[HN Gopher] Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support deve...
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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
Author : gk1
Score : 259 points
Date : 2021-11-08 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mooreds.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mooreds.com)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Whats the best forum software out there?
| mooreds wrote:
| We use nodebb and find it pretty good from a UX/functionality
| perspective.
| mmcclure wrote:
| I think "less capable moderation tools" is really underselling
| how purposefully useless and nonexistent Slack's moderation tools
| are for open communities. I cannot overstate how terrible Slack
| is in this regard.
|
| To be clear, I really and truly don't fault them for this:
| Slack's always been clear that their focus is on business
| communication, which is a totally different animal when it comes
| to moderation needs. Discord is nearly infinitely better in the
| sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still
| considerably far behind the resources I've got when moderating a
| large Discourse instance.
| mattbk1 wrote:
| I understand your pain. Even simple things like moving posts
| from one channel to another aren't possible for an admin to do
| in Slack, although this has been basic forum functionality
| since...ever?
| techsin101 wrote:
| better idea, an easier way to convert certain conversations into
| forum post.
| mooreds wrote:
| I built a zap to store off slack conversations to google sheets
| (for a slack I joined a few years ago, where I would also
| notify the user I was going to do this).
|
| But yes, an automated solution would be great.
|
| Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am
| writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good
| post than when I just toss out a slack q.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore.
| They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for
| me over the course of my internet life because:
|
| - The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I
| helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that
| codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still,
| stored passwords in plaintext in the database.
|
| - The people who want to have the forum rarely have the tech
| skills to keep up to date on security issues, let alone keep the
| software up to date.
|
| - There are 'forum as a service' sites but they inevitably become
| essentially ad spam platforms that are intolerable to use.
|
| So you can do this, and I might even benefit from it showing up
| in google searches, but I'd actually still be way more likely to
| _use_ discord if I have a question.
|
| Also, I reject the idea that there even is a strict dichotomy
| between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" communication systems.
| If anything, you can always do what's usually described as async
| on a synchronous platform but you can't really do the opposite,
| so they're a superset/subset pair to me.
|
| I don't care if the maintainer takes 2 days to get back to me on
| discord but at least if they do I get a notification and I don't
| have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they
| have or not.
| lategloriousgnu wrote:
| What PII are you putting on a forum? All I can think of is
| email and password. Your password should be unique to the
| forum, and I would hardly say that an email address is PII. If
| you're super worried about email, just use an alias.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you're putting PII on a random forum, that's your problem,
| respectfully. I have a specific email account for "random
| forums" and don't put real info in my account.
|
| I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a
| matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and
| bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that
| I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam
| posts.
|
| You can set up email notifications to thread replies in most
| forum software, so you don't have to actively check if you
| don't want to.
|
| Finally, I reject the notion that you can _effectively_ search
| through years and years of discord or slack chat for topics
| related to your question. The nature of creating a thread
| differentiates itself from a "random" post. Perhaps if
| Discord/Slack's UI prompted a person to label a post
| "conversation starter" or "thread starter" then it would be
| better organized.
| kobieyc wrote:
| what you said
|
| slack doesn't have categories and tags and some search terms
| in slack bring up too many results without context to be
| useful
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums
| anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of
| breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life
|
| Why were you putting PIID on web forums? Why weren't you using
| a unique password?
|
| > I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to
| check if they have or not.
|
| Discord is a nightmare. Someone mentions you in a busy channel,
| 6 hours ago? Try to find it. Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no
| "skip to where I was mentioned" feature.
|
| You're forced to use a (visible to everyone) unique identifier
| across every discord server, ripe for doxxing or stalking
| people. Targeting someone's account is attractive because their
| single login gets you into every server they're part of.
|
| Their implementation of threading sucks. They rolled it out
| with little warning to server mods/admins and it caught nearly
| everyone off guard, with users going hog wild creating threads
| because it was a way to get something like "joesuckscocks" into
| the channel list. The icing on the cake was that threads
| created before the ACLs were rolled out couldn't be removed by
| server admins and mods, so they had to go around begging users
| to delete them.
