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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

#51

Post by rtpg »

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.

to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity.

I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform.

Not perfect for many reasons, but having to sign up to random forums to try and interact with support for, like, Circle CI has always felt a bit silly for me.

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

#52

Post by mulmen »

duskwuff wrote: post #27
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.

> publicizing my joined servers to other users You're making this sound a little more dramatic than it is. Discord only makes your membership in a server public to users who are also members of that server (and who could thus see you in its member list).

For now. But you of course have no way to know that. And there’s no architectural reason for this to remain true, if it even is.

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

#53

Post by ssivark »

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.

We could try using vector search to surface better matches, or LLMs to summarize large forum threads, etc.

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

#54

Post by rtpg »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #38
stvsu wrote: post #12

Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!

There's dozens of forum apps available, both classical and endlessly scrolling. Discourse is well-known but suffers from extreme feature creep. Flarum, myBB, NodeBB, Vanilla, … And then there's also closed-source apps.

How is Discourse's customization tooling? phpBB's ability to let ~anyone go in and add random stuff as plugins was really powerful back in the day IMO

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

#55

Post by KennyBlanken »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #26
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…

Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model. I would never use it for something professional/business related.

[flagged]

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

#56

Post by KennyBlanken »

sjfjsjdjwvwvc wrote: post #41
KennyBlanken wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#57

Post by ssivark »

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…

It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.

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

#58

Post by corentin88 »

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.

I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.

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

#59

Post by kijin »

rtpg wrote: post #51
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.

to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity. I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform. Not perfect for many reasons, but ha…

Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform.

Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.

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

#60

Post by rytis »

pocketarc wrote: post #29
wolverine876 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.

I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s. I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it. A real contender for "new forum softwa…

> modern forum stack

Genuinely curious, what would that be?

From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search?

Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?

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