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As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a

As a maintainer of a small open source project I have to disagree. The hurdle for someone to join Discord and ask a question is much lower than signing up to a custom forum and posting there. I also love interacting with people that use my stuff. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see that people are actually using it. I can see the other side of course. There are a few things that are repeated questions or useful content that may benefit others. I try to push that stuff into GitHub or add it to the docs. I've also thought about recording the Discord channel and publishing that too, so that the search engines get it. I am afraid that that may scare people away though. If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions.

CyberShadow 5y ago
Have you tried GitHub Discussions? They even have a Q&A mode for your own mini StackOverflow.
- binwiederhier 5y ago
  I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion. Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.
rcarmo 5y ago
Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way better experience.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who joins needs to create new account per instance
  - hedgewitch 5y ago
    You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are going to want to pay to host a forum.
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already familiar with setting up servers, handling access, setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you evening or two just to get going and after that it requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these custom forums actually have backups in case something goes wrong?
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    discourse is open source, you can put it on a raspberry pi
    - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
      Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice, but then again you didn't know that when you started. Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course you need to setup the software and learn how it works and keep it up to day forever. Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.
      - micromacrofoot 5y ago
        Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data. TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.
- spaniard89277 5y ago
  Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    Is composer a problem for shared hosts? Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
    - spaniard89277 5y ago
      I never thought of doing like you said. I've tried composer in a few shared, and it's been a hit or miss.
      - jeroenhd 5y ago
        I've started doing my composer installs offline when I foolishly tried to deploy a decently sized PHP project to a VPS with "only" 2GiB of RAM. For some obscure reason Composer eats RAM like it's cake and I couldn't get it to complete fast enough on the server itself. Composer on shared hosts is a challenge, mostly involving retrying until it works. That's why I fetch most dependencies locally. Sometimes I mess with the dependencies a bit when a specific dependency requires information about how the operating system is configured, but most of the time that's not necessary.
kitkat_new 5y ago
Perhaps Matrix is an option as well. It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed by search engines if you set the discussions to public Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split the community.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my experience. The way the discussion is structured changes completely when someone on the other end responds instantly, and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge. There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results. Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse. I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.
tluyben2 5y ago
Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years later.
- pas 5y ago
  But that IRC archive was written by a bot, not the server(s). Adding a bot to Discord is just as easy.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Seems not so easy as the oss project owners I asked to do that had no idea how. That would make life better indeed.
    - Coding_Cat 5y ago
      Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or less, large bots need approval) can see every message event in every channel they have access to using the websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API. From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/ https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.
    - pas 5y ago
      They have to invite the chosen bot, for example this one https://top.gg/bot/884415978459512862 https://top.gg/bot/884415978459512862 (I don't use it, haven't tried it.)
- password4321 5y ago
  https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this though.
throwaway3snao 5y ago
> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your data and metadata forever.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit will get leaked anyway
born-jre 5y ago
i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.
Prestoon 5y ago
One of my biggest issues is that the principles and ideas that come with the open source community are practically shutout by the use of discord. Information does not flow freely, it's locked in a server and it's not easily accessible by other people. It's not indexed by search engines. It might as well be missing completely. Half the time I plan to learn an open source project and learn that the majority of the discussion goes on in Discord, I already know that I'm going to have a horrible time finding answers when I need them so I just search for alternatives.
- binwiederhier 5y ago
  Isn't it an illusion though that GitHub is more accessible than discord? Yes, it's indexed by Google, buy these days it'll disappear quickly if it is deleted. I don't even know if all of GitHub and its issues are even indexed to be honest. You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read only without an account.
- MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
  This is the argument that most of these comments are making. But Discord isn't supposed to replace a bug tracker or documentation. It's supposed to replace IRC or a mailing list. The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all. And if you really need some piece of information in the Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search for it, all you need is an email. I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly prefer it to forums or IRC.
hedgewitch 5y ago
> There are a few things that are repeated questions I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails. It's an issue with the people, not the format. EDIT: > If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions. Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent. For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever." Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.
Hayarotle 5y ago
The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a wiki). Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums. Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this property by requiring some sort of authentication for new members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of the channels. Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box, discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages; like social media, it nudges you into using a single account for all your different interests. I can see how this combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards and IRC.
- tester756 5y ago
  >shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, How would that even work? google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it and have to scroll forever?
  - Hayarotle 5y ago
    They usually were two separate parts on the same page, the shout-box was a widget and its content did not get indexed. The forum was usually not a single-page application, and forum threads were paginated. Here's a modern-day example [1] [1] http://www.logic-sunrise.com/forums/ http://www.logic-sunrise.com/forums/
    - tester756 5y ago
      I thought you wanted to say in previous comment that shoutbox will be indexed, nvm.
vorpalhex 5y ago
I'm a discord user. I'm in several servers. I'm even Nitro. ...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not use the software. Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to join is very low. Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies you for every message until you tune it down.
- binwiederhier 5y ago
  I guess it is a personal preference then. I don't think any project will stop you from posting questions on GitHub in their issues. I for one will happily answer questions in discord or GitHub issues. I don't know about others.
- sanjiwatsuki 5y ago
  Although there are certainly some servers with gauntlets to join, I think that's only for some really huge ones that have scaling issues. I have no issue joining a Discord for technical assistance.
toastercat 5y ago
Gitter is better for your use-case. The search just sucks, but there are archive pages. You can also use a Matrix client to access Gitters.
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  It's a real shame GitLab bought Gitter just to let it rot.
mgdlbp 5y ago
As far as I can remember, I've never been able to use Discord at all as a guest through any device on my home network (always demands verification; never used Discord before through the ISP, and undoubtedly my dynamic IP has changed many times throughout). This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid' screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for which the help link doesn't even include the case of being seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord. Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.
iopq 5y ago
I'm more likely to go into Github issues or Discussions. If I join your discord, there's no guarantee I'll get an answer. I'm not staring at your Discord for a few hours trying to see if anyone decides to answer the question when they log back in