|
| Every server I belong to, I've had to spend a minute or two
| making sure I disable all the by-default-on notifications
| because people abuse the shit out of @everyone, @here, etc;
| some server admins even abuse roles to push a notification to
| everyone (ie, they'll create a role everyone is added to, and
| then spam it with mentions.)
|
| Discord has done little to address problems like server raids
| and trolls targeting LGBTQ/PoC groups, 'rivals' to their
| favorite streamers, you name it. They've shrugged and said "we
| don't have the staff to do it", yet they have estimated profits
| around $130M/year. As a result people have had to add all sorts
| of bots to deal with the problem, and nobody has any idea what
| all these bots are doing with all the chat logs people share.
|
| There's so much fragmentation, too. I play a not-very-popular
| tactical shooter game and the number of servers I've been added
| to and have to keep track of is crazy because everyone creates
| their own server.
|
| Oh, and last but not least: tencent has a significant
| investment in them.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was
| mentioned" feature.
|
| You'll have to excuse the HN pendantics, but it does. In iOS
| app, for example, open the left draw and there's a navigation
| tab on the bottom. There's a mentions tab that will show you
| a list of mentions (that is replies and pings) and tapping on
| one takes you to that message.
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| It's not extremely hard to set up SSO with the big (tech)
| providers like GitHub and Google.
|
| Would you be cool with "log in with google"?
| MrPatan wrote:
| Cool as a cucumber that has been cut off from every single
| account they have the moment somebody at Google (or an
| algorithm) doesn't like you. Good luck!
| secondcoming wrote:
| What to do when Goog closes your account and won't reinstate
| it?
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I raised this in a comment here a few months ago, so much
| information that would reduce support burdens is buried in slacks
| and discords. It can't be found through Google, it's hard to find
| information in the apps if you do manage to get in and then if
| they aren't paying for the storage it all disappears after a few
| thousand messages anyway. Infuriating.
| lux wrote:
| I loathe Discord for (non-dev but still software-related)
| community management but we tried launching a forum and realized
| users don't care and just want Discord or Slack. It's now in the
| "familiar" zone and registering for a forum sucks. They don't
| care that it's hard to find answers, or any of the other reasons
| listed here, many of which were our motivation for starting a
| forum. We ended up dividing users and now have a dead forum with
| a banner directing people to our Discord :P
| lux wrote:
| I wonder if this is also part of the preference for Discord,
| but all of our most active/longtime users tend to prefer DMing
| us over posting publicly. We should probably discourage that so
| the community seems more active, but it probably lets them feel
| like they can speak more freely.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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 me, "Just use a friend's phone to verify. As long as
| they don't try to verify on Discord in six months it should be
| fine, we won't check again".
|
| Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate
| someone else!
| errantspark wrote:
| 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. Same thing with
| having a credit score. You're just assumed to participate in
| these systems even though there's no mandate to do so or
| protection for you if you don't.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Wait what? You literally put a sim card into a phone for it
| to be treated as a cell number? Thats odd and interesting to
| me how does that work?
| jedberg wrote:
| The SIM has its own phone number, so when they put it in a
| phone they can do "phone" things like make calls. In their
| laptop it's just for data.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I don't understand, isn't that how SIM cards are supposed
| to work ?
