41 ms·

Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

• riantogo 5y ago
  Somewhat related, I'm looking for few good folks to start some forums of their interest at https://discoflip.com https://discoflip.com (shameless plug for my covid side gig). #developer is still available at the time of this comment.
• PascLeRasc 5y ago
  This is a little off-topic, but does anyone have a good way to manage different identities on Discord? For example I'm in one Discord with real-life friends, one for a game community, and one for programming. I'd like my account to have different names and profile pictures for each. So far that appears impossible but maybe there's a way I haven't found.
  • gxnxcxcx 5y ago
    Right click on server icon > Edit server profile. Custom nickname per server is a free feature. Alas, custom profile pic per server is a paid feature.
    • PascLeRasc 5y ago
      Thanks, I guess for the price of Nitro that'll be good enough.
• johng 5y ago
  Xenforo is excellent forum software.
• Bayart 5y ago
  I quite like Zulip, which is basically chat software but with great forum-like properties. Plus it's open source and can be self-hosted. It really hits my sweet spot.
• simonbarker87 5y ago
  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.
• DantesKite 5y ago
  Is there a product that lets you effortlessly build a forum? Can’t think of one off the top of my head but I’m sure there’s one out there.
• teawrecks 5y ago
  Don't think #2 should be so Google-centric, just like dev communities shouldn't be slack/discord-centric. "Web crawlers can't see inside chats" is just fine.
• atroche 5y ago
  Yep, have recently had some troubles with provisioning two relatively new products (Redpanda and Materialize), and both of them relied on Slack communities and it's really not an experience I enjoy or find helpful.
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  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?
  • GreenWatermelon 5y ago
    Discord has threads now.
  • 4ggr0 5y ago
    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-Threads-FAQ https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-...
• johnmato 5y ago
  It would be great to help the newcomers browse for previous discussions compared to the chat software.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bovermyer 5y ago
  There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord group, though.
  • rightbyte 5y ago
    Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to be useful, though.
    • pavel_lishin 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • nicce 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      It's virtually impossible to do so in Slack, unless someone ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large slacks.
      • stavros 5y ago
        It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being threaded-only and having great UX.
• pavel_lishin 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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…
• dangus 5y ago
  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.
  • JasonFruit 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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.
    • encryptluks2 5y ago
      And then people can live in their closed ecosystems where exporting data will be ever more difficult.
  • JoshTriplett 5y ago
    > 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.)
  • wvenable 5y ago
    Who are these people and how do they have time follow synchronous chat on deep technical products all day?
• novocaine 5y ago
  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.
  • bullfightonmars 5y ago
    Basecamp worls really well for this. It has team and project based message boards with tight access controls that help to keep boards focused. I have used this to great effect in my teams.
  • monksy 5y ago
    When pushing instantaneous forms first and async forms second, you're creating a barrier from moving the conversation over.
• a-dub 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has
      • int_19h 5y ago
        More importantly, I don't recall IRC ever replacing mailing lists / newsgroups / forums. People generally knew when to use either one appropriately. But these days, it's not uncommon to see a project page straight up saying that if you have any questions, Discord is it.
    • int_19h 5y ago
• mooreds 5y ago
  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/ https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/
  • dzonga 5y ago
    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.
    • mooreds 5y ago
      Thank you, glad we can help you out! Hope your project is a smashing success. When it launches, I'd love to interview you for a community story like https://fusionauth.io/blog/2020/11/18/reconinfosec-fusionauth/ https://fusionauth.io/blog/2020/11/18/reconinfosec-fusionaut... if you'd be game. My email is in my profile.
  • NotEvil 5y ago
    Which platform your forum is on. Or its custom?
    • jeanlucas 5y ago
      It really looks like a good ol' nodebb
      • mooreds 5y ago
        Yup, it is nodebb.
      • ksec 5y ago
        But it still looks 10x better than Discourse.
• 1cvmask 5y ago
  Whats the best forum software out there?
  • mooreds 5y ago
    We use nodebb and find it pretty good from a UX/functionality perspective.
• mmcclure 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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?
  • Matthias1 5y ago
    > Discord is nearly infinitely better in the sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still considerably far behind Could you expand on this a bit? A lot of this thread seems to be coming down to opinions. Are there specific moderation features that Discord lacks?
    • skinnymuch 5y ago
      How do you move conversations/posts from one channel to another? I assumed this had to be built in because of so much meme ish talk of discord mods.
      • jachee 5y ago
        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.
        • theshrike79 5y ago
• techsin101 5y ago
  better idea, an easier way to convert certain conversations into forum post.
  • mooreds 5y ago
    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.
    • techsin101 5y ago
      i think what's missing a functionality that would bring up previous conversations around the same topic. I.e. on stackoverflow you have strict no duplicate policy which forces people to add and update already existing topic. For that to happen user need to know question they have already exists, or a discussion. And then they can catch up, add scenarios and contribute to it. not sure how this could be added to slack tho.
• stormbrew 5y ago
  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.
  • stormbrew 5y ago
    Since several people asked, yes, email addresses are PII and may or may not be sensitive. And yes, my response to the number of forum breaches I've seen has indeed been to stop putting information on them -- that's exactly what I said. I stopped using them.