CyberShadow 5y ago

Have you tried GitHub Discussions? They even have a Q&A mode for your own mini StackOverflow.

binwiederhier 5y ago
I should check those out, thanks for the suggestion. Though I do feel that that splits the community even more. I do agree with he author's point that having too many communication channels split the people unnecessarily.

rcarmo 5y ago

Check out Discourse, which is a proper, modern forum and a way better experience.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago
aaand it costs $100/mo vs Discord being free and everyone who joins needs to create new account per instance
- hedgewitch 5y ago
  You can get it cheaper if you self-host, but it still requires a VPS, which, on average, costs more than most are going to want to pay to host a forum.
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    And with VPS you have to maintain the actual server. You can't just install it and be done. If you aren't already familiar with setting up servers, handling access, setting up software, and setting up DNS it will take you evening or two just to get going and after that it requires you continuous maintenance and how many of these custom forums actually have backups in case something goes wrong?
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  discourse is open source, you can put it on a raspberry pi
  - nextlevelwizard 5y ago
    Then you have to pay for a domain name (which granted is cheap), setup something to handle your IP changes, install and maintain the pi itself and hope there aren't any vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain a foothold in your home network, which means segragating it behind a VLAN which your ISP router probably doesn't support so you need to buy a router then of course you need to buy the pi it self and an SD card and powersuply since the normal micro-USB doesn't provice enough juice, but then again you didn't know that when you started. Then you probably want to buy a case for it so you don't just store a naked PCB on a shelve/floor. Then of course you need to setup the software and learn how it works and keep it up to day forever. Or you can just spin another Discord "server" which you already know how to do and not have to worry about hosting anything.
    - micromacrofoot 5y ago
      Sure but good luck if you ever want to leave Discord or do anything with the data. TBH it’s kind of weird to hear someone bemoan running a raspberry pi on hn. You could also use Digital Ocean for $5 a month, I think they have a one click Discourse install. I guess running your own stuff is old fashioned.
spaniard89277 5y ago
Discourse is an atrocious blob. If anyone is looking for a sleek forum software, Flarum is the answer IMO, https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ It's PHP, but requires composer so not as easy to setup in shared hosting as old forum software like MyBB et al.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Is composer a problem for shared hosts? Not that I would ever want to subject myself to shared hosting again, but I'm pretty sure you can run composer on your local machine to install the dependencies and then copy everything over, right? You've got to pay attention to what PHP modules are or aren't available on your shared host, but usually that's not too big of a problem.
  - spaniard89277 5y ago
    I never thought of doing like you said. I've tried composer in a few shared, and it's been a hit or miss.
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      I've started doing my composer installs offline when I foolishly tried to deploy a decently sized PHP project to a VPS with "only" 2GiB of RAM. For some obscure reason Composer eats RAM like it's cake and I couldn't get it to complete fast enough on the server itself. Composer on shared hosts is a challenge, mostly involving retrying until it works. That's why I fetch most dependencies locally. Sometimes I mess with the dependencies a bit when a specific dependency requires information about how the operating system is configured, but most of the time that's not necessary.