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah same. ETrade recently changed their phone verification
| system and can no longer send me a text message to verify my
| identity. I'm actually ok with that because it forces them to
| use the security token instead, which they should be doing
| anyway!
|
| And often I'll run into problems with silently failed
| messages because they don't accept the number.
| jetpackjoe wrote:
| sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than
| verifying identity
| jedberg wrote:
| Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative
| other than "impersonate someone else".
| blibble wrote:
| every time I sign in at asks me to input my university email
| address
|
| I cancel it then it comes back next time
|
| I'm in my 30s...
| ascar wrote:
| I don't think it's really about identification. Binding user
| accounts to SIM-based phone numbers is an effective way of
| limiting account creation as it's effectively binding it to a
| physical token.
|
| I can only guess why Discord wants to do this (fighting scam
| bots?), but for example for Tinder this is a very effective way
| of preventing abuse on the huge early discovery boost after
| signup or long inactivity.
| jedberg wrote:
| I understand why they do it, and I have no problem with that.
| My problem is their lack of an alternative. Either have an
| alternative way for me to verify, or a way for an admin to
| let me into their channel without verification.
| ejj28 wrote:
| Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who's
| been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots
| that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone
| verification stops someone from raiding a server with it
| enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not
| being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are
| extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the
| whole purpose of phone verification.
|
| Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to
| require phone verification is a good thing. It's not mandatory
| and it's only used if the server admin enables it. I don't
| think it's fair to blame Discord when it's a choice made by the
| server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| If they allow the user a chance to send an appeal or out-of-
| band alternative method to verify then this becomes less of
| an issue. It's when people presume certain baselines -- like
| a phone number -- that it becomes a showstopper to community.
| jedberg wrote:
| My problem isn't with the phone verification. I totally
| understand why they do that. I don't even have a problem with
| not accepting VOIP. I get why they do that too.
|
| My problem is that they don't have an alternative, and there
| is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to
| know how many people can't get in because of their choice.
|
| They should either have an alternative way to verify oneself,
| or a way for the channel admin to allow you in without the
| verification, or both.
| ejj28 wrote:
| Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed
| verification method. Something better needs to be created,
| but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same
| or different flaws.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| There's a bot that will ban most of those spam bots called
| Beemo. You realize a lot of bots are verified right? I've
| seen scripts to verify accounts on GitHub and spoken to the
| kinds of people who would automate accounts via scripts just
| to have a bunch of alts. They get numerous alts into servers
| just to spy. Its a kind of art I guess. I wouldn't recommend
| doing any of these things.
|
| Personally I just wish Discord wouldnt rate limit bans if
| they're not going to make a true effort to catch these bot
| farms. Gee I wonder how likely it is that three thousand
| accounts will decide to join the same exact server at the
| exact same minute? Having modded a decent (tens of thousands)
| sized Guild I gotta say people pop in every few minutes or
| seconds. Unless something big and relevant to your server
| happens that draws more traffic, but even then never
| thousands in seconds.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Discord, Slack, Gitter all gate messages so much, they are not
| well indexed but search engines (if indexed at all) and very
| chaotic when a lot of people are posting.
|
| Please use something like Github discussions.
| danr4 wrote:
| As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem
| is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet.
| imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in
| slack/discord.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
| jcelerier wrote:
| Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to
| the phpbb and vBulletin of yore
| nerdponx wrote:
| An interface like PHPBB or vBulletin, combined with the
| Markdown formatting + live preview and tagging/search of
| Discourse, would be ideal for me.
| syshum wrote:
| I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...
| Oddskar wrote:
| In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| discoverability
|
| answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let
| alone archived) by search engines
| Oddskar wrote:
| Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower
| and has vastly less information density
| simias wrote:
| I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more
| of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super
| clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only
| because of the lack of proper threading.
|
| Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
| Zababa wrote:
| Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow
| loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything,
| even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.
| int_19h wrote:
| On the desktop, it also hijacks standard browser
| shortcuts such as Ctrl+F.
| mthld wrote:
| Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it?
|
| https://flarum.org
| majormajor wrote:
| The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten
| years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations
| like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and
| tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate
| posts.
|
| That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front
| page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be
| nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also
| online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for
| when viewing later.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-
| line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like
| it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's
| forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP
| reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists
| like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like
| [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw.