  • unethical_ban 5y ago
    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.
• lux 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    I’d be interested in seeing how that stuff went for you. I am also worried about a dead Discourse. I am now leaning toward just doing Discord. I am unhappy about it. But I think it’s the right move for the community I manage. I will email you this week if you don’t mind. :).
• danr4 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
  • dreyfan 5y ago
    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.
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.
      • codinghorror 5y ago
        The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • fartcannon 5y ago
          What happened in 2014? I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
• lxe 5y ago
  Or something like StackOverflow
  • mooreds 5y ago
    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.
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    SO is great except for all the wrong and stale answers
• paxys 5y ago
  What forum though? An intuitive, modern, free, fully managed forum software is non-existent.
• rweichler 5y ago
  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 https://eqe.fm
  • blitzar 5y ago
    Still a link to discord that still exists ...
• badwolf 5y ago
  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...
  • int_19h 5y ago
    I, for one, am not comfortable using Discord or Slack because of the very nature of synchronous communication.
  • mooreds 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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.
      • mooreds 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          "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.
• blitzar 5y ago
  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.
  • mooreds 5y ago
    Have you found it easy to start a Reddit community? This isn't something I've explored much.
• dsfasdklgjalkj 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
• kayodelycaon 5y ago
  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.
  • encryptluks2 5y ago
    That brings up a good point. If forums are going to work, they need some form of federation that doesn't suck.
    • knowledge-clay 5y ago
      Mailing lists!
      • encryptluks2 5y ago
        I too like mailing list, but most of the mailing list software I have seen isn't that great. Essentially, it would be like a glorified Google Groups which I am not a fan of. They are prone to spam and often leak your email address. I could see a modern system working with remailer support built in, but at that point it isn't much different than a forum. It is essentially Usenet, and at this point I'd rather see Usenet make a comeback.
        • m4rtink 5y ago
          Hyperkitty provides a nice web interface on top of mailing lists: https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty All Fedora mailing lists use it and it works well IMHO. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/ https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/
    • jeroenhd 5y ago
• cletus 5y ago
  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.
• muglug 5y ago
  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.
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    As an end user, I find that in practice most projects don't actually move any information to a suitable spot. I can't tell you how many times I've Googled an obscure error message and the only two results were the source code where the error came from and that self-hosted, open-source Slack alternative that Google can index. At that point, I already went to check the source code, and when I click the chatroom where the message is supposed to be, I reach some kind of archived page that's clearly at completely the wrong place in the chatroom history with no way to find what I was actually looking for. At least the open source clone is searchable, so many troubleshooting could've been avoided if people had used forums rather than Slack/Discord/Mattermost for "support forums".
    • lmm 5y ago
      If they'd been using a forum, would you have a good record of the solution? Or would the problem just never have been solved? The low friction of slack-like tools matters.
• ljm 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    "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
• CreepGin 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    It seems like you need a new service to create accounts seamlessly /s
  • mooreds 5y ago
    > Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much simpler for everyone. This is a totally valid choice and I know folks who have gone that path. If you are focused on an OSS project, it is a nobrainer. From a company standpoint, there are downsides: * who owns the user? GitHub * who owns the posts you and your community are making? GitHub * who owns the links and the other residual benefits from knowledge being shared on the site? GitHub Weighed against all of that is the fact that there is a tremendous number of developers on GitHub and you are engaging with them where they are. At $CURJOB we try to separate bugs/feature requests (which go to GitHub) from support (which goes to a forum). Again, it's a tradeoff that anyone trying to foster a developer community should consider.
  • smcameron 5y ago
    No, fuck discord.
• 323 5y ago
  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).
• jedberg 5y ago
  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!
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    That is bad enough, but the worst part is that the content is not really discoverable outside of Discord. Sometimes you don't want that of course but I have seen communities pretty much dying because they only met there with no influx of new users.
  • errantspark 5y ago
    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.
    • perryizgr8 5y ago
      Using SMS as a login verification thing is just so irritating. My bank asks me to enter an SMS OTP every time I login to the website. I know my username and password! Let me into my bank account!
      • Plasmoid 5y ago
        They're trying to do that to break 3rd party financial integrations. Not for your security but because they think they deserve to get paid for your data and these other people haven't paid up.
• aledalgrande 5y ago
  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.
  • gkop 5y ago
    Isn’t Gitter the one that is fairly well indexed? I wouldn’t lump it in with the others.
    • aledalgrande 5y ago
      It is indexed but it is impossible to follow a conversation in a busy channel, like the others
• rexreed 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  > 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.
• Fellshard 5y ago
  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.
  • forgotmypw17 5y ago
    Agree with this, with the addition that the format everything eventually flows into should be either plaintext or HTML 2.0.
• hartator 5y ago
  What about an issue-only GitHub public repo?
• api 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Installing a web forum is one click in damn near any web hosting/VPS provider's admin panel...
    • api 5y ago
      What about updating it? What happens if you need to move it? What happens if something breaks? Who fixes it? Who monitors it?
      • int_19h 5y ago
        You open a support ticket for your web hosting provider, and they do the upgrade/fix.
