12 ms·

Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

396 points by vmatsiiako 3y ago

whinvik 3y ago
Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability. The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.
- makeitshine 3y ago
  Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    I rather like Discord search and found it to be fast and reliable to use.
  - pratnala 3y ago
    It is called Discourse and it is far better.
  - iknowstuff 3y ago
    What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well
    - Kye 3y ago
      It's the lack of verbatim search. I can't plonk an error message in quotes and have Discord return only comments with that. Instead I'm inundated with irrelevant comments. This wouldn't be a problem if so many things didn't use Discord for support. It's being overloaded as a knowledge base, support forum, and community when it doesn't handle any of these functions well.
  - PUSH_AX 3y ago
    Discord search is pretty standard, you can do much worse. Especially at their scale.
    - makeitshine 3y ago
      Standard in what way? It can't even do partial matches or words with close spelling. It's pretty much exact whole words only or nothing.
      - PUSH_AX 3y ago
        Which, is pretty standard..
        makeitshine 3y ago
        On what platform? Every single social media app I use has some form of partial matching in the search boxes.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    But there already is one. It's called a forum :)
- rtpg 3y ago
  to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity. I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform. Not perfect for many reasons, but having to sign up to random forums to try and interact with support for, like, Circle CI has always felt a bit silly for me.
  - kijin 3y ago
    Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform. Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.
    - mbirth 3y ago
      Tapatalk was/is great to heighten the experience in that regard. But I’m not sure whether it is still supported with recent versions of forum software. Also many admins didn’t like it as people using Tapatalk didn’t produce ad impressions. Nowadays, forums should support ActivityPub so I can subscribe to threads from e.g. my Lemmy instance.
- ssivark 3y ago
  We could try using vector search to surface better matches, or LLMs to summarize large forum threads, etc.
- corentin88 3y ago
  I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.
  - Kye 3y ago
    Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.
- rvdginste 3y ago
  I agree, I think forums and things like Slack/Discord/IRC is used for different kinds of communication. Forums are rather asynchronous, while the others are rather synchronous. When a forum is used to help someone fix a problem, there is a communication thread that (as you say) can be searched and followed by other people. In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears". Even if you have seachable logs, I think these are a lot harder to search than a forum that is more "structured". I do believe there is value in having both forums and Slack/Discord/IRC.
  - Xcelerate 3y ago
    > In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears" This drives me nuts. I went from one company that used Workplace to a different one that uses Slack, and I can never find anything anymore. “Who was in that conversation back in November? What timeline for this project did we agree upon?” I spend half an hour adjusting search filters in Slack to try and find information like this.
    - ghshephard 3y ago
      Strongly recommend you use a knowledge engine like glean (or one of it's many competitors) at work - pulls together slack, google docs/sheets, confluence, github - single place to filter by date, document type, who it's from, etc....
      - tinodb 3y ago
        That’s just bandaid. Using chat to manage projects is just a bad idea a lot of people now got used to….
- kandros 3y ago
  I recently had problems finding an old message, I learned that having “streamer mode” enabled prevents a lot of search features and filters I had no idea why streamer mode was active so worth checking it this also apply to you
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    Discord will automatically switch to streamer mode if you paunch a recording/streaming app like OBS, so that could be it.
potatoicecoffee 3y ago
good move, i certainly seem to get better responses when i post my hog on a forum compared to slack
Brajeshwar 3y ago
I've heard that Slack becomes gigantically costly once you hit certain thresholds. Another big community is moving away from it after spending nearly $0.5M a year just on Slack.
- worik 3y ago
  > Another big community Who?
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Pieter Levels' Nomad List was one, I recall. They moved to Telegram recently.
  - habitue 3y ago
    OnDeck is also moving away from it
    - dopeboy 3y ago
      That's right - OnDeck was spending $500k/month on it.
      - dopeboy 3y ago
        Typo - a year
- colechristensen 3y ago
  The free version of slack has no user limits. The paid version is about 8 or 12 dollars a month per active user. You get more features and unlimited history with paid.
- ssnistfajen 3y ago
  It's possible to negotiate bulk pricing. The billing is also based on the number of active days per user: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-Policy https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin..., so a 5000 member community doesn't necessarily mean they'll have to pay $7.25*5000 every month. But agreed Slack is generally a poor choice to host any non-profit-making organizations due to having to choose between either gated knowledge or allocating a hefty expense. Discord is the better alternative for now due to the lack of content gating in the free tier but that might change when they become desperate enough with their profitability push.
ironmagma 3y ago
I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.