|
| [1]: https://lobste.rs
|
| [2]: https://tade.link
|
| [3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-
| sf@lis... for example
|
| [4]: https://getaether.net/
|
| [5]: https://lemmy.ml/
| floren wrote:
| Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but
| I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that
| perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not
| documented?
| nirvdrum wrote:
| I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge
| problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and
| subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all
| from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client
| space.
|
| Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today.
| But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as
| unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I
| simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every
| day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord
| or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client,
| but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load
| channels from each server.
|
| As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few
| communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor
| tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there
| isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities
| more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than
| something like IRC.
| notriddle wrote:
| Is there a reason why Discourse's email notifications
| aren't helping?
| int_19h wrote:
| I would argue that "modern UX expectations" is a large part
| of the problem with Discourse. Infinite scrolling is one
| prominent example. Wasteful whitespace is another.
| dreyfan wrote:
| I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as
| vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s.
| Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and
| comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a
| voting audience.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| vBulletin is still available, isn't it?
| dreyfan wrote:
| Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| https://xenforo.com/ -- Paradox Interactive uses it for their
| Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities.
|
| edit: e.g.,
| https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-
| universal...
| buro9 wrote:
| I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like
| this https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this
| http://forum.espruino.com/
|
| Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side
| though... it was designed as a platform rather than a
| standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are
| sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which
| is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the
| moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no
| database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly
| porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to
| use.
| einpoklum wrote:
| So why not continue using it today, until something better
| comes along?
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not "web 3.0" ~
| [deleted]
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums
| have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good
| customization. (Not sure if the latest version supports digest
| emails though)
|
| https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
| julianlam wrote:
| Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla,
| Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the
| forum game.
|
| The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I
| see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work
| better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to
| today.
|
| We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years
| ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software
| to really make it the best offering out there
|
| I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)
| lxe wrote:
| Or something like StackOverflow
| secondcoming wrote:
| SO is great except for all the wrong and stale answers
| mooreds wrote:
| ding ding ding!
|
| Only issue with SO is that you (as a company or community)
| don't have as much control. That may or may not be an issue
| depending on goals.
| paxys wrote:
| What forum though? An intuitive, modern, free, fully managed
| forum software is non-existent.
| rweichler wrote:
| Best thing I ever did for EQE is shut down the Discord. Insane
| waste of my time. Now the only way to reach me is via email or
| the forum on https://eqe.fm
| blitzar wrote:
| Still a link to discord that still exists ...
| [deleted]
| bovermyer wrote:
| There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them
| is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord
| group, though.
| [deleted]
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Setting up a Discourse seems pretty easy from what I can tell.
| Seems like it's as easy as setting up a cloud instance and
| running a docker container.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to
| be useful, though.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I agree with the fact that Slack/Discord are terrible for
| keeping track of things long-term, but I will say that once
| you've set Discord/Slack up and running, operating it is
| typically pretty smooth - you've already likely got Slack and
| Discord running, and you can check it every so often.
|
| Granted, things can completely explode, and moderation is
| _still_ a requirement, but that 's true of forums as well.
|
| (Although due to their async nature, things boil over much
| more slowly, and it's typically easier to just put the entire
| forum or a user into a timeout.)
| [deleted]
| nicce wrote:
| Slack or Discord live in the current moment. It is hard to get
| back into discussion which started a week ago. Channels do not
| provide much historical value.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It's virtually _impossible_ to do so in Slack, unless someone
| ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large
| slacks.
| stavros wrote:
| It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being
| threaded-only and having great UX.
| kobieyc wrote:
| We use Discourse's hosted solution and it's effectively zero
| maintenance
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why not use a facebook page? Super easy to maintain and some
| moderation
| SXX wrote:
| Discourse does need a server and it's resource-hungry, but I
| cant say there any problem in maintaining it at all. Yeah, once
| in a few months it's worth to check for spam notifications and
| click to upgrade.
|
| But overall all you need to do is setup it properly once and
| configure some backups sync.
|
| Again, you need to pay like $10-15 / month for server to host
| it and backups.