      • Bayart 5y ago
        I remember updating and moving VBulletin/IPB/PhpBB being painless 15 years ago.
• ejj28 5y ago
  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.
  • bserge 5y ago
    So you're actively participating in reducing the amount of useful solutions/answers available for everyone via a search engine.
  • the_af 5y ago
    The thing is that StackOverflow is not meant just for the asker; it's meant to serve as a searchable Q&A repository, so that when you google "how do I do X?" it's one of the first matches. If you ask your question in a messaging system, it will help you but then be lost to the wider audience.
• Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
• drzel 5y ago
  FortressOne dev here. We use a Discord and it was the perfect fit for us. Since we're game focused. A forum simply would not have worked. It's a matter of the right tool for the job as usual. Though, it might be nice to publish the logs somewhere.
• muhammadusman 5y ago
  Yes, 1000% this. I've found reddit and stack overflow to be way easier to search for content than slack/discord. Creating a subreddit for your app/service/topic is trivial and moderation tools are decent as wel.
• thefedoration 5y ago
  There are pros & cons of both the forum & chat based communities. Really, it should be determined by the kind of community you're managing and how you want your community members to interact. Forums are great for debugging & keeping a record of information. If your community works together on projects, chat is the way to go. I've been curating lists of online communities at the Hive Index. For example, here's my one for programming https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/ https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/. In this case, it's about 50/50 split between forum & chat. There are also community platforms experimenting with both forum & chat in the same place, for example circle.so
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    Is Hive Index yours? Curious why you don’t put that in your bio? I like the initiative! Nice site
• jedimastert 5y ago
  I think both a forum (async) and some form of IM (sync) communication are needed, but I think IM should really just be just for developers. Mailing lists are a great option as far as async comms go, but maybe are a little intimidating for laymen for whatever reason. Other than that, they're well trodden and Google Groups is still pretty solid, although the lack of categories (other than just a ton of different mailing lists, which an option)
• holler 5y ago
  I'm working on a new open discussion site at https://sqwok.im https://sqwok.im that mixes chat with topical posts in an open and accessible UI. The issue of highlighting/indexing important messages and series of messages has come up recently and it's something I want to focus on in the near future. While not specifically designed as forum software, I would be curious to learn if it could solve some of the issues people have brought up regarding searchability, indexing, and displaying more long-lived content. Posted a recent dev update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750996 PS If you'd like to work on something like this drop me a line.
• soheil 5y ago
  > Problem #3: synchronous communication is synchronous I love synchronous communication sometimes. Specially if you're a builder it's invaluable to have the person right there and ask them as many questions as you want. Not having any latency in each back and forth increases the efficiency by orders of magnitude.
• jraph 5y ago
  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 (archives). You won't be able to trace the history of your project when you will want to do it. What's more, Slack and Discord are hype now but will probably be old-fashioned in a few years and you don't know when they will disappear. Just pick something already old-fashioned today but that somehow does not die.
  • sergiotapia 5y ago
    I own two fairly popular github projects (2.4k and 500 stars) - I have a Discord server. What do you recommend for me? I don't want to spend a penny on hosting this since it's a for fun project.
    • tapland 5y ago
      I think just putting g some effort I to keeping a FAQ on the repo up to date with things people run into and post on discord is a great solution.
      • skinnymuch 5y ago
        Are you saying make the FAQ. and that will make the Disord unnecessary? New stuff always comes up. This doesn’t seem right
        • tapland 5y ago
          "Keeping it up to date" means updating with common issues that pop up on discord. Those who only need support are helped and not victims to discords search and discussion -issues.
    • afurculita 5y ago
      GitHub has a discussions section.
• gizdan 5y ago
  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 the forum integrated into your software. I seriously do not want yet another login unless there is a good reason. It's ridiculous. I have nearly 700 logins in my password manager and I'd say probably 500 of those items are websites I've registered once to ask a question (quite often questions that go unanswered). Half of these forums do not even provide the capability to removing my account without contacting the admins, which is just an unnecessary hassle.
  • julianlam 5y ago
    > If it's a company, please have the forum integrated into your software. Counterpoint. Other companies absolutely suck at making forum software. It's because it's not their core business, so why would they put more than token effort into it? Edit: upon re-read this seems to be exactly what you are suggesting, so please disregard my reply. The solution here is a forum set up with robust and plentiful SSO solutions, so existing authentication providers can be used.
  • iforgotpassword 5y ago
    This could have been posted by me. :-) GitHub just has critical mass. Everyone has an account. UI is not bad. Just use it.
  • e12e 5y ago
    > 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?
  • curun1r 5y ago
    I’m a believer in just creating a subreddit. It’s free and easy, many people already have Reddit accounts and it’s a much better forum than the ones that would be self-hosted, including moderation tooling and bot ecosystem. The threaded discussions are also better than what Github offers.
• nbzso 5y ago
  I will patiently wait for the real internet to return. RSS/Blogs/Forums. This is the only way for archiving and communicating sustainable information repos which will serve people without a middleman. Creating federated silos with "modern" UX is serving only the owners of this SaaS hell. It is logical for those type of businesses to optimize for "engagement" and profit.