- jmspring 3y ago
  I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    Discord represents the same problem
  - ironmagma 3y ago
    Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.
    - hannofcart 3y ago
      Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        I much prefer being a lurker.
      - andersa 3y ago
        This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.
      - 3y ago
sublinear 3y ago
From the article: > Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS. Wanted to leave a link here for the impatient https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Why would they create their own? That just feels like wasted resources, given that forum software is a solved platform.
  - alberth 3y ago
    Agreed. Also, Strapi has one of those odd licenses where everything is MIT expect what’s in /ee directory https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE
    - sublinear 3y ago
      "Open Core Model" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model Enterprise edition features require a license file, so that directory would be empty and is not needed to use the community edition. Most people do not need the enterprise edition and despite what some think, a CMS is fairly trivial to write from scratch anyway. That's why there are so many out there. It's a lazy business model. The general idea is more valuable than the actual code. People who pay for a CMS or start out with an open-core product will eventually have to shift priorities towards protecting what they've built otherwise when they scale up. Cheaper to migrate to your own thing than pay a license in the long term. It's more of a business decision than a technical one to do the cost-benefit analysis. The data, community, brand, etc. are so much more valuable than the platform making vendor lock-in almost impossible unless you're stacked to the ceiling with idiots who can't code at all. That's their customer: entities who want a website or app and don't need to think about the long-term cost yet or ever.
  - sublinear 3y ago
stvsu 3y ago
Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!
- wolverine876 3y ago
  What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.
  - pocketarc 3y ago
    I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s. I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it. A real contender for "new forum software" would have to address the fact that Discord is its competitor, not other forum software, and it would have to have a very compelling answer for "why this instead of Discord".
    - rytis 3y ago
      > modern forum stack Genuinely curious, what would that be? From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search? Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?
      - pocketarc 3y ago
        I'm referring to the whole UX of it, really. The experience for mobile users, the "join community" process for new users, the experience for the community owner, not just moderation but how easy it is to start a new community. You can go and start a new Discord community in a minute. It's free and with no restrictions on the number of members. Anyone wanting to launch new forum software needs to compete with that. And on top of that, "just self-host" isn't enough in an era where developers don't even want to self-host their own projects anymore, let alone some third-party forum. That's another thing that has -deeply- changed in the last 20 years.
calimac 3y ago
[dead]
muratsu 3y ago
I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.
  - bsder 3y ago
    What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?
    - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
      Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.
- james_impliu 3y ago
  (Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas. In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team! And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.
  - ssivark 3y ago
    It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.
jerrygoyal 3y ago
I wonder if they considered reddit.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Reddit missed a massive opportunity imo. They could have become a really good disqus competitor if they allowed embedding of Reddit comments in the post it links to.
- chrisandchris 3y ago
  Or Stackoverflow? They basically have this answer-question-thing solved very good.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  Base your business on proprietary platform with history of making user hostile actions? That couldn’t go wrong.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  Given reddit's recent middle finger to it's long time user base I'd not base any part of my business around it. Sure, if some employees wanted to hang out on reddit and answer a few questions more power to them, but as the official company forum/info outlet? no way.
stevenicr 3y ago
Hoping someone was going to show a phpbb or vbulletin theme that makes it look like slack if you are logged in, and look like pinterst / instagram / tiktok - when logged out. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to move a lot of people back into forums - they just expect the threads and thumbs to look different on mobile.
opportune 3y ago
Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.
- chrisin2d 3y ago
  I'm impressed by how much sheer ~style~ PostHog is rocking, from the Ursula von Der Leyen privacy notice to hedgehog Godzilla hero video on their home page.
  - astrange 3y ago
    That's a bad sign since it implies they know what their own name means rather than it being some kind of weird coincidence.
amtamt 3y ago
XMPP would have been a nice substitute. Will all the history record in plain text and grep'ability without having to write slack webhooks handlers to perform basic automation is a serious time saver and force multiplier. I think the most troblesome aspect of Slack is the "highlighting" individuals. Usually the most productive command during a typical work day is ... `killall slack` :)
