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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

#601

Post by sneak »

jrootabega wrote: post #591
sneak wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply don't use services that demand a phone number to use them. It won't get better if we keep caving.

And hope we can find a way to educate the staggering masses of children who are growing up thinking this is normal and good.

One of the best ways we can educate people is not being reachable on these sorts of platforms. Delete your Facebook accounts so you can't be reached on Messenger or WhatsApp or Instagram. Delete your Discord account so you can't be reached on Discord. Delete your Clubhouse account so you can't be reached on Clubhouse.

The choices we make affect those around us.

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

#602

Post by fesc »

Gigachad wrote: post #380
Robotbeat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can’t we just use normal forum software from the 2000s, but with security patches?

Because no amount of security patches can fix 00s forum software designed without modern security in mind. And the average user _likes_ Discourse. They don't give two shits that Ctrl + F is hijacked because it does exactly what they want. It finds the text. They don't want excuses like "Oh well it doesn't find that text because you didn't scroll down to load it". They don't want to click through 100 pages of thread.

What kind of security problems are you talking about?

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

#604

Post by black_13 »

Slack is essentially a way for your management to spy on your communications with your coworkers. Lets say you don’t know a subject matter and you wish to ask and you have to ask about tribal knowledge. This is great for those who wish to hold on to it if you work at toxic company. The holder just says „ask the slack channel“. Now everyone knows what you dont know including your management. You know this so you dont use slack instead you figure if its obtainable from Stack Overflow you go that route and just go home and just work unpaid like everyone else. But tribal knowledge is where this breaks down. I worked for company that used a home grown linux arm system where at times you need to be root and you needed to a specific user and the packages were based on the slackware packages. It had grown over many years and had an overlay of git and being split between the us and europe. slack was great was of telling ppl to get lost. The better alternative would be office hours but the company was like all American companies lets trim everything to nothing lets be lean to point of Anorexia and thats ficking slack

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

#605

Post by black_13 »

jrootabega wrote: post #590
EdwardDiego wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and…

Slack is great for the masses to get someone's attention. Not much else. I'm betting most of those requests start with: "Hey, I have a problem, can someone help?" No actual information follows, just minutes idle, waiting for someone to respond. Slack is like a bird's nest. Baby birds chirp loudly, open up their mouths, and hope you'll regurgitate some worms into them.

And a cuckoo bird managers who said „i implemented slack on this project“ then threw out those little birds you mentioned and put his little bird in

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

#606

Post by kitkat_new »

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…

this won't happen on Slack or Matrix though

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

#607

Post by charcircuit »

account42 wrote: post #569
EdwardDiego wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and…

> What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help. For me there is also c) I can browse the content that is already there without signing up. Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.

>Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.

Why not? It's just as easy to join a discord server as to visit a site. If you don't have a Discord account already you can just type something random for your nickname.

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

#608

Post by EleanorKonik »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #365

I prefer forums due to similar reasons, but I found asking questions as a user on Discord more "successful", so to speaking. On a forum, the chance of your question being totally ignored is much, much higher. Some do have some staffs that seem to be obligated to reply, and they will just.. copy and paste some templates. On Discord, even the devs and staffs are not always there to answer questions, there are often eno…

This. I help moderate for the community surrounding Obsidian.md. We have a discourse forum, a subreddit, and a discord. The discord is by far the easiest place to actually get help — and not because the forum isn't active (it is) but because it's real-time and there's always someone around.

Whenever I have to go find a forum for a product I'm using that doesn't have a discord, I have to twiddle my thumbs for a day before maybe getting asked a clarifying question.

Sure, there's a "static knowledge base" but in my experience, most search features suck for figuring out if something has already been asked before, but at least discord doesn't make you feel dumb for not having found the old relevant thing already. Plus, it's a lot harder than it used to be when I was active on jcink boards to actually trawl all the new content (a problem for me because I write the community newsletter every week — consistently the one thing I don't actually read all of is the forum. I'm able to keep up with everything else, including twitter).

I understand the value of threading, but don't underestimate the value of linear, chronological thought, either. As a moderator, there's a lot of emotional relief in being able to be sure that I saw everything, and didn't miss a new comment in a thread I stopped reading a week ago.

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

#609

Post by jrootabega »

black_13 wrote: post #605
jrootabega wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is great for the masses to get someone's attention. Not much else. I'm betting most of those requests start with: "Hey, I have a problem, can someone help?" No actual information follows, just minutes idle, waiting for someone to respond. Slack is like a bird's nest. Baby birds chirp loudly, open up their mouths, and hope you'll regurgitate some worms into them.

And a cuckoo bird managers who said „i implemented slack on this project“ then threw out those little birds you mentioned and put his little bird in

I have often thought of cuckoo bird analogies in this context.

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

#610

Post by adwww »

noneeeed wrote: post #597
adwww wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even for open communities. I'd love an ability to mute annoying sales colleagues boasting about this week's big win, etc. I have no professional reason to communicate with this team, why should my day be interrupted with their whooping and macho sales competitiveness.

Do you not have seperate channels for that sort of thing? We have a channel called "big-wins" where the sales people can flag up new/extended deals. I have it muted but check it out from time to time to see if we've bought in any interesting customers. Channels and channel discipline are the key to keeping Slack manageable. Have lots of channels with specific purposes and people can choose what they care about and ig…

#general. I'd quite like to be able to mute almost all middle management.

Hearing people like 'head of people' or 'release manager' spout inspirational management quotes just makes me cynical and miserable.

I'm far happier with my job and probably also more productive without their input.

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