| badwolf wrote:
| This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on
| the desktop"
|
| Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure
| that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies.
| Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are
| comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience
| across different servers/subreddits/etc...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I agree, and I think OSS projects should learn from these
| commercial successes and use their learnings to feed into OSS
| product experiences. But to some extent, Discord and Slack are
| both quite new. They were obviously quite successful at
| encouraging people to sign-up. There must be something there
| that makes Discord or Slack seem more trustworthy than "random
| weird site".
| htns wrote:
| The only time I tried to use Discord it demanded I send them my
| government ID.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Nobody wants to register on some random weird site
|
| 1. It's the project's web forum. https://forums.fooproject.org/
| . Not random at all. If you're lucky, your registration for
| fooproject works for the forum as well.
|
| 2. Well, we don't like registering with a large corporation
| either.
|
| > and figure that sites navigation,
|
| Suppose it's a web forum, one of the trusty varieties from the
| 2000's. What's there to figure out? The exact placement of
| settings in the user profile pages? You'll live.
|
| > let alone their privacy/data policies.
|
| In this day and age, the effective assumption is: It's all
| potentially public and the US government keeps a copy forever.
| Wish it were otherwise.
|
| ... and actually, the privacy is typically better on smaller
| independent platforms than on large ones. The large ones are
| probably already hooked up to the NSA, while for the smaller
| ones it's just a potential.
|
| > Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
|
| Slack is a painful experience, and not even that easy .
|
| Reddit... yes, but there's not much of a UI to be difficult.
|
| Discord - I have almost no experience with it TBH.
|
| > People are comfortable using them.
|
| No, they're not. Some are. Those who aren't, tend not to use
| them unless they have to.
|
| > They provide a more uniform experience across different
| servers/subreddits/etc...
|
| A web forum is a pretty uniform thing. I hope you're not
| complaining that not all forums are controlled by some huge
| single company...
| mooreds wrote:
| > Nobody wants to register on some random weird site,
|
| Simple fix: add login with google/github.
|
| Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick
| response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not
| so great.
|
| Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of
| the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else
| owns that content/SEO value.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github
| which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my
| google account.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "I don't want that either."
|
| Then use a password manager. Pick your poison.
|
| Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just
| phone number/sms verification
| mooreds wrote:
| This is what openid (the original) was designed to fix. You
| get to own your identity and delegate it if desired. But
| adoption didn't really happen.
|
| But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right
| way around it for you?
| klyrs wrote:
| "Throwaway email address" has gotten a lot tougher in the
| last 10 years. It's not impossible, but many providers
| demand a phone number or email verification. The ones who
| don't are used by bots, so those email addresses aren't
| universally accepted by sites that require email
| verification.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Most board software follows a simple tree layout. Not hard to
| navigate.
|
| No one wants to register for slack or hand over government id
| for discord or use the reddit app.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I agree and I've been wondering, why doesn't someone make
| something like a Discord/Discourse hybrid? Guilded has forum
| channels and yet it misses so many of the bells and whistles
| for moderation and discoverability that Discourse has.
|
| Basically, I want a Discord-type app, with it's UI and one
| login, and then blended with the Discourse forum power.
| majormajor wrote:
| Do you think we should replace HN with discord or slack?
| johng wrote:
| Xenforo is excellent forum software.
| blitzar wrote:
| Reddit + discord + github.
|
| Be active and push real issues and bugs into the github channel
| and use the content of forum / chat for documentation / faq /
| guides.
| dsfasdklgjalkj wrote:
| People say it's hard to create a forum, but for software projects
| there's one built right into Github - Github issues. Yet so many
| times I see Github issues answered with "We answered this in
| Discord. Go check there." Then there's other projects where
| they're super anal about opening any Github issue, yet are happy
| to answer the exact same question in Slack.
|
| Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer
| questions there, your users will find it.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| For knowledge sharing purposes chat is way too ephemeral.