progval 3y ago
> useful solutions aren't searchable on our site or via Google. And since their forum does not render without Javascript, it is still not archived on archive.org, and probably not searchable with Bing or Duckduckgo
- makepanic 3y ago
  It's working fine once it's archived tho, see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20240114085417/https://posthog.com/questions https://web.archive.org/web/20240114085417/https://posthog.c...
  - progval 3y ago
    My bad, it wasn't visible until I disabled uBlock, requests seem to be caught by the "uBlock filters – Privacy" list. Does the IA actually run the JS and archive the fetched JSON on its own, or does it depend on someone visiting the archive page with their browser to trigger archival of this JSON data?
- rmbyrro 3y ago
  Their blog also seems to rely on JS to render text. I mean, most sessions will have almost no user interactions besides scrolling. Generating the HTML and serving it static seems a no brainer...
- factormeta 3y ago
  another reason to stop using SPA and use island base or NO JS web page for informational stuff like forum and discussion. At least displaying of information on the web should NOT depend on JS.
altairprime 3y ago
Slack is reviewing and canceling long-standing discounts these days, so there’s going to be many more instances where companies are no longer willing to pay $$ per user per month instead of hosting a forum.
- nottorp 3y ago
  It never made sense to pay per user for a public support-oriented slack. Internal slack with a finite number of people, that's another matter.
  - altairprime 3y ago
    It could make sense, at the time, if your support staff were on Slack, and you had high hopes for community engagement, and Slack offered discounts to get you hooked.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > you had high hopes for community engagement If you have high hopes for engagement instead of offering a product people want to buy, you deserve your fate :)
      - altairprime 3y ago
        > your fate Up to and including the collapse of your business and/or a successful VC unicorn exit, yes!
lpapez 3y ago
Laravel does this with their Laracasts forum and it's great. It's the first place I seek answers for it, before ChatGPT and before StackOverflow. You simply can't beat well moderated public forums when it comes to historic search.
- gassiss 3y ago
  true, I do the same when I'm looking for truenas or proxmox answers
arthur_sav 3y ago
I've been part of an open source project for well over 2 years now. We use Slack for community management (3k users). It's pretty clear to me that Slack was never really meant to replace forums: - Lots of the previously answered questions are lost - Search is not great and is limited to Slack. We have many non-slack users searching through Google. - It's noisy with random chatter - It's harder for us to keep track of questions to answer. I think Slack is great for really small communities or for new products that need quick feedback but not for large community management.
- rvdginste 3y ago
  I think forum/mailinglist and Slack/Discord/IRC are different kinds of communication: the first is rather asynchronous/offline while the second is rather synchronous/online. I believe they can exist next to each other within a project or community. For keeping track of specific questions and how those can be answered, a forum is a lot better. But random chatter can also be useful and that is a better fit for things like IRC.
pants2 3y ago
Both forums and discord are really bad for finding quick answers. You enter a 40 page thread with post on post of speculation and "try this" - if you have more than 100 active users you need a voting system like Reddit or Stack Overflow. Otherwise the best content gets drowned out by the bad content.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  And even with those you need strict content moderation, else you get the same problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
igeligel_dev 3y ago
Wondering why they do not use GitHub discussions. Found it quite great to use. Also costs less to maintain raw money-wise. Any negative opinions around GitHub discussions?
lawgimenez 3y ago
The only chat community I enjoyed was stackoverflow chat. The early days, 2010-2015 I think. The UI was simple, no fancy stuffs. Very fast on mobile browser, no push notifications, no fancy avatars, reminds me of IRC.
pyromaker 3y ago
I've been using https://aihackers.ai https://aihackers.ai as my forum for the past few months for my own community (built on HN clone tool) - works very well for me.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum. Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?
- mathgladiator 3y ago
  Why is it insane? I'm thinking of hiring an intern to build a forum for my saas using my platform. I can have fantastic integration and make it open source to educate on my platform.
  - philipwhiuk 3y ago
    It's ridiculous we've had forums for decades and people still feel the need to re-invent the wheel (at the huge engineering time and cost involved).
  - julianlam 3y ago
    Because simply put, thinking that a forum is a weekend project is the issue. I thought that once... it's just a couple of tables in a database and a nice frontend, right? I've been at this (building forum software) for a decade now, and I'm still innovating. Good luck!
wdb 3y ago
Not a huge fan of moving to forums for these kind of community activities. A big barrier when things get indexed by Google. Limits discussions.
donohoe 3y ago
I think this is a good move (leaving Slack) but without knowing more internal info I think it could equally be a bad one. The issue I see is they are building their own in-house solution. That’s a project in itself - and time not focusing on the core products. It could have been mitigated if they used on off-the-shelf solution as a foundation, but instead they are re-inventing or rebuilding login/regi, user management, moderation, threads, etc from scratch - with the bugs that come with it. They at least considered it and would be interested to know their rationale. That’s a lot of internal resources. Time will tell if it’s worth it.