  • boplicity 5y ago
    Many of those things are still there. I've run an old-school style forum since 2009, and it is still going strong. Many of the people using it are very different than the HN crowd: non-tech savvy, relatively old, mostly women relatively low-income. The design has barely changed since it was first created, though I've incrementally added useful features (and not useful features) specifically geared towards helping the community.
    • InnerGargoyle 5y ago
      bless you brother. may i ask what is this forum is about?
• Saris 5y ago
  I feel like the current state of forums kind of sucks. Discourse is the common one I see and it's not that great, it loads weirdly sometimes, it's a bit hard to read threads with the layout, and it's just not that nice to use. Figuring out notifications is still just as much of a pain as always, and they never seem to work right. One forum I use a lot is using XenForo and I actually like that one reasonably well, it seems to get most things right.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Vladimir Panteleev wrote the forum software D uses: https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ It's all completely searchable, it works with NNTP (yes!), and I wrote a program: https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver to turn the message database into simple, fast loading static web pages: https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html It has served us well.
  • mhd 5y ago
    I really wish more systems had a NNTP bridge. If we can't have nice things with regular federated Usenet servers, something RSS-like where you could subscribe to different "proprietary" servers would be awesome. For the web interfaces people can do all kinds of things, be Web X.0 etc., as long as the conversation format maps well enough to NNTP.
    • zzo38computer 5y ago
      I agree. In my case, I have a NNTP server, but would also be OK to have a web forum and mailing list which bridges to it. The web interface could be any as long as the conversation format maps to NNTP, is readable and writable in usual NNTP clients without difficulty, that the formats are readable just fine as plain text, and that even if JavaScripts and CSS are disabled that it must display a link to the NNTP. I want to treat the NNTP as primary, though, even if other interfaces are also available. This can either be done on my computer (and read the SQLite database containing the messages directly; also will need to be compatible with what I have), or on some remote service which the messages are mirrored (and then I can set up a cron job if I wanted to). However, I have not found a suitable one for my specific use. (Also, my NNTP server is not currently in use by anyone other than myself, it seems. However, I would like others who are interested in my projects to discuss there. There is also a IRC channel for discussion, which also isn't used (there are a few people on there, but nobody else other than myself seems to write messages there). IRC logs are kept.)
      • WalterBright 5y ago
• hardwaresofton 5y ago
  I think slack/discord are also bad for business, but that’s a discussion not many have had yet. It remains to be seen whether forums are the better midpoint between emails and meetings but sure wish more people would try
• kelnos 5y ago
  I agree, but I don't think those things serve the same use cases, and I know some projects that have both a Slack workspace and a forum. A forum is great for getting technical support, and is ok-ish for technical discussion and planning, but I don't think it's a good replacement for real-time chat, which is great for developing more nuanced, personal relationships (for distributed developers and users that aren't going to do things like regular video chats). Certainly real-time chat isn't going to give you as rich an experience as a video or in-person chat, but it's much better than the asynchronous back-and-forth of a forum (or email). So I would say "Use IRC/Matrix rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community" would be a better position to take (and set up a bot to automatically archive conversations to somewhere searchable on the web), as well as "Supplement your real-time chat with a forum or email list" (which can also be searchable). On top of that, know where to capture information for the longer term: for example, if discussion on IRC or the forum leads to an understanding that the project's documentation is confusing in some areas, write up a ticket on GH Issues or Jira or whatever you're using. That way you (or someone else) will remember it needs to be done.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Mailing lists (and newsgroups!) are really really really simple forums. Still used widely in the open source community. Lots of hosts out there, very low investment in cost/time/maintenance, the 'friction to post' is a feature not a bug, you don't need a weird client or server, the archives are publicly searchable, you can filter them at your leisure and use different lists for different topics. If you want to gamify your community engagement, StackOverflow/Reddit is better. But if you just want answers to questions, a mailing list is the simplest thing in the world. If you have a lot of questions, you need to make a FAQ, and StackOverflow basically does that by sorting.
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  I used the OpenPhone app to side step many of these checks as a Google Voice alternative.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    Nice app. Paying $10/mo is not expensive. But a lot if the only reason is side stepping when VoIP number verifying doesn’t suffice
• kevinmgranger 5y ago
  This continually comes up. It doesn't matter. The people who don't already agree aren't on Hacker News.
• tmwed 5y ago
  i think this is a valid use-case for web3. wallet addresses avoid the PII implications that I’ve seen a lot of people mention.
• chovybizzass 5y ago
  all tech support interactions should be searchable on the public web.
• drawkbox 5y ago
  Great article and covers all the points. Important information should not be trapped in apps or walled gardens. This is a major problem today. People talk about worse search results today but that is largely due to information grabs by these systems locking that up to own it. Anything not indexable is a problem.
• far_focus 5y ago
  I cannot agree enough. For example, in the bevy[0] discord alone, there's a remarkable about of advice, plugin recommendations, and technical help that's essentially just lost in noise. It's a real shame; I can't help but wonder how much effort is repeated, or how much beginners needlessly struggle because they couldn't effectively find information. [0] https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy
• maxclark 5y ago
  Forums are the ultimate in async workflow. You can post a message, and when get to control when you come back. Little features like search, threads, search engine integration, are amazing! Slack/Discord is fine for an IRC alternative. But they should be additive not the only option.
