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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

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Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#541

Post by rcarmo »

I could not agree more. Chat is great for coordination and hand-holding when you can spare the cycles for supporting someone directly, but it is a mess for retaining knowledge or documenting past issues/resolutions.

Also, if you’re on a significant timezone offset, you will seldom be able to chat directly anyway. To assume otherwise is somewhat naïve, really.

Most people don’t know GitHub now has Discussions, which is enough of a usable forum to fill in that gap without turning Issues into a pastiche of random arguments, and I hope other dev platforms follow suit to spare me the trouble of spending hours sifting through random Slack/Discord channels asking for very specific things I could just search for.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#542

Post by TonyTrapp »

errantspark wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: post #70

Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…

I constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Sa…

> I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone

Just in case you are not aware, you can receive verification SMS on your laptop as well! On Windows 10 there is a built-in app simply called "Messaging" which shows you all the SMS received on that number. I'm sure something different exists for other OSes.

This is what I do when asked for a verification number and there is absolutely no way around it, I just put the phone number of my laptop's SIM card, that way I don't have to worry too much about spam too because I will never use that number in a real phone.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#544

Post by faho »

casion wrote: post #219
jraph wrote: post #182

Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this. Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable , now and in the future (arch…

I agree mostly, but I'm going to nitpick: not all open source software is "free" in either sense of the term. I think slack and discord are _awful_ support forums (I'm saying this as I manage a 30k user slack and a 15k user discord server). The detriments of these platforms as a support portal stands on its own without any sort of philosophical musings.

> I agree mostly, but I'm going to nitpick: not all open source software is "free" in either sense of the term.

To a first approximation, it is. The opensource definition [0] and the free software one [1] are basically equivalent in outcome, just not in the philosophy behind them.

The license lists are also basically identical, except for the Open Watcom license, where, tbh, someone at the OSI smoked the wrong thing. It's also essentially unused.

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#545

Post by dopamean »

errantspark wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: post #70

Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up: I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity. They told…

I constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Sa…

I had been using my gv number for 9 years for everything as well. I recently ported it out of gv into my mobile carrier since no one knew my carrier number and I was running into too many annoying voip restrictions. So far I don’t miss gv.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#546

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

vanviegen wrote: post #521
eftychis wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never ever ever ever give your phone number to Google for verification or authorization. People just don't understand how easy it is to find someone's phone number and then steal it for long enough to steal e.g. emails. Has happened, will happen etc. Like ssn, phone numbers were never made for this purpose. In fact phone numbers and services (e.g. SMS) are just the front end and are setup to be easy to redirect. We h…

Is it really that easy to steal a phone number and/or intercept SMS messages? Isn't the SIM supposed to hold all sorts of secrets to prevent that?

> Isn't the SIM supposed to hold all sorts of secrets to prevent that?

The process has a security hole by design: SIM cards can get damaged/lost (usually with the phone) and you wouldn't want to lose your number just because you lost your phone or damaged your SIM card by accident. This hole is typically exploited by attackers after they have identified a high-value target. You basically outsource the control over your account to a telco employee.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#547

Post by faho »

jraph wrote: post #479
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because IRC (the prior state-of-the-art) is eminently accessible.

I haven't mentioned IRC, and there are several, more modern, alternatives to IRC. But actually, what is so wrong about IRC? I used to listen a popular webradio which had an IRC channel, people managed to join it no problem, including me as a child. Surely a developer is capable of joining and using IRC with ease? IRC had this interesting property that chat logs were often provided publicly, making them searchable.

>But actually, what is so wrong about IRC?

1. IRC doesn't have any form of persistence or history, requiring the user to run a bouncer 2. IRC doesn't have any formatting - this makes it annoying to talk about code

My experience with IRC is that I joined a channel, asked the question I wanted, waited for a few hours without a response, and turned my computer off. If anyone answered it after that, I have no way of knowing. I don't regularly use IRC and so I don't run a bouncer.

This wasted both my time and the time of people who answered my question after I was gone.

In better chat systems, you can e.g. get an email notification if someone replies to you, allowing you to check back later.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#548

Post by lemoncookiechip »

You can have both. One doesn't invalidate the other.

Forums are no different from instant chat apps like Discord, in that, once you reach a certain size, you'll stop being able to stay on one topic most times, unless you heavily moderate and people hate that more than conversations diverging from topics(speaking from experience in both sides). But they're also great to engage with strangers and a wider amount of people at all times.

The main issue is that one is instant messages and the other has a delay that could be hours or days even, since people aren't going to wait there for someone to reply. The instant messages have a similar problem, in that, it can be hard to follow a conversation once you reach a certain size with comments flooding the chat and comments are mostly lost (there's the log, obviously) unless you're willing to go back and read everything. Discord and similar apps, are great to engage with people who are regulars, since you're already acquainted and can have a more casual and faster conversation.

They both have their positives and negatives and there's no good reason to not use both.

Re: Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

#550

Post by wodenokoto »

I've only used discord as part of a MOOC, and it seems absolutely useless for such a thing.

Since discussions aren't threaded, you can't really keep track of what people are talking about.

I joined slack at work basically the week after they added threaded discussion, and I was very surprised to learn it was a new thing. The whole premise of "slack instead of emails" seems ludicrous without threaded discussions. Like, how did anyone get that idea initially?

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