kitkat_new 5y ago

Perhaps Matrix is an option as well. It's open source and open (decentralized) - and can be indexed by search engines if you set the discussions to public Matrix can also be bridged to Discord, so you wouldn't split the community.

jeroenhd 5y ago
Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my experience. The way the discussion is structured changes completely when someone on the other end responds instantly, and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge. There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results. Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse. I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.

tluyben2 5y ago

Discord itself is fine, but it needs something to write it's logs to a public html page per channel every x hours. Cannot be that hard and everyone benefits. Every chat for open source should do that as so much valuable stuff is discussed per day that no-one will write down elsewhere.... I mean that's the only thing; all (open source) projects I knew on IRC had an archive in .html which was indexed. Handy to find issues years later.

pas 5y ago
But that IRC archive was written by a bot, not the server(s). Adding a bot to Discord is just as easy.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Seems not so easy as the oss project owners I asked to do that had no idea how. That would make life better indeed.
  - Coding_Cat 5y ago
    Unless they changed it, small scale bots (10 servers or less, large bots need approval) can see every message event in every channel they have access to using the websocket API. They can also query older messages. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to use the API. From there it's no longer a Discord problem, as you just need to export that data somewhere. There's bots which already partialy do this. There's bots that log edits & deletes for moderators to review and bots like TicketTool (https://tickettool.xyz/ https://tickettool.xyz/) let you create special one-off channels (tickets) that you can export to html on closure too.
  - pas 5y ago
    They have to invite the chosen bot, for example this one https://top.gg/bot/884415978459512862 https://top.gg/bot/884415978459512862 (I don't use it, haven't tried it.)
password4321 5y ago
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter Always scared to earn a ToS ban using something like this though.

throwaway3snao 5y ago

> If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions One reason more to stay away from Discord, which can keep your data and metadata forever.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago
Yeah, so instead your create accounts and have your email and potentially password stored in plaintext on some random guys server which they won't keep updated anyway so all your shit will get leaked anyway

born-jre 5y ago

i also have similar view, i think it could be solved by bot that can watch message and if someone asks_and_answers question that might be useful for broader people you could do something like /makrbot mark 5 then it will publish recent 5 conversation to some read only seachengine indexable public page, maybe also anonymize usernames.

Prestoon 5y ago

One of my biggest issues is that the principles and ideas that come with the open source community are practically shutout by the use of discord. Information does not flow freely, it's locked in a server and it's not easily accessible by other people. It's not indexed by search engines. It might as well be missing completely. Half the time I plan to learn an open source project and learn that the majority of the discussion goes on in Discord, I already know that I'm going to have a horrible time finding answers when I need them so I just search for alternatives.

binwiederhier 5y ago
Isn't it an illusion though that GitHub is more accessible than discord? Yes, it's indexed by Google, buy these days it'll disappear quickly if it is deleted. I don't even know if all of GitHub and its issues are even indexed to be honest. You are right though that GitHub is at least accessible read only without an account.
MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
This is the argument that most of these comments are making. But Discord isn't supposed to replace a bug tracker or documentation. It's supposed to replace IRC or a mailing list. The Linux kernel-dev mail list archives might technically be accessibly by anyone, but they're still not going to come up in a web search. And IRC history isn't stored at all. And if you really need some piece of information in the Discord server, you can join the Discord server and search for it, all you need is an email. I've been using Discord for a couple of years and greatly prefer it to forums or IRC.