|
| Forums have an ephemerality too as threads get too cluttered or
| buried under new threads. When an old thread takes too long to
| find or filter through, new ones are created and then redundancy
| sucks up everyone's time.
|
| The answer is moderation - preferably with "elected" moderators.
| The other key is to have a system of escalation of key knowledge
| to a Wiki, which again needs moderation in the form of reviews to
| keep the knowledge up to date.
| rexreed wrote:
| YES - I hope we see a return to mid-2000s approaches for web
| applications across the board. I'll take 2008 Google Maps over
| 2021 Google maps. Heck, I'll take 2008 Google SEARCH over 2021
| Google Search. Things have regressed over the past decade.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Why do people use Slack/Discord/etc?
|
| One reason seems missing: chat is arguably easier to set up and
| maintain.
|
| Synchronous communication also means that messages won't pile up.
|
| No past content means fewer places to keep up to date; plus there
| are always users who ask questions without reading existing
| topics.
|
| I could give more examples; to me chat seems a more lean
| approach.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I've tried to use forums so many times but I just can't use them
| effectively. I don't want to create accounts and get the
| notification settings correct so I don't have to log in to see
| replies to my messages without getting spammed.
|
| The only forum I've had success with as a user is Reddit. It
| isn't the best forum software in the world but it is miles better
| than the usual php bulletin boards.
|
| Having run a forum before, it's so much work to keep anything
| secure and spam-free. I had to geo-ip block all of France and
| Russia just to stay above water. I gave up.
| Fellshard wrote:
| Format migration seems to me to be a key feature - the ability to
| lift ephemeral discussions into more permanent and deliberate
| mediums as required. Something like chat -> forum -> wiki, for
| example. Have set processes in place for determining when
| something can usefully be pushed upwards. Also encourage a
| culture of pointing to documentation /first/ to ensure the more
| permanent documents are well-maintained and robust.
|
| Stack Overflow got close to this, but is still quite a ways off.
| The chat element is present but very much cut off from the site,
| and it lost its way over time as its focus changed. It may be
| worthwhile trying to assemble recommendations for how to select
| your own tools that give you these benefits, and perhaps to ease
| migrations between them.
| hartator wrote:
| What about an issue-only GitHub public repo?
| api wrote:
| The problem with self-hosted forums is that you have to host
| them, and that adds Yet Another Thing already overworked
| developers and maintainers have to worry about.
|
| Self-hosting will not make a comeback until hosting software can
| be installed and maintained as easily as, say, mobile apps.
| Install a forum on your server, set an upgrade policy, and mostly
| forget about it.
|
| So much developer work goes into overwrought boil the ocean
| attempts at decentralization when solving this boring-but-hard
| problem well could lead to a renaissance in the simplest and yet
| most robust and most accessible form of decentralization: people
| hosting shit themselves. Docker could have done this but really
| didn't. RedHat or Ubuntu could do it, but they're not. Nobody is
| really doing this, or if they are they are doing it in an overly
| complicated way.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Installing a web forum is one click in damn near any web
| hosting/VPS provider's admin panel...
| api wrote:
| What about updating it? What happens if you need to move it?
| What happens if something breaks? Who fixes it? Who monitors
| it?
| ejj28 wrote:
| I find googling for existing answers on forums, StackOverflow and
| Reddit to be great resources when I need to solve a problem, but
| I really dislike asking questions myself on those kind of
| platforms. I hate having to write a formal post and then hope
| someone responds, and then if anyone responds the conversation
| slowly crawls along post by post.
|
| When I need help, I greatly prefer more casual, real time
| environments like Discord. To me, asking on forums feels like
| posting a newspaper ad for help and hoping someone mails me a
| letter, compared to asking on Discord feeling like walking into a
| room of knowledgeable people and discussing my question face to
| face.
| cletus wrote:
| I like the idea of Discord in general. It certainly does have
| uses like making voice communication more accessible.
