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Yep, doing documentation and support through a chat service designed for gamers with terrible search that means the same question is going to be asked over and

Yep, doing documentation and support through a chat service designed for gamers with terrible search that means the same question is going to be asked over and over again and where most users behave as if they were 15 year olds because that is the prevailing social norm means I'm going to pass.

acedTrex 4y ago
Discords text search is incredible though, It's still not a good platform for support but not because search is bad
- andybak 4y ago
  > Discord's text search is incredible Really? There's no way to do verbatim searches and it's "very" generous in deciding what it thinks you meant to search for. It's almost useless for searching technical posts (or anything when you need to disambiguate similar words)
  - MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
    The primary use case that we’re talking about is that someone has a common error, in which case they can put that error message into Discord search and read conversation about previous errors. Discord search is perfectly adequate for that use case.
    - antifa 4y ago
      The primary use case is actually googling the error, in which discord falls flat on it's face. Every external chat room logs service I've seen has also had bad SEO, buggy, bad UI/UX, etc..
    - andybak 4y ago
      That's fairly close to my use case for which Discord fails miserably. But let's not get stuck on this point. There's a dozen other reasons why Discord shouldn't be used for technical forums
      - 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
        I don’t love that projects use discord now, but I don’t hate it either. Beyond the crappy search, what other reasons make discord a bad fit for technical forums? What’s your preferred solution?
        andybak 4y ago
        My question was driven by the fact I don't have a preferred solution that would suit both technical and non-technical users. But as for why Discord is a bad fit - it's completely opaque to search engines, it requires an invite, it has a fairly complex UI and it's basically "unstructured chat". Threads are an afterthought and don't come close to giving any proper structure. I want chat for people that, you know, want to chat - but structured posts with topics and categories are needed for any sane, long term knowledge-base. People on chat (this goes for IRC as well) will continually ask the same questions and you will continually have to answer them again because there's no structure.
  - TechBro8615 4y ago
    It’s far better than Slack’s search, which limits you to the last 10,000 messages unless you pay them a fee per member in your community.
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      This might change in the future as Discord tries to recoup their VCs' investment. See GitLab for a recent example.
      - TechBro8615 4y ago
        GitLab is charging for metered compute minutes, which is hardly an unreasonable bargain for users who have been them for free for two years. Slack's feature-gating is disconnected from any unit economics - indeed, they actually do _store_ the messages prior to the most recent 10,000, but they just refuse to index them. The cost of that indexing is relatively minimal and does not scale linearly with number of users.
        cercatrova 4y ago
        Doesn't matter what the technical justification is, it's a business move, not a tech move. It's about the customer's willingness to pay, and it looks like for Slack, companies are very willing to pay.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      > But according to Butterfield, Slack is actually an acronym. It stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge." https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name-2016-9?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name...
    - artifact_44 4y ago
    - 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
      Being better than Slack’s search doesn’t make it good.
- 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
  I actually don’t mind projects that use discord as their primary online community, but goddamn, discord’s text search is NOT amazing. Yes, it searches text and is likely fine for gaming / casual online communities. But man, it provides none of the utility I would expect a modern chat app’s search feature to have. Boolean operators, date ranges, wildcard matches, fuzzy matching, scoped searches (beyond just being able to specify a channel, like searching for a string in a user’s posts in a specific channel), etc. The subpar search functionally is a huge weakness, especially for communities like OSS where being able to meaningfully surface past comments / threads / solutions provides enormous value.
andybak 4y ago
I'm stuck with an open source project on Discord for a mix of developers, artists and casual users across a wide range of age groups. I'd love to migrate off but I honestly can't think of the right platform. 1. Lots of people like realtime chat. It's worth having something that fills that niche (the old "mailing list + IRC" combo used to work well) 2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX. 3. A "Stack Overflow" style site requires a lot of moderation and either annoys users for being too messy or annoys users for being too strict 4. I actually still have some fondness for Google Groups but Google's brand is too tainted for most people. 5. Nobody under 30 seems to use email any more so mailing lists are out but something that syncs with email is a must (reply notifications etc) I am also hoping for something free but very easy to install. (SaaS with a free tier, one-click docker or similar). And easy on resources ideally (I guess $10/month for hosting is about our limit at the moment) Yeah. I'm asking for a lot.
- dom96 4y ago
  > 2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX. Isn't Discourse an answer to that?
  - rapnie 4y ago
    Yes, can use Discourse for async, long-term communication. Or Flarum if you want something more modern feeling (but with a lot less features). And then Matrix for real-time chat. Bridge it to IRC if you want. Search is not great in Matrix but sufficient for simple keyword searches.
    - synergy20 4y ago
      I just checked out Flarum the other day, why is it more modern? I actually found Discourse is still much better. Flarum does not even have nested reply threads as far as I can tell, it's all flat and hard to read for any thread of replies.
      - 4y ago