hedgewitch 5y ago

> There are a few things that are repeated questions I honestly think that this issue is vastly overstated in the case of Discord. I've seen any number of even non-technical applications that could literally put, in bold, flashing text, "click here for setup instructions" right next to the download button and people would still be asking on Discord how to drag and drop or how to register an account or whatever inane setup procedure the application entails. It's an issue with the people, not the format. EDIT: > If you feel like everything you ask (even with you pseudonym) is recorded forever, you are more afraid to ask stupid questions. Ha. Funny. In my experience, this isn't a deterrent. For a not-quite-relevant, but nonetheless elucidating, example, see: Any number of celebrities on Twitter who have said something insanely stupid and later said "you don't think about how the things you say are going to stay up there forever." Social networks do a really good job of making permanence feel ephemeral to the average user. To those of us who know better, this is a strange concept, but the reality is that people don't really think about or care whether someone will judge them for their stupid questions in five years or so.

Hayarotle 5y ago

The issue of the barrier to entering a forum and ask a question used to be a non-issue, as it was easily solved by appending a shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, longer-form forum threads (as well as pinned threads that had a similar function to a wiki). Pseudonyms were less of a problem when you could use a different pseudonym in each forum, while on Discord/Reddit you are mostly confined to a single identity for all forums. Having a barrier of entry in the form of having to sign up to a custom forum to participate on threads had its problems, but was useful in preventing spam and low-effort content. Most larger Discord servers I've been in try to replicate this property by requiring some sort of authentication for new members to be able to even look at the discussions on most of the channels. Discord seems to stand on the middle ground between a shout-box, a message board and social media walls: like a shout-box, discussions are ephemeral and non-paginated, and not indexed on the web; like a message board, you can look up older messages; like social media, it nudges you into using a single account for all your different interests. I can see how this combination can work for some people and for some purposes, and I use it myself, but I much prefer the days of message boards and IRC.

tester756 5y ago
>shout-box to it. Ephemeral, anonymous, low barrier chat coexisted with search engine-indexed, How would that even work? google indexes something under forum.com/ and you enter it and have to scroll forever?
- Hayarotle 5y ago
  They usually were two separate parts on the same page, the shout-box was a widget and its content did not get indexed. The forum was usually not a single-page application, and forum threads were paginated. Here's a modern-day example [1] [1] http://www.logic-sunrise.com/forums/ http://www.logic-sunrise.com/forums/
  - tester756 5y ago
    I thought you wanted to say in previous comment that shoutbox will be indexed, nvm.

vorpalhex 5y ago

I'm a discord user. I'm in several servers. I'm even Nitro. ...and I'm probably not going to join your server to ask questions or get help. If I can't get help via your git platform or shoot off an email, I'm probably just going to not use the software. Gitter, for all it's flaws, is ok for this case. The effort to join is very low. Discord is a whole beast. Every server has a gauntlet to join with a dozen bots and channels, and then Discord over-notifies you for every message until you tune it down.

binwiederhier 5y ago
I guess it is a personal preference then. I don't think any project will stop you from posting questions on GitHub in their issues. I for one will happily answer questions in discord or GitHub issues. I don't know about others.
sanjiwatsuki 5y ago
Although there are certainly some servers with gauntlets to join, I think that's only for some really huge ones that have scaling issues. I have no issue joining a Discord for technical assistance.

toastercat 5y ago

Gitter is better for your use-case. The search just sucks, but there are archive pages. You can also use a Matrix client to access Gitters.

hocuspocus 5y ago
It's a real shame GitLab bought Gitter just to let it rot.

mgdlbp 5y ago

As far as I can remember, I've never been able to use Discord at all as a guest through any device on my home network (always demands verification; never used Discord before through the ISP, and undoubtedly my dynamic IP has changed many times throughout). This isn't helped by the infuriatingly opaque 'Invite Invalid' screen that is shown whenever I follow any invite link, for which the help link doesn't even include the case of being seemingly IP-range-blocked across all of Discord. Doesn't give a great impression for any of the large open-source projects that are the main reason I follow such links.

iopq 5y ago

I'm more likely to go into Github issues or Discussions. If I join your discord, there's no guarantee I'll get an answer. I'm not staring at your Discord for a few hours trying to see if anyone decides to answer the question when they log back in