octacat 3y ago
If someone wanna build an XMPP modern open source UI, we could could cooperate with building the missing features on the server side with MongooseIM. The open source clients are currently pretty outdated. Matrix protocol has nice UI clients though, but not XMPP.
flohofwoe 3y ago
I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).
- warthog 3y ago
  Oh certainly - I go ballistic whenever I see a Discord link for support or community
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    At the very least discord doesn't make threads which get lost in the channel like slack. But both suffer without tools like telegram which automatically catalogs all links, files, images, etc into tabs. But at the end of the day a chat system isn't meant to be documentation. It's meant to be chat. If you and me talk in the hallway, we wouldn't then tell a colleague oh yeah we figured it out in the hallway don't worry. We would try and document it somehow so that it's useful later.
    - georgyo 3y ago
      Discord does have threads, just that they are so heavy weight and even less discoverable that they don't get much use.
    - xp84 3y ago
      “We figured it out in the hallway, go play back the recording from the hallway recording system until you find the bit where we addressed it”
  - tchock23 3y ago
    Glad to hear I’m not the only one. It makes me irrationally angry when I see Discord being the support channel for a product.
  - 3y ago
theanirudh 3y ago
Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source. https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/
apitman 3y ago
I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them. Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to. I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they use Discourse[0]. It could work like a normal forum for users who don't participate in the Fediverse, but for those who do you could post from your existing Mastodon/Lemmy/etc ActivityPub account. [0]: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-activitypub-over-atproto/3707 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-a...
- kbenson 3y ago
  Given your complaint, what benefit is there to building a forum on ActivityPub over just allowing ActivityPub as a login mechanism?
  - apitman 3y ago
    I'm assuming you mean sending a one time passcode to the AP account? I think that would be a great idea. But it's also highly phishable. And full AP integration allows users to own their data if they want.
- proactivesvcs 3y ago
  Discourse is currently working on AP federation: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117 https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117 I am pretty excited for the future of the open Web for the first time in a long time.
- julianlam 3y ago
  The fact that the Socialhub uses Discourse is as you said, no forums pursued ActivityPub integration at that time. NodeBB, Flarum, and yes, Discourse, are pursuing it now.
FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
For me, Reddit is basically my forum of choice (yes, the "old" version is in fact a forum). You can concat several subreddits together that recreate the forum experience of yesteryear. For instance one of the many I follow daily: https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+msp+sysadmin+sysadminjobs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+m... Not the greatest but it gets the job done (mostly)
- xp84 3y ago
  Neat trick!
- poisonborz 3y ago
  I never got why big forums/engines back then weren't converging more to reddit structure, like the ability to subscribe to specific threads and have a custom starting screen.
bitcurious 3y ago
A useful LLM-based product would be something that can scan discord discussions for "useful" information and replicate it in a forum format, for posterity, but ignore the mundane/trivial.
animeepisode 3y ago
[flagged]
wslh 3y ago
Seriously, a critical issue when deciding to use a forum software is security. Once a software is popular (or insecure by default) you are required inviting hackes while you are sleeping. Security is very expensive and few companies have the budget and the attitude to be continuously awake and proactive.
symlinkk 3y ago
Nice that should make it much easier for ChatGPT to access that information and make it so that humans aren’t needed at all!
jkmcf 3y ago
I’m surprised I haven’t seen a chat interface on top of the Discourse, or other, forum. Discord introduced subject-based chats, but they seem secondary to the fire hose of the topic channels and not used much where I participate.
- julianlam 3y ago
  NodeBB has one
vfclists 3y ago
How come so far there has been only one mention of Zulip?
crossroadsguy 3y ago
Duplication and painful search and information access seems so intentional in tools like Slack and Discord. And these feed each other in a vicious cycle.
l72 3y ago
What is the best opensource forum software?
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Discourse is popular and pretty good. I think Zulip could be better, but less popular.
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  From a user perspective I really like Flarum https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ Some example forums that use flarum: Flarum itself: https://discuss.flarum.org/ https://discuss.flarum.org/ GrapheneOS: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ Kagi and Orion: https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/ https://orionfeedback.org/ https://orionfeedback.org/ Mailcow: https://community.mailcow.email/ https://community.mailcow.email/ Many more can be found here: https://builtwithflarum.com/ https://builtwithflarum.com/
julianlam 3y ago
Awesome trend! > Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS. So, they did no research on actual modern forum software. Got it.

