351–355 of 355 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think sometimes people want communities rather than projects so they go the whole hog with realtime chat: IRC, slack, gitter, discord, etc. Personally I find it a barrier to entry since I have no desire to sit around in a chat room where support is typically blended with shitposting, infighting and drama. At least perhaps consider a middle ground like Discourse or phpBB.
Years ago I looked after a product that the company I'd worked for had acquired which had hundreds of thousands of users. Originally the only avenue for support for that product had been email and that was a problem because we were overrun with emails asking very similar questions, and nobody was responding to them (or had time to). So I started creating blog posts to answer these questions, every time I encountered a new question, and sending them in very short responses to emails. I.e., effectively I created a knowledgebase, but I used a blog because it was the most convenient, and least bureaucratic way of achieving the solution: I won't say it wasn't politically charged, because it definitely pissed a couple of people off, but it got the job done and avoided a zero outcome scenario because I didn't get blocked by these people (one in particular). Sending out these knowledgebase posts started to reduce the support burden because now, of course, we had a search-engine indexed body of content that people could find online.
The point being if you're a small team and you want to minimise the amount of work you need to do to support your project, unless you have a very small and niche community, you're much better off creating resources that are openly available, than in some sort of walled garden, especially if the walled garden means you have to repeat yourself a lot.
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…
A place to report issues and a place to discuss have their use, but any project needs comprehensive documentation and a FAQ page. Yes, many won't read them. But also, many will.
It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far: - Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears - Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community - Developer communities are an outlier here - People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord
I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.