• retrocryptid 5y ago
  you could even write documentation for your product and publish it as either HTML or PDF files.
• Robotbeat 5y ago
  My favorite forum is https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com Nothing fancy and little changed from the 00s. Works great and allows pretty in-depth technical analysis with images, etc. It uses Simple Machines forum software: https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/
• elwell 5y ago
  Does anyone remember phpBB?
• fomine3 5y ago
  Gitter FTW. I don't know why Gitter missed for chat. It's crawlable by Google.
• robbiemitchell 5y ago
  Many people are constantly logged in to Slack in a native app. Viewing discussions is a click away, and replies will show up in the sidebar even if they aren't currently viewing that Workspace. A website is another place to forget about. It would be neat to merge the durability and SEO goodness of a Stack Overflow with the accessibility of Slack.
• thrdbndndn 5y ago
  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 enough other users that can help you, and they are willing to discuss with you if details are not clear (as soon as you're polite). Even though they don't always solve the problem, you can tell someone actually looked into it. And all these happen in real-time, without at best half day delay between each exchange (it helps that Discord is hella popular so lots of people are online all the time, and the chance to notice your message on a server they're in is much higher. Can't say the same for any random forum.) I still prefer GitHub issues, but after that, Discord. Forums (or the communities it normally forms) really don't cut it.
  • lifthrasiir 5y ago
    I totally agree, and I believe that was also the reason why IRC was so successful in F/OSS communities. Traditional thread-based forums are great for archival but also seem to encourage a full-sized post, which is a conversational barrier by itself and also limits the potential engagement by reducing the number of people willing to reply. It doesn't seem to me that the discouragement of short posts is inherent to forums though, for example traditional South Korean forums had been traditionally evolved from BBS and had a strong dichitomy between posts and comments, so short comments and quick reactions were norms (longer replies are typically posted separately in a post). GitHub issues seem to be somewhere between those different models.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    +1. Also, IMO many users already use Discord for other purposes, so they're more likely to check your project's channel while checking other things. Meanwhile, nobody really goes out of their way to look at a project-specific forum, not until that project build sufficient momentum.
  • EleanorKonik 5y ago
    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.
• varispeed 5y ago
  Setting a forum these days is a legal nightmare and big tech is lobbying to pull the drawbridge up even higher. I think this is already lost. Only a mad person would host a forum these days.
• 8note 5y ago
  A stack overflow style seems better than either a forum or a discord Support requests are usually questions, and QnA based solutions handle questions well, including search based on prior questions
• mraza007 5y ago
  Couldn’t agree more on this Using public forums would do greater good for developer community and the future developers as it retain the knowledge and can benefit a lot more than just sharing within chat apps
• l33t_d0nut 5y ago
  Agreed. We see about 25% of our traffic come from our forums. https://forums.ironmansoftware.com https://forums.ironmansoftware.com
• smashah 5y ago
  Discord makes sense for my project due to the dynamic nature of it. I agree it's probably redundant for stable projects with minimal updates
• smashah 5y ago
  In reality the best solution is to mix all available tools in a way where individual interactions always have a specific place to be addressed effectively. For example, I encourage people to introduce issues in the discord. If it is fixable with the given context and I am available, I will fix it there and then + publish a new version of the package/patches within minutes. This way others don't even have the time to experience the problem in the first place. If the problem seems more complex, I direct them to fill in an extensive issue template. On boot of the library, I also log a link to an issue template with most of the context filled in. If the issue has a few bits of information missing & there seems to be miscommunication, I direct them to message me on the discord. Most projects are maintained by a single person, so the communication landscape of the project should be optimised for that person and how they deem effective to communicate. It's not for users/passers-by/etc.
• micimize 5y ago
  Hopefully we'll eventually have better bridges for going between the live discussion and the persisted artifacts. Discord has lightweight threads now, so a thread <-> issue/discussion bridge like https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340 https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340 is viable there.
• giantrobot 5y ago
  Ok cool set up a forum. Who's going to moderate it to handle the tons of spam it will immediately receive? Will it be the same person keeping security updates current? They're going to be busy doing that and fielding support requests because someone forgot a password or someone is being a jerk to them. I'd love for FOSS projects to avoid things like Discord but they choose free managed services for a reason. Unless someone wants to dedicate a fair amount of effort to running a forum, IRC channel(s), or other service it's a big ask of a bunch of part time contributors. Running a forum is usually orthogonal to developing some software. It's a lot of extra effort for minimal benefit for a "community".
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    I have very rarely if ever seen spam on Discourse forums.
• masoodkamandy 5y ago
  I agree with the OP for open-source projects, but I thought I’d share what a great thing Discord has been for my first year programming students. They share questions, glitch screenshots, and interesting websites. They are also able to get help on simple problems quickly. More often than not they help each other before I can answer their questions. I know the OP is about open source projects, so I’m not sure if it’s totally relevant, but I thought I’d share how much it has helped my students foster community, get immediate help, and feel more comfortable as they learn to program. They wouldn’t feel comfortable or ready to post to a forum and my Discord server provides a safe space to get started.