396 points by vmatsiiako 3y ago

Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability. The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.

makeitshine 3y ago
Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  I rather like Discord search and found it to be fast and reliable to use.
- pratnala 3y ago
  It is called Discourse and it is far better.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well
  - Kye 3y ago
    It's the lack of verbatim search. I can't plonk an error message in quotes and have Discord return only comments with that. Instead I'm inundated with irrelevant comments. This wouldn't be a problem if so many things didn't use Discord for support. It's being overloaded as a knowledge base, support forum, and community when it doesn't handle any of these functions well.
- PUSH_AX 3y ago
  Discord search is pretty standard, you can do much worse. Especially at their scale.
  - makeitshine 3y ago
    Standard in what way? It can't even do partial matches or words with close spelling. It's pretty much exact whole words only or nothing.
    - PUSH_AX 3y ago
      Which, is pretty standard..
      - makeitshine 3y ago
        On what platform? Every single social media app I use has some form of partial matching in the search boxes.
- nottorp 3y ago
  But there already is one. It's called a forum :)
rtpg 3y ago
to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity. I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform. Not perfect for many reasons, but having to sign up to random forums to try and interact with support for, like, Circle CI has always felt a bit silly for me.
- kijin 3y ago
  Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform. Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.
  - mbirth 3y ago
    Tapatalk was/is great to heighten the experience in that regard. But I’m not sure whether it is still supported with recent versions of forum software. Also many admins didn’t like it as people using Tapatalk didn’t produce ad impressions. Nowadays, forums should support ActivityPub so I can subscribe to threads from e.g. my Lemmy instance.
ssivark 3y ago
We could try using vector search to surface better matches, or LLMs to summarize large forum threads, etc.
corentin88 3y ago
I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.
- Kye 3y ago
  Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.
rvdginste 3y ago
I agree, I think forums and things like Slack/Discord/IRC is used for different kinds of communication. Forums are rather asynchronous, while the others are rather synchronous. When a forum is used to help someone fix a problem, there is a communication thread that (as you say) can be searched and followed by other people. In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears". Even if you have seachable logs, I think these are a lot harder to search than a forum that is more "structured". I do believe there is value in having both forums and Slack/Discord/IRC.
- Xcelerate 3y ago
  > In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears" This drives me nuts. I went from one company that used Workplace to a different one that uses Slack, and I can never find anything anymore. “Who was in that conversation back in November? What timeline for this project did we agree upon?” I spend half an hour adjusting search filters in Slack to try and find information like this.
  - ghshephard 3y ago
    Strongly recommend you use a knowledge engine like glean (or one of it's many competitors) at work - pulls together slack, google docs/sheets, confluence, github - single place to filter by date, document type, who it's from, etc....
    - tinodb 3y ago
      That’s just bandaid. Using chat to manage projects is just a bad idea a lot of people now got used to….
kandros 3y ago
I recently had problems finding an old message, I learned that having “streamer mode” enabled prevents a lot of search features and filters I had no idea why streamer mode was active so worth checking it this also apply to you
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Discord will automatically switch to streamer mode if you paunch a recording/streaming app like OBS, so that could be it.