|
| But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that
| Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than
| a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any
| discoverability.
|
| One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that
| hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the
| days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are
| bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model
| you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to
| other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on
| and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure.
|
| This is why tagging is so much better.
|
| Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it
| Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type?
| You see how quickly it breaks down.
|
| Discord channels are a hierarchy.
|
| So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels
| be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've
| run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of
| these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and
| someone might only be interested in those posts.
|
| Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can
| never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without
| exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on
| different parts of the screen.
|
| I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information
| from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example,
| to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it
| seems?).
|
| So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord
| for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or
| you're going to have a bad time.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wish I remembered what it was I was searching for, but I found
| a github issue where a repo admin directed folks to some chat
| website about a year ago; naturally, in the year 2021, the whole
| thing was completely defunct, and more recent threads pointed
| people to Discord.
|
| I wonder what'll happen next year, if/when the Discord community
| fractures, or starts making certain channels private, or it's
| just abandoned and closed down.
| johnebgd wrote:
| I remember when I used IRC to speak with developers of
| products. Everything felt temporary. I wonder if I still have
| any of the MIRC logs hanging out in a backup somewhere...
| muglug wrote:
| Slack developer here, views are my own.
|
| Prior to Slack I spent many years as an OSS maintainer. I also
| participated in a Slack channel that discussed my OSS tool's
| general problem space. That Slack workspace was on the free plan,
| so messages older than 6 months were memory-holed.
|
| In practice that wasn't too big of an issue. Most developers
| understood that GitHub was the place for concrete actionable
| things and long-term discussions, whereas Slack was the place to
| build relationships and address burning questions quickly. Most
| developers understood this distinction, though occasionally some
| would have to be steered towards GitHub when discussing potential
| bugs that benefitted a proper write-up.
|
| I also worked at a large company that paid for Slack, and it was
| much more of a long-term memory resource. But as always, whenever
| I found myself repeatedly searching in the message history for a
| particular piece of information it always made sense to put it
| somewhere more defined -- in a readme or some other sort of
| document.
|
| At Slack we have the same basic breakdown -- Slack (the software)
| provides a really useful context for why certain decisions were
| made, and in a pinch the search feature is great for finding
| particular nuggets of information, but that doesn't stop us using
| Quip, GitHub and Jira for tracking longer-lived information.
| dangus wrote:
| The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of
| people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant
| chunk.
|
| Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both
| excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
|
| I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a
| message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in
| a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge base page, working
| something like a more powerful version of a pin in Slack or
| Discord.
|
| Overall, though, I felt like the article was kind of bossy.
| wvenable wrote:
| Who are these people and how do they have time follow
| synchronous chat on deep technical products all day?
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| No data to back this up, but I have a feeling the industry is
| so bottom-heavy with juniors that we've started optimising
| towards their immediate need to learn. Juniors don't have a
| problem sitting in Slacks all day.
| vegai_ wrote:
| >Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both
| excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
|
| Basecamp?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| The poll is not exactly lined up with the point, though: it
| says that people _want_ synchronous chat, while the article
| says synchronous chat is not beneficial to the community. Both
| can be true.
| km3r wrote:
| Yeah I could see in a few year Discord/Slack having "chat"
| channels, voice channels, and "forum" channels. Maybe even add
| in wikis, or dashboards.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both
| excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
|
| The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It
| works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content
| remains useful and findable later.
|
| (We _also_ have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer
| content), as well as GitHub.)
| ljm wrote:
| What if you don't need a community? Why does everything have to
| be a community now?
|
| To that point: slack/discord/irc/whatsapp/pub conversations are a
| great way to bootstrap a community before you invest in something
| longer term, if it's needed. Find your like-minded friends and
| then grow it out.
|
| In fact, I can use my own experience in the mid-2000s as an
| example: we used existing forums like Gamesradar and rllmuk and
| neogaf to bootstrap our offshoot forums. Most failed, some
| succeeded for a while (one was PoopGang IIRC).