• jimkleiber 5y ago
  I'll throw this out: I would love to see an open-source version of Guilded. Discord-like design, but with forum channels, open-sourced so it can be tweaked and guarantee data longevity.
• Decabytes 5y ago
  This is something that the Racket community has faced. We have an active discord, but the search ability is not great. We also have a mailing list, but have been getting increasing amounts of spam. Hopefully the Discourse forum that was created in the past few days will solve this [1] 1. https://racket.discourse.group/ https://racket.discourse.group/
• numpad0 5y ago
  I still don’t understand what were the problems that Slack/Discord solved. Almost all its features can be done with IRC, admittedly not easily, which kind of answers my own question, but……
• dmarlow 5y ago
  Not just to support a developer community, but maybe communication in general. I've mentioned this in the past and have thought this for years and years now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273869
• micropresident 5y ago
  I've been working on an interesting concept precisely for this sort of thing. It's pay-to-post and DM authors in a decentralized and unmoderated way (moderation happens via the micropayments). I cross-posted this blog over there: https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum/014ad3ec1c9c5488af76abf68c7c1c6138bd539d41dcf5c0a9a9787f624d7ff7 https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum/014ad3ec1c9c5488af76abf68c7...
• ronenlh 5y ago
  Forums are the obvious right choice for a developer community. But chats feel friendly while forums are formal and cold. Developers need a chat tool alongside the IDE. I was saddened when the ReasonML/ReScript community closed their chat for this reason.
• smokey_circles 5y ago
  The title makes me want to respond with "OK boomer". I'm glad I read it though. This is a great write up about community building on asynchronous, public forums vs private, synchronous chat. I notice IRC avoided a mention here though, but it suffers the same problems as discord (namely not being searchable)
• rawoke083600 5y ago
  100% agree ! Slack/Discord is like the Medium.com for blog posts. I dont want to start and app(even a webapp) just to get the info i need.
• cable2600 5y ago
  I used to use Yahoo Clubs/Groups but now they are all deleted. Had a lot of good developer talk in those groups. All you needed was an email address to subscribe to the newsletter.
• Gentil 5y ago
  Forums are awesome for this context. It is most of the time better for privacy as well. But is it just me or whenever I use Discourse forum, my FB container in Firefox shows it has blocked something which FB uses to track me! This is in multiple discourse forums self hosted and otherwise. So am assuming it is bundled with Discourse. This bugs me the hell out. And Discourse is everywhere too since it has an open source version. I think Flarum is awesome and maturing! (https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/)
  • reilly3000 5y ago
    It may be Facebook login. They don’t have native support for a Facebook pixel or like button to my knowledge and it’s not likely that every discourse forum is manually adding those things - it almost seems antithetical to have a self-hosted forum and be promoting a Facebook group/page.
    • Gentil 5y ago
      I hope they remove it. Anything and everything FB sends data. Their share button alone does it. Don't you think their auth does it too?
• intellix 5y ago
  Apollo Graphql (Meteor) moved to Spectrum chat for this reason, all conversions are basically searchable. It seems now they've moved to Github discussions which is also nice
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  Running a Discord "server" is a lot easier than running a forum. Most paid forums suck (they try hard to not look like forums, which also makes them not usable like forums). The alternatives are PHP (why are they all PHP?!) open-source dumps you get to install on an Apache node yourself. Or you can get a generic VPS and use tools like softaculous to set up the forum app. Most of these projects don't come with CAPTCHA out of the box, or proper GDPR compliance, or other things you'll want. That all said, running a forum is DEFINITELY worth it, and your customers will thank you (if not in actual words, in traffic).
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Yes bring phpBB back.
• drodio 5y ago
  For our Founder community, we went from Slack, to Discord, to Circle: https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/our-community-s-journey-from-slack-to-discord-to-circle https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/our-communit...
  • jpkeisala 5y ago
    Nice article and there is also indepth analysis of alternatives https://kb.founderculture.net/public/posts/460yq0p9 https://kb.founderculture.net/public/posts/460yq0p9. Intresting read!
• PicassoCTs 5y ago
  Is there a way to transcribe Discord comunity chat into php forum talk?
• jumperabg 5y ago
  Where are the forums? StackOverflow, GitHub/GitLab issues are a good alternative? Very rarely I just open up a question in Slack/Discord for some projects but I also get very rarely any answers, either I am lucky that someone else with the same issue there or it just stales forever or while I dig very deep and eventually find a solution.
  • M4v3R 5y ago
    GitHub apparently has a “Discussions” feature although I’ve never used it.
