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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

posthog.com

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Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#41

Post by sjfjsjdjwvwvc »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #34
sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack. Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them. Zulip is also available as a container.

Not in my experience. We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course. That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#42

Post by james_impliu »

muratsu wrote: post #17

I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.

(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas.

In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team!

And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#43

Post by rgj »

james_impliu wrote: post #42
muratsu wrote: post #17

I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.

(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas. In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team! And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to…

Discourse can do that…

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#44

Post by mulmen »

ironmagma wrote: post #14
jmspring wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

I signed up for discord once, was horrified by what I saw, gave up, and never looked back. Everything about identity and “servers” seemed to be the opposite of what I would want.

On the plus side when it inevitably shuts down I will be unaffected.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#45

Post by pratnala »

makeitshine wrote: post #25
whinvik wrote: post #2

Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability. The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.

Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.

It is called Discourse and it is far better.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#46

Post by andersa »

hannofcart wrote: post #20
ironmagma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.

This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#48

Post by mulmen »

hannofcart wrote: post #20
ironmagma wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.

I really don’t trust this behavior.

The difference between an account and an identity was so unclear when I signed up for Discord that I actually just closed the app and gave up on whatever led me there.

The identity and “server” concepts are complete non-starters for me.

Discord is in complete control of what information is shared with other users. There’s no mechanical prevention on them changing this behavior by accident or on purpose.

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#49

Post by ssivark »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #23
ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack. Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work?

2. What is the way around the free plan message limit?

3. What do you use Slack for?

Re: Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

#50

Post by twelvechairs »

ironmagma wrote: post #5

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

Matrix is the obvious option for chat style communication without being beholden to a for profit company
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