|
| Discord servers aren't really so different from that.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "Why does everything have to be a community now?"
|
| It always did. The key is searchability - you can find
| discussions through Google and they will have an answerr to
| your question
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Discord is great for developers who provide support, because all
| incoming issues are instantly drowned in the noise, and you can
| pretend that they don't exist.
| einpoklum wrote:
| My stance on interaction mechanisms "to support developer
| community":
|
| For any project size:
|
| 1. Issue tracker.
|
| 2. Mailing list (or similar mechanism) for announcements (not
| discussions with the users).
|
| For a larger project:
|
| 3. Forums
|
| 4. IRC/Matrix channel for chatting ... if core developers are
| chatty enough to sustain this.
|
| For an even larger project:
|
| 5. A publicly-editable wiki and/or a Q&A platform
|
| 6. Multiple chat channels, mirroring them on different chat
| platforms
|
| I'm not saying nothing else works, only that this ladder seems to
| work well on the projects I have encountered.
| CreepGin wrote:
| It seems to me Github Discussions does the job for a forum (for
| open source devs at least). Are there significant advantages to
| setting up a standalone forum suite like Discourse? I imagine you
| do have to spend quite a bit of resources to setup and maintain
| such thing.
| dmart wrote:
| No, please don't. I don't want to make a separate account for a
| random forum, and I especially don't want to use Discourse.
|
| Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much
| simpler for everyone.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| It seems like you need a new service to create accounts
| seamlessly /s
| novocaine wrote:
| Dev _teams_ also benefit a lot from having an async way to
| discuss bigger issues that require thoughtfulness and long form
| answers, especially remote teams. There 's a reason mailing lists
| are still somehow alive and well in open source projects that
| have been remote first for decades.
|
| We're using discourse internally for this (in conjunction with
| matrix) and it's allowed us to have discussions I don't think we
| would have otherwise had.
| monksy wrote:
| When pushing instantaneous forms first and async forms second,
| you're creating a barrier from moving the conversation over.
| a-dub wrote:
| i've always felt like synchronous chat was best for operations,
| incident response and realtime help where long form
| communications like forums and listservs are best suited for
| deeper discussions and designs. chat can be fun, but it's really
| lossy!
| monksy wrote:
| The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions
| is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a
| solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire.
| (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original
| need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being
| instanteous is just a convenience )
|
| What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss
| technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit,
| phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry
| decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided
| to move to a more transient form of communication for everything.
|
| In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is
| spreading, and we're running into development of technology that
| has a limited set of experience behind it.
|
| What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to
| switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other
| words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there
| rather than completely scrapping them)
| dragontamer wrote:
| I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can
| remember?
|
| Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are
| based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists.
|
| -------
|
| IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication /
| instant messenger style communications.
|
| Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker
| News are async and slow.
| monksy wrote:
| IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| If conversation threading were enforced adequately in a
| Slack/Discord, a bot could watch threads for a heuristic of
| usefulness and kick off the archival of some form of read-only
| SEO-happy forum-like store.
| 323 wrote:
| To paraphrase an old saying, there are two kinds of community
| software: the ones everybody complains about (Discord, Slack),
| and the ones no one uses (forums, IRC).
| mooreds wrote:
| Author here. Thanks for submitting!
|
| I wrote this a year ago as my employer was starting up their
| forum[0]. While we have since added slack, the forum is the main
| support mechanism for our community (people who pay us money get
| support tickets).
|
| I still stand by that choice for: * SEO *
| durability * question quality
|
| I can't recall the exact numbers, but something like 5-10% of our
| overall traffic is to the forum.
|
| 0: https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/
| dzonga wrote:
| FusionAuth is a pleasure to work with. Thanks for the work and
| documentation :+1. You folks done saved me a lot of time,
| hopefully if I make a dollar will pay it forward.
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(page generated 2021-11-08 23:00 UTC)