potatoicecoffee 3y ago

good move, i certainly seem to get better responses when i post my hog on a forum compared to slack

Brajeshwar 3y ago

I've heard that Slack becomes gigantically costly once you hit certain thresholds. Another big community is moving away from it after spending nearly $0.5M a year just on Slack.

worik 3y ago
> Another big community Who?
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Pieter Levels' Nomad List was one, I recall. They moved to Telegram recently.
- habitue 3y ago
  OnDeck is also moving away from it
  - dopeboy 3y ago
    That's right - OnDeck was spending $500k/month on it.
    - dopeboy 3y ago
      Typo - a year
colechristensen 3y ago
The free version of slack has no user limits. The paid version is about 8 or 12 dollars a month per active user. You get more features and unlimited history with paid.
ssnistfajen 3y ago
It's possible to negotiate bulk pricing. The billing is also based on the number of active days per user: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billing-Policy https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin..., so a 5000 member community doesn't necessarily mean they'll have to pay $7.25*5000 every month. But agreed Slack is generally a poor choice to host any non-profit-making organizations due to having to choose between either gated knowledge or allocating a hefty expense. Discord is the better alternative for now due to the lack of content gating in the free tier but that might change when they become desperate enough with their profitability push.

ironmagma 3y ago

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

jmspring 3y ago
I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Discord represents the same problem
- ironmagma 3y ago
  Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.
  - hannofcart 3y ago
    Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      I much prefer being a lurker.
    - andersa 3y ago
      This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.
    - 3y ago

sublinear 3y ago

From the article: > Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS. Wanted to leave a link here for the impatient https://strapi.io/ https://strapi.io/

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Why would they create their own? That just feels like wasted resources, given that forum software is a solved platform.
- alberth 3y ago
  Agreed. Also, Strapi has one of those odd licenses where everything is MIT expect what’s in /ee directory https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE
  - sublinear 3y ago
    "Open Core Model" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model Enterprise edition features require a license file, so that directory would be empty and is not needed to use the community edition. Most people do not need the enterprise edition and despite what some think, a CMS is fairly trivial to write from scratch anyway. That's why there are so many out there. It's a lazy business model. The general idea is more valuable than the actual code. People who pay for a CMS or start out with an open-core product will eventually have to shift priorities towards protecting what they've built otherwise when they scale up. Cheaper to migrate to your own thing than pay a license in the long term. It's more of a business decision than a technical one to do the cost-benefit analysis. The data, community, brand, etc. are so much more valuable than the platform making vendor lock-in almost impossible unless you're stacked to the ceiling with idiots who can't code at all. That's their customer: entities who want a website or app and don't need to think about the long-term cost yet or ever.
- sublinear 3y ago

stvsu 3y ago

Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!

wolverine876 3y ago
What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.
- pocketarc 3y ago
  I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s. I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it. A real contender for "new forum software" would have to address the fact that Discord is its competitor, not other forum software, and it would have to have a very compelling answer for "why this instead of Discord".
  - rytis 3y ago
    > modern forum stack Genuinely curious, what would that be? From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search? Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?
    - pocketarc 3y ago
      I'm referring to the whole UX of it, really. The experience for mobile users, the "join community" process for new users, the experience for the community owner, not just moderation but how easy it is to start a new community. You can go and start a new Discord community in a minute. It's free and with no restrictions on the number of members. Anyone wanting to launch new forum software needs to compete with that. And on top of that, "just self-host" isn't enough in an era where developers don't even want to self-host their own projects anymore, let alone some third-party forum. That's another thing that has -deeply- changed in the last 20 years.

calimac 3y ago

[dead]

muratsu 3y ago

I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.
- bsder 3y ago
  What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.
james_impliu 3y ago
(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas. In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team! And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.
- ssivark 3y ago
  It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.

