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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

#551

Post by switch007 »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #504
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…

What even more sucks that you need to first set up phone 2FA before you can enable TOPT. You can remove the phone number afterwards, but why make it so complicated?

Because they want your phone number

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

#552

Post by e12e »

gizdan wrote: post #222

I just wish people would use a system that's integrated into where the code is. I don't want to have to register for a forum when GitHub has a perfectly good ticketing system (and now discussions), and yet I have to register at another place where my details can be leaked from because who knows the technical capability of this one single person who may or may not have done any security. If it's a company, please have…

> register for a forum when GitHub has a perfectly good ticketing system (and now discussions)

At least if using github for code, enable an option to login with github in the forum software?

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

#553

Post by jraph »

faho wrote: post #547
jraph wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know…

I see, fair point. You convinced me.

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

#554

Post by GreenWatermelon »

wodenokoto wrote: post #550

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…

Discord has threads now.

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

#555

Post by thrashh »

ouid wrote: post #432
thaumasiotes wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the gmail login page, you may notice that they specifically recommend you sign in in incognito mode when using a device that doesn't belong to you. Their expressed policy makes an interesting contrast with their behavioral policy of freaking out and locking you out of your own account if you ever try to sign in on a device they suspect might not belong to you. And of course, they're godawful at recogni…

I imagine it has nothing to do with security and is more about tracking. A similar failure mode with apple is that I essentially need to own two apple products with the same account to accomplish things that should only need one apple product, like making a free download from the app store.

These features came online not long after there were news articles about journalists being hacked.

The fact that Google is inconsistent about it is probably due to Google generally not being good in UX and frequently making these kind of mistakes where it seems there are multiple teams doing their own things incompatible with each other.

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

#556

Post by truly »

The main issue with Discord/Slack is that it is difficult to get up to speed with the context of the discussion. You essentially have to read the entire history, and you might or might not be interested in every topic.

Email is much better, since only a select set of persons receive email on a given topic, making it more likely they are interested in it.

For documentation purposes, Discord and Slack are essentially completely useless, due to poor structuring of the conversations and poor search functionality. Anything with more structure would work much better.

The only case it works well is on small teams that are 100% into solving a particular problem together, and they can context switch every few minutes into the chat.

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

#557

Post by buro9 »

I run forums, I write forum software, I am pro forums.

However I'd also add that it's important how to engage with a forum.

My top tips:

1. Financially fund a forum, but have the enthusiasts run it so it is arms length but official. If you run it, spin it up as a distinct thing so that future independence is possible and easy.

2. Bless it fully, point everything you have at it and have your support staff answer questions, and allow your engineers to go deep on details where they can. Transparency wins, if you can't do it don't run a forum.

3. Have someone else run it... That was #1, but it means "Don't moderate away dissenting voices". You will never have a more vocal and clear line of feedback to help you improve, you might not like it... your job is to either listen and learn, or to explain why you are where you are and not going to do something, etc. People aren't dumb, "for money" is a fine argument, but don't use moderation to silence feedback you don't like.

4. Forums are great for content that ages well, know your audience... it's not only the person you're replying to, it's the 1,000 visitors who will never create an account but found this issue via a search engine.

5. Don't use moderation to silence feedback you don't like! (Also #1 and #3). Don't even use threats of "we're withdrawing support" or "unblessing"... these are your users and customers, listen to them rather than fight against them.

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

#558

Post by 4ggr0 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #550

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…

You can create Threads on Discord since a couple of months[0] Granted, it's not perfect to use in my opinion. But at least the feature exists :)

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-...

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

#559

Post by 4ggr0 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #540
jachee wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moderate (but I’m not admin for) a ~5k member Discord server, and the only tool I know of to move conversations is to tell the users to take it to #other-channel.

There are bots that can do that: https://discordbotlist.com/bots/movebot The official feature is still TBA

I tried adding this bot to my server, Discord gave me an error.

"This bot can't join more servers as it has not been verified or is requesting gateway intents it has not been verified for. Ask the bot's developer about https://dis.gd/bot-verification so you can add it to your server!"

I know that you're probably not the dev, just posting it here for visibility.

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

#560

Post by lloydatkinson »

After a long time spending my free time helping out in the C# discord before leaving due to extreme ego and staff cliques and then more recently the Vue discord and getting nothing but grief in return and zero thanks for the 4 years helping on the Vue discord after a couple of moderators unfortunately became jealous at my message count in comparison to them (yeah, immature as hell), I couldn't agree more.

What a waste of time that was. I, along with practically every other person helping out, would get little to no thanks.

A further frustration is the fact that the same poor questions get asked over and over and over it becomes totally demoralising. They don't google anything.

I would say the vast majority of "programming discord servers" are complete cringefests with people wildly incapable of helping others somehow with roles like "helper" and "moderator". It's exhausting. I think I prefer just talking to friends and spending time on smaller servers now. The above issues and people have worn down my good will and patience. It will take me a while to recharge.

When some 15 year old with a role like "Super Helper ++" starts trying to correct an experienced software developer, and then banning said software developer because they disagreed with them, something is very wrong. Unfortunately such scenarios are incredibly common, believe it or not.

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