acedTrex 4y ago

Discords text search is incredible though, It's still not a good platform for support but not because search is bad

andybak 4y ago
> Discord's text search is incredible Really? There's no way to do verbatim searches and it's "very" generous in deciding what it thinks you meant to search for. It's almost useless for searching technical posts (or anything when you need to disambiguate similar words)
- MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
  The primary use case that we’re talking about is that someone has a common error, in which case they can put that error message into Discord search and read conversation about previous errors. Discord search is perfectly adequate for that use case.
  - antifa 4y ago
    The primary use case is actually googling the error, in which discord falls flat on it's face. Every external chat room logs service I've seen has also had bad SEO, buggy, bad UI/UX, etc..
  - andybak 4y ago
    That's fairly close to my use case for which Discord fails miserably. But let's not get stuck on this point. There's a dozen other reasons why Discord shouldn't be used for technical forums
    - 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
      I don’t love that projects use discord now, but I don’t hate it either. Beyond the crappy search, what other reasons make discord a bad fit for technical forums? What’s your preferred solution?
      - andybak 4y ago
        My question was driven by the fact I don't have a preferred solution that would suit both technical and non-technical users. But as for why Discord is a bad fit - it's completely opaque to search engines, it requires an invite, it has a fairly complex UI and it's basically "unstructured chat". Threads are an afterthought and don't come close to giving any proper structure. I want chat for people that, you know, want to chat - but structured posts with topics and categories are needed for any sane, long term knowledge-base. People on chat (this goes for IRC as well) will continually ask the same questions and you will continually have to answer them again because there's no structure.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  It’s far better than Slack’s search, which limits you to the last 10,000 messages unless you pay them a fee per member in your community.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    This might change in the future as Discord tries to recoup their VCs' investment. See GitLab for a recent example.
    - TechBro8615 4y ago
      GitLab is charging for metered compute minutes, which is hardly an unreasonable bargain for users who have been them for free for two years. Slack's feature-gating is disconnected from any unit economics - indeed, they actually do _store_ the messages prior to the most recent 10,000, but they just refuse to index them. The cost of that indexing is relatively minimal and does not scale linearly with number of users.
      - cercatrova 4y ago
        Doesn't matter what the technical justification is, it's a business move, not a tech move. It's about the customer's willingness to pay, and it looks like for Slack, companies are very willing to pay.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    > But according to Butterfield, Slack is actually an acronym. It stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge." https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name-2016-9?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name...
  - artifact_44 4y ago
  - 9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
    Being better than Slack’s search doesn’t make it good.
9935c101ab17a66 4y ago
I actually don’t mind projects that use discord as their primary online community, but goddamn, discord’s text search is NOT amazing. Yes, it searches text and is likely fine for gaming / casual online communities. But man, it provides none of the utility I would expect a modern chat app’s search feature to have. Boolean operators, date ranges, wildcard matches, fuzzy matching, scoped searches (beyond just being able to specify a channel, like searching for a string in a user’s posts in a specific channel), etc. The subpar search functionally is a huge weakness, especially for communities like OSS where being able to meaningfully surface past comments / threads / solutions provides enormous value.

andybak 4y ago

I'm stuck with an open source project on Discord for a mix of developers, artists and casual users across a wide range of age groups. I'd love to migrate off but I honestly can't think of the right platform. 1. Lots of people like realtime chat. It's worth having something that fills that niche (the old "mailing list + IRC" combo used to work well) 2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX. 3. A "Stack Overflow" style site requires a lot of moderation and either annoys users for being too messy or annoys users for being too strict 4. I actually still have some fondness for Google Groups but Google's brand is too tainted for most people. 5. Nobody under 30 seems to use email any more so mailing lists are out but something that syncs with email is a must (reply notifications etc) I am also hoping for something free but very easy to install. (SaaS with a free tier, one-click docker or similar). And easy on resources ideally (I guess $10/month for hosting is about our limit at the moment) Yeah. I'm asking for a lot.

dom96 4y ago
> 2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX. Isn't Discourse an answer to that?
- rapnie 4y ago
  Yes, can use Discourse for async, long-term communication. Or Flarum if you want something more modern feeling (but with a lot less features). And then Matrix for real-time chat. Bridge it to IRC if you want. Search is not great in Matrix but sufficient for simple keyword searches.
  - synergy20 4y ago
    I just checked out Flarum the other day, why is it more modern? I actually found Discourse is still much better. Flarum does not even have nested reply threads as far as I can tell, it's all flat and hard to read for any thread of replies.
    - 4y ago