some point for others to use for their communities.

Do not assume the worst of posters, some of us are just as smart as you I promise, it isn’t fair to assume I had no plans :).

Post reply on HN