jerrygoyal 3y ago

I wonder if they considered reddit.

ramraj07 3y ago
Reddit missed a massive opportunity imo. They could have become a really good disqus competitor if they allowed embedding of Reddit comments in the post it links to.
chrisandchris 3y ago
Or Stackoverflow? They basically have this answer-question-thing solved very good.
wiseowise 3y ago
Base your business on proprietary platform with history of making user hostile actions? That couldn’t go wrong.
EasyMark 3y ago
Given reddit's recent middle finger to it's long time user base I'd not base any part of my business around it. Sure, if some employees wanted to hang out on reddit and answer a few questions more power to them, but as the official company forum/info outlet? no way.

stevenicr 3y ago

Hoping someone was going to show a phpbb or vbulletin theme that makes it look like slack if you are logged in, and look like pinterst / instagram / tiktok - when logged out. Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to move a lot of people back into forums - they just expect the threads and thumbs to look different on mobile.

opportune 3y ago

Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.

chrisin2d 3y ago
I'm impressed by how much sheer ~style~ PostHog is rocking, from the Ursula von Der Leyen privacy notice to hedgehog Godzilla hero video on their home page.
- astrange 3y ago
  That's a bad sign since it implies they know what their own name means rather than it being some kind of weird coincidence.

amtamt 3y ago

XMPP would have been a nice substitute. Will all the history record in plain text and grep'ability without having to write slack webhooks handlers to perform basic automation is a serious time saver and force multiplier. I think the most troblesome aspect of Slack is the "highlighting" individuals. Usually the most productive command during a typical work day is ... `killall slack` :)

progval 3y ago

> useful solutions aren't searchable on our site or via Google. And since their forum does not render without Javascript, it is still not archived on archive.org, and probably not searchable with Bing or Duckduckgo

makepanic 3y ago
It's working fine once it's archived tho, see e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20240114085417/https://posthog.com/questions https://web.archive.org/web/20240114085417/https://posthog.c...
- progval 3y ago
  My bad, it wasn't visible until I disabled uBlock, requests seem to be caught by the "uBlock filters – Privacy" list. Does the IA actually run the JS and archive the fetched JSON on its own, or does it depend on someone visiting the archive page with their browser to trigger archival of this JSON data?
rmbyrro 3y ago
Their blog also seems to rely on JS to render text. I mean, most sessions will have almost no user interactions besides scrolling. Generating the HTML and serving it static seems a no brainer...
factormeta 3y ago
another reason to stop using SPA and use island base or NO JS web page for informational stuff like forum and discussion. At least displaying of information on the web should NOT depend on JS.

altairprime 3y ago

Slack is reviewing and canceling long-standing discounts these days, so there’s going to be many more instances where companies are no longer willing to pay $$ per user per month instead of hosting a forum.

nottorp 3y ago
It never made sense to pay per user for a public support-oriented slack. Internal slack with a finite number of people, that's another matter.
- altairprime 3y ago
  It could make sense, at the time, if your support staff were on Slack, and you had high hopes for community engagement, and Slack offered discounts to get you hooked.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > you had high hopes for community engagement If you have high hopes for engagement instead of offering a product people want to buy, you deserve your fate :)
    - altairprime 3y ago
      > your fate Up to and including the collapse of your business and/or a successful VC unicorn exit, yes!

lpapez 3y ago

Laravel does this with their Laracasts forum and it's great. It's the first place I seek answers for it, before ChatGPT and before StackOverflow. You simply can't beat well moderated public forums when it comes to historic search.

gassiss 3y ago
true, I do the same when I'm looking for truenas or proxmox answers

arthur_sav 3y ago

I've been part of an open source project for well over 2 years now. We use Slack for community management (3k users). It's pretty clear to me that Slack was never really meant to replace forums: - Lots of the previously answered questions are lost - Search is not great and is limited to Slack. We have many non-slack users searching through Google. - It's noisy with random chatter - It's harder for us to keep track of questions to answer. I think Slack is great for really small communities or for new products that need quick feedback but not for large community management.

