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> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this. That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposi
by nulbyte 3y ago
> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this.
That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit.
But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord.
Competing with QuickBooks means competing for business clients, yet I can't imagine a business forgoing real documentation for Discord.
- hedora 3y agoThe last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos. Support has been useless too. As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.
- millzlane 3y agoI support QuickBooks for smaller companies by calling tech support for them, YMMV.
- brianjking 3y agoWait, you simply are a middleman? What percentage of the support can you provide without having to call Intuit yourself? Is this lucrative?
- bombcar 3y agoIt can be a decent side business for an IT support contractor. Quickly you learn the biggest issues, and only really need to spend time on special scenarios.
- olyjohn 3y agoThis is like 90% of Enterprise IT work. Install some box, follow their directions, make sure the port is open on your firewall... call the vendor when it breaks. IT is so often just being the middle man.
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoYet this is the middle man that brings in the business aspects, the context etc. Installing a product in a bank and at a soft ware vendor's can be dramatically different.
- drumhead 3y agoThat's pretty standard for a lot of companies. IT log the calls with the supplier.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI think just having someone who acts as a gatherer of info, so Intuit aren't being sent junk tickets, means service is resumed much quicker. And that's worth paying for.
- balaselvam 3y agoIf the company is serious enough about competing with Quickbooks and solving a real customer problem, Discord is not going to cut it.
- guax 3y agoI'm curious. Is this a criticism of their support. Real time chat in general or just specifically discord?
- callmeal 3y agoReal time chat in general and discord in particular. Discord cannot be self-hosted, so any support message history will be completely reliant on the goodwill of discord. Another problem with using a chat channel for support (slack has the same problem) is searching for things you know are there but are impossible to find again.
- icemelt8 3y agoso you want them to roll-out a discord like platform themselves?
- rco8786 3y agoAnd an ISP to host it on. As we know, if you don't self-host your ISP then you're beholden to the goodwill of a large corporation who could shut you down at any time.
- icemelt8 3y agowhat about the deep sea cables that run the internet, those can still be blocked by governments right?
- callmeal 3y agoNo, I want knowledge-base style documentation and faqs. Something slightly better than this single question: https://docs.bigcapital.ly/docs/faq https://docs.bigcapital.ly/docs/faq
- Spivak 3y agoFor better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now, having an active server where the core contributors participate is the sign of a healthy project. Honestly looks better than a public Slack imho and it's where they'll get the most engagement from devs. Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.
- heyoni 3y agoFree Slack tiers don’t allow searching beyond 10,000 messages so no one’s going to pick that over a free Discord server without such limitations.
- Jedd 3y agoEven this is no longer true - current free tier of Slack (as of a couple of months ago IIRC) is 90 days of retention, which for low-volume groups of users is even worse.
- andreasha 3y agoI think they retain it but you can't access it. One Slack I'm in activated the trial and everything was there and searchable.
- ghostpepper 3y agoThere used to be a workaround where you can still access the full archive as an exported JSON document
- andreasha 3y agoSeems to be still available for "Workspace Owners/Admins and Org Owners/Admins" https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
- 3y ago
- moneywoes 3y agoWhat would support be instead, a phone hotline?
- stbl219z8y 3y agoI think if you’re targeting developers, then Discord is fine. If you’re targeting businesses, then you’d want a contact-us form at the bare minimum.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoI'm a developer, and I find Discord to be a disorganized mess. I prefer a traditional support forum to Discord, and that's a pretty weak option.
- toastal 3y agoAnd if you want to preach the virtues of FOSS of your product, you’d offer FOSS real-time communications as at least an option. Slap in IRC, an XMPP MUC, Matrix Space. You could bridge to (not from) Discord as a second-class option if it was deemed valuable, but shouldn’t be the primary host.
- akvadrako 3y agoA phone is worse, but almost anything else is better: email, forms, old-school forums, discourse, github issues or discussions, etc...
- RobotToaster 3y agoAnything that isn't a walled garden. A forum, hell even a subreddit would be better, at least it wouldn't require an account to view and is indexable.
- donutshop 3y agoInteresting. I didn't realize they're behind the Argo project. Having second thoughts now.
- lelanthran 3y ago> But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord I always felt that projects used discord-only as a way to signal that they don't want to deal with users.
- orangepanda 3y agoHaving interacted with Stripe's chat and email support, I have a similar feeling - their goal is to get me to go away instead of actually helping with my problem. My first and only choice is their discord support, when that doesnt help I rather work around the problem than get stuck in their email limbo.
- TobyTheDog123 3y agoYour take doesn't make sense at all to me. It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?
- icemelt8 3y ago[flagged]
- quadrangle 3y agoI'm sure there's some subreddit or something where people appreciate knee-jerk defensive reactions to the entire idea of free/libre/open anything. There are people out there who actually hate public libraries… Supposedly HN is for reasonable discussions of things.
- that_guy_iain 3y agoIt seems to be a one man show project, which I don't think is their fulltime gig since the contact me is discord. Someone could fork the project and build on top of it to build a commercial project though. For me, this is actually a common problem with lots of open source projects. They're hobby projects with no commercial support behind them. It's a super good hobby project tho. If they invested in docs I think it would be onto a winner.
- homero 3y agoYou'd rather talk to a salesman than chat with the developers? Stripe at the beginning had a chatroom for support
- nulbyte 3y agoNo, I'd rather read the documentation than wait for a response to a question that should be addressed in the nonexistent documentation.
- rco8786 3y ago> 'support' link is a link to Discord For a FOSS project targeting people who are comfortable using FOSS this seems entirely fine...desirable even. "We don't have money for phone staff who would put you on hold and only be reading off scripted responses anyway, but you can come chat directly with the leaders and maintainers of the software by chat".
- jkepler 3y agoWhy don't they use IRC with public logs? Or a stack exchange style support wiki, so that it becomes documentation over time.
- capableweb 3y agoDiscord (and other non-indexable chats like Slack) is where conversations go to die and be hidden forever. FOSS and other "open" projects should be using something like Zulip, or even anything else, that can actually be indexed by Google and other search engines. I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thing and eventually stops helping people. In contrast, using Stack Overflow or anything else, people can search Google for answers and actually find it.
- cpach 3y agoPersonally I like Discourse. Similar to an old-school forum like phpbb, but with a neat and modern UI.
- metadaemon 3y agoI know some of the guys that work there too, really cool people.
- capableweb 3y ago~~~Well, besides the whole thing about my previous comment that everything you write in Discord stays in Discord and is basically not findable unless you're already a part of the Discord. While phpbb (or any public forum really) is by default readable by anyone, so searching for questions let you find answers without having to sign in and join the forum.~~~ Edit: Misheard parent...
- hluska 3y agoThis sort of armchair quarterbacking is why many people won’t open source things. Instead of shitting on someone’s work, get involved and make changes. It’s easier and keeps people involved.
- garbagecoder 3y agoMaybe people don't because getting involved means dealing with a bunch of thin-skinned people who can't take a legit criticism, like "accounting software can't have support on Discord." Do you want people to use it or to like you?
- bcrl 3y agoI did some integration work with QuickBooks online, and oh the horror! Simple things like reconciling transactions against a bank account couldn't be done via the supported API. There was basically no way to automate clicking on every single customer payment aside from scraping the website. Bonus: the website screws up when you have thousands of transactions that need to be reconciled. I couldn't come up with a good test case as it seems to be some weird internal race condition. In other words: I wholeheartedly welcome an open source project my business can build on.