• sneak 5y ago
  Discourse (selfhosted, open source forum) > Discord (proprietary, centralized, censored spyware chat)
• KronisLV 5y ago
  So what's everyone's favourite forum software? Which of the many packages out there would actually be suitable to replicate the usability of Slack/Discord, without making all of the messages disappear like in a black hole? 1) Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/ Looks pretty modern and also offers managed instances if you'd like, but i can't help but to feel that it's pretty JS heavy and there is perhaps too much whitespace, which makes navigating longer threads somewhat cumbersome. To me, it seems like a case of UI > UX, which is an upsetting trend that i've noticed ("make something pretty rather than something functional"). 2) Flarum: https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ This one is perhaps a bit better in my eyes as far as the UX is concerned and seems to have actually been developed as a mobile first forum. It does have that modern look while at the same time being reasonably functional, and the idea of putting the forum structure tree in the sidebar actually works pretty well! 3) phpBB: https://www.phpbb.com/ https://www.phpbb.com/ Personally, this is my favourite from the "traditional" forum software, since it's really usable, it keeps a good information density, doesn't lose usability and isn't as JS heavy as any of the other alternatives. Also, there are plenty of plugins and even the default functionality provides you with most of the things that you'd like in a piece of forum software and the hardware requirements are pretty low. As someone who runs a phpBB forum or two myself, the biggest pain is perhaps updating, since you run into the very same issue of never knowing whether an update will break something or not and you might have to manually alter some config files if things go sideways. Also, admittedly, the admin UX could be better, but i guess that's just the software showing its age. That said, old is not necessarily always worse. 4) Simple Machines Forum: https://www.simplemachines.org/ https://www.simplemachines.org/ To me, it looks like a slightly simpler alternative to phpBB, with similarly good readability, slightly lower information density, but overall a very similar look and feel to phpBB. Can't talk much about its features, but some people have recommended it in the past. Also, in regards to the free plan memory limitations, has anyone here experimented with self-hosted IM solutions? Personally i'm running a Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/) instance which seems pretty nice and functional, for example, for a smaller software developer team, though others also have had good experiences with Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/) or other software.
  • eXpl0it3r 5y ago
• politelemon 5y ago
  > Problem #2: Google can’t see inside chats Search engines seem to do well with Gitter. It's very searchable and the search results lead to the exact timestamp where the discussion happened. I used to find decent support for Apache Airflow this way. A while ago they voted to move to Slack, not for any good reasons but because it was the popular place to be; The Slack setup was invite-only so search engines couldn't index it, and it was one with limited message retention, about 30 days I think. Very disappointing.
  • Uberphallus 5y ago
    I hate Gitter with a passion. It's indexed, but it's chat after all, meaning it's painful to read as there are multiple conversations going on, and whatever you're looking for needs to be extracted from below the noise floor. It always keeps coming up in my search results but it's absolutely never been useful to me.
  • pferde 5y ago
    And since Gitter is being turned into a frontend for Matrix, you might as well just have a Matrix room for your project. Or several rooms, grouped together in a "space".
• admin787 5y ago
  Thanks for visiting
• ksec 5y ago
  It doesn't go into issues which I think is the most important. Slack / Discord being free? Who is setting up the forum? Who is paying for it? Who does the maintenance? Who does the moderation with Spams? Part of the reason why Discourse took over most of the forum for Open Source is that they are free for Open Source Project. And there are little to no maintenance involves. Not to mention to this day, forum software still sucks.
• rcarmo 5y ago
  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.
• xakpc 5y ago
  I do agree, slack and discord become way to heavy and bloated. Forums might be the best way, but it need a new iteration or something. phpBB is way too old
• lemoncookiechip 5y ago
  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.
• peter_retief 5y ago
  I just have to agree with this.
• truly 5y ago
  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.
• buro9 5y ago
  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.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    I think #3 ("don't moderate away dissenting voices") is a pretty good line / tactic; it makes the community look more independent, instead of a "my product, my rules, I am absolute" community. I mean by all means be on staff, but stay out of forum politics - you are inherently biased towards e.g. criticism. Get some staff to help enforce rules / CoC / etc - if people are being dicks then ban them, but if they're providing feedback you don't like then just... leave it? Having a community as a third party of sorts helps keep you unbiased.
    • zinekeller 5y ago
      Of course, that doesn't mean that you allow straying too much out of the topic. Competitor's product that does it better? That's for your improvement, don't shut off critics. Geopolitics? Well, you need to draw a reasonable line sooner or later.
• lloydatkinson 5y ago
  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.
  • xeronik 5y ago
    The C# discord became a lot better after lloyd left due to his "extreme ego" lol. "if it seems like it's everyone else, then it's probably you"
    • dang 5y ago
      You can't attack another user like that here. I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
    • lloydatkinson 5y ago
      This individual targets people online with abuse that were once part of aforementioned server. I hope they get the help they need one day.
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  Classic forums never actually felt convenient. IMHO the best could be a StackExchange-like UI + HN-like hierarchical comments + allowance and convenience of repeating similar questions as the time passes (as the old answer may be inapplicable to a newer version or just not complete enough for a new person facing the same problem even why satisfactory for the previous one) + more permissive policy in regard of opinionated questions and answers. The best engine for this I have seen so far in Reddit (I men Old Reddit of course) and IIRC it has its source code open so anyone can run their own. From the pragmatic point of view I can see nothing comparable to GitHub Issues + Pages. A problem would have to be hell of importance to me to motivate me sufficiently to register on another website like a specific project's BugZilla but on GitHub everyone can find everything at one place and participate straight away as everybody apparently has a GitHub account nowadays anyway.
