New World, an MMORPG game by Amazon Game Studios, have recently shut down their forums and migrated completely to Discord. It has been a complete disaster, including all the forum posts that show up in Google search are now just 404. Reporting bugs is a crap shoot into the void.
Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
91–100 of 355 posts
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#92I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
Of course, yet another way for the new generation of programmers to relearn the hard way the lessons of the older generation, like happens a lot in software.
When I started out, it was pretty clear to me that to solve problems, first read the error message clearly and try understand it, then search the relevant forum or google for someone in the past who experienced the same error. Finally, if unable to solve, post a message describing the problem clearly and what you have tried to do and still failed.
Well, good luck finding any thread from discord on Google. The chat interface also wants you to post one liner chats without taking the time to properly describe the scenario.
Chat platforms can exist but should not be the official support channels.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#93If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&A forum.
Or they start a subreddit because you only have Discord
So many project subreddits are just dead and sterile. And Discord is a much more engaging place to just shoot the breeze.
TBH a Reddit isn't much of a "threat" unless its a really popular subject and the original forum is really bad.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#94If you ever need to extract important information buried somewhere in a Discord server, I am having luck with Discord History Tracker [1] (browser-only version). It lets you download all messages in a json file, which then you can read with [2] (works offline too).
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#95Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#96I don't know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don't want a forum, they don't want Matrix. It's a matter of knowing your audience. I've been working on ways to better archive support/question threads, and the discord search isn't that terrible.
HN has a particular culture that dislikes social media and due to the nature of these sites, once a culture is established, it attracts more of the same since everyone upvotes the dominant cultural position. Discord is social media, so it's bad, not like the good old days of forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/IRC/whatever. Listen to your users.
My personal fear with Discord is the audience. Discord has a lot of kids and the likelihood of having kids come into your server and troll you or ask low-effort questions is much higher than Slack. But if your users want Discord, then you should use Discord. There's nothing gained by telling your users what to like.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#97Or use both? Why decide so early what works? Launch a discord server and create a dedicated forum and see which one gets most traction.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be a bias too. I really dislike Discord. I'm on too many discords. It's just one of those network effect things that I wish wasn't everywhere. I'm happy with searchable public chat support. Unfortunately, discord seems to be the best way to do this. I think I do want a forum, but I probably wouldn't use it because signing in is too much effort. Maybe if forums had shared profiles and better mobile support, they…
I tried launching a forum, I spent a _lot_ of time setting up Discourse and proper CDN/uploads etc. I didn't go all out, only a few categories based on what was commonly needed (like 5?). I did this _before_ I resorted to Discord as the only point of help. People begrudgingly used it... It got to the point where I was asked "why aren't you using Discord like everyone else in this space?" enough that I asked my power…
Here is the thing. You may be seeing more people seeking help because they are repeating the same questions again. Where as before they found the thread with the answer.
To me this is the biggest drawback for discord over forums.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#99I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip's search function itself leaves much to be desired). hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host. self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure
It's interesting seeing other comments like "take Discord and put more layers on top for knowledge management" rather than researching and finding an objectively way better tool for the job like Zulip.
I can't quite put my finger on why this is the dominant way people think about solutions in tech nowadays, but the impulse to reach for this kind of solution is infiltrating all levels of tech (see: every single "wrapper around LLM to force it to do things we want" startup). It's like that deep learning meme from a few years ago saying "just add layers" except it's webdevs saying "just add endpoints".
It could be useful to have a periodic "open office hours" VoIP meeting perhaps, but that's more an argument for Zulip adding VoIP than for contorting Discord into something it's not suited for.
Re: Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum
#100I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50/month[1]. A bit of an ask for my "failed side projects". [1] https://www.discourse.org/pricing
Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.
I'm appalled by the number of people answering this comment very negatively / quickly dismissing the self hosting option with a hostile tone.
Guys, it was very common for (side-)projects to self host a forum in the 2000s, what changed since then so that many people find this unreasonable? Or are you a vocal minority?
It's not like you have to host a service that needs 5 figures SLA.
I understand that people may not like having to host stuff, but seriously, there's no need to dismiss the option that harshly, calling forums "random shit" and so on.
Now people want it easy and free for everything: git hosting, website, communication tools… you can't have your cake and eat it too forever. It's very unfortunate those investors-infested companies running at loss made us used to this.
It's requiring that everything is free and easy that's an unreasonable stance, not suggesting to self-host or to pay. At some point things need to be sustainable. Even for side projects with limited time available. A community can't be managed if nobody has time for this anyway.
Setting up a forum is not the hard part in handling a community. Moderation is a lot harder.