  • 12ian34 5y ago
    Have you ever used a Discourse forum? I've found them to be by far the most convenient, and would rate above old Reddit.
    • qwerty456127 5y ago
      Not really. Any example I could take a look at? I generally hate every more-than-2-user discussion engine which doesn't enforce hierarchical threads (making message-response relation always defined and clear and the whole chain easily traceable) and/or encourages real-time communication.
• bborud 5y ago
  Most forums I come across when searching for things (usually obscure problems in embedded software) are slow and they have very poor layout. Can someone recommend forum software that is fast and doesn't look terrible?
  • dom96 5y ago
    If you like Discourse but want something a bit lighter, check out: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum
• dusted 5y ago
  Sooo, back when I was growing up, phpbb was the shizzles.. What is the new style of persistent/web forums?
  • marceldegraaf 5y ago
    Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/ https://www.discourse.org/) seems to be used very frequently, at least for open source projects. EDIT: forgot to mention that Discourse is self-hostable, if that's your thing: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTALL.md https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...
    • dusted 5y ago
      Nice, thank you! :) I will investigate this. Self hosting is very very much my thing indeed.
• ansarispot 5y ago
  I often see people just outward disregard the value of chatting softwares and compare directly, cant we talk about co-existing of both?
• black_13 5y ago
  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
• adileo 5y ago
  Or maybe you can do both, that's the reason behind the tool I'm building right now: https://www.channelsync.chat/ https://www.channelsync.chat/ In this way you can mitigate #1 "the memory hole" and also the #2 "Google can’t see inside chats" while creating a mirrored forum version of the best content you have on Discord. It's still in closed alpha right now. But I would love to know what you think about it.
  • Carlseymanh 5y ago
    That's a pretty cool idea, can you choose which channels people can see while not being in the discord? You know why
• dlsa 5y ago
  I'm still evaluating this myself but: Alternatives exist in various ways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830640 I still like IRC but understand why its being left behind for plenty of purposes. Yet still useful for plenty more.
• giancarlostoro 5y ago
  I gotta say Dlang has my favorite approach to this problem, if only we could turn their forum into a simple Debian or Linux package, I wonder if that would help. Basically, you can see t he website or you can open them up with an NNTP reader (Newsreader) client and download the entire history of their forums for offline friendly reading. I don't know what's better than that, bonus points: you can post too! They also load blazing fast, and post to IRC and I forget what else they do. Regardless, they're not running bloated JS or anything, they just work.
• kache_ 5y ago
  ok boomer
• Zachsa999 5y ago
  Chat rather than ticket based support is great for people who are more timid, inexperienced, who don't have the knowledge to peice together a good question.
• ramesh31 5y ago
  There's a lot of value in both. I love being able to hop into a Discord for an open source project and get an immediate answer to a problem I'm dealing with. What we really need is something that logs out chats to a publicly available search indexed archive.
• lgessler 5y ago
  Dev communities are actually primarily for writing ad hoc documentation. From that perspective, the answer to which platform one ought to use for them is very clear.
• b0rsuk 5y ago
  Have there been any efforts to make forums INTEROPERATE with each other? A big advantage of Reddit or FB is that it's consistent and works well with another subreddit etc. Oldschool online forums can only link to outside posts, but there's no trivial feature to quote a post from another forum for example. You can do something like "quote='I edited this field manually'"
• sudotechie12 5y ago
  The benefit of a forum is searchability. Answers from a forum can be indexed in Google SEO which ended up driving a ton of traffic. I think forums struggle when you're building a product that is changing/evolving quickly. The information becomes dated and can even end up misleading users since workflows, terms, feature implementations are always changing. The success of a forum or any place where interaction occurs depends on engagement. Is there enough activity? Are people responsive? Is it discoverable? If you're not seeing traffic in your Slack/Discord server, then a forum will most likely not do much better. I also think empty forums feel like a graveyard, so I wouldn't expect my question to get many eyes. If you do go with the forum route, you'll need to seed content. One thing you can do is run both and see what happens. There are tools now out there that help you see all interactions across your various community channels. I work for a company called commonroom.io that shows you all activity, categorizes it, and enriches the user information, making it easy to see what's going on in your community and quickly segment for reporting or segmentation.
• philip1209 5y ago
  This resonates as true to me - chat software encourages urgency over quality in responses. The archives are mostly unusable because they're so stream-of-consciousness where context is essential to understanding messages. Forum software is just so difficult to use and manage. It often requires setting up a server from scratch, and take some technical chops to run or manage. I've wanted asynchronous forum software for my groups - whether professional or personal - for some time. And, I've wanted something that's as easy to set up as a Notion or Slack - meaning no domain tinkering, no custom server, and easy for less-technical folks to use. So, I'm attempting to build it! My project is called Booklet, and I am trying to make it a better Google Groups - with a focus on asynchronous, threaded conversations alongside a robust member directory. I'm a few months into building in the open, and hope to be ready for some early testers before the end of the year. If you're interested in trying it or following the journey, check it out: https://bookl.et https://bookl.et