rvdginste 3y ago
I think forum/mailinglist and Slack/Discord/IRC are different kinds of communication: the first is rather asynchronous/offline while the second is rather synchronous/online. I believe they can exist next to each other within a project or community. For keeping track of specific questions and how those can be answered, a forum is a lot better. But random chatter can also be useful and that is a better fit for things like IRC.

pants2 3y ago

Both forums and discord are really bad for finding quick answers. You enter a 40 page thread with post on post of speculation and "try this" - if you have more than 100 active users you need a voting system like Reddit or Stack Overflow. Otherwise the best content gets drowned out by the bad content.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
And even with those you need strict content moderation, else you get the same problem.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

igeligel_dev 3y ago

Wondering why they do not use GitHub discussions. Found it quite great to use. Also costs less to maintain raw money-wise. Any negative opinions around GitHub discussions?

lawgimenez 3y ago

The only chat community I enjoyed was stackoverflow chat. The early days, 2010-2015 I think. The UI was simple, no fancy stuffs. Very fast on mobile browser, no push notifications, no fancy avatars, reminds me of IRC.

pyromaker 3y ago

I've been using https://aihackers.ai https://aihackers.ai as my forum for the past few months for my own community (built on HN clone tool) - works very well for me.

philipwhiuk 3y ago

It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum. Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?

mathgladiator 3y ago
Why is it insane? I'm thinking of hiring an intern to build a forum for my saas using my platform. I can have fantastic integration and make it open source to educate on my platform.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  It's ridiculous we've had forums for decades and people still feel the need to re-invent the wheel (at the huge engineering time and cost involved).
- julianlam 3y ago
  Because simply put, thinking that a forum is a weekend project is the issue. I thought that once... it's just a couple of tables in a database and a nice frontend, right? I've been at this (building forum software) for a decade now, and I'm still innovating. Good luck!

wdb 3y ago

Not a huge fan of moving to forums for these kind of community activities. A big barrier when things get indexed by Google. Limits discussions.

donohoe 3y ago

I think this is a good move (leaving Slack) but without knowing more internal info I think it could equally be a bad one. The issue I see is they are building their own in-house solution. That’s a project in itself - and time not focusing on the core products. It could have been mitigated if they used on off-the-shelf solution as a foundation, but instead they are re-inventing or rebuilding login/regi, user management, moderation, threads, etc from scratch - with the bugs that come with it. They at least considered it and would be interested to know their rationale. That’s a lot of internal resources. Time will tell if it’s worth it.

octacat 3y ago

If someone wanna build an XMPP modern open source UI, we could could cooperate with building the missing features on the server side with MongooseIM. The open source clients are currently pretty outdated. Matrix protocol has nice UI clients though, but not XMPP.

flohofwoe 3y ago

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

warthog 3y ago
Oh certainly - I go ballistic whenever I see a Discord link for support or community
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  At the very least discord doesn't make threads which get lost in the channel like slack. But both suffer without tools like telegram which automatically catalogs all links, files, images, etc into tabs. But at the end of the day a chat system isn't meant to be documentation. It's meant to be chat. If you and me talk in the hallway, we wouldn't then tell a colleague oh yeah we figured it out in the hallway don't worry. We would try and document it somehow so that it's useful later.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    Discord does have threads, just that they are so heavy weight and even less discoverable that they don't get much use.
  - xp84 3y ago
    “We figured it out in the hallway, go play back the recording from the hallway recording system until you find the bit where we addressed it”
- tchock23 3y ago
  Glad to hear I’m not the only one. It makes me irrationally angry when I see Discord being the support channel for a product.
- 3y ago

theanirudh 3y ago

Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source. https://www.answeroverflow.com/ https://www.answeroverflow.com/

apitman 3y ago

I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them. Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to. I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they use Discourse[0]. It could work like a normal forum for users who don't participate in the Fediverse, but for those who do you could post from your existing Mastodon/Lemmy/etc ActivityPub account. [0]: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-activitypub-over-atproto/3707 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-a...

kbenson 3y ago
Given your complaint, what benefit is there to building a forum on ActivityPub over just allowing ActivityPub as a login mechanism?
- apitman 3y ago
  I'm assuming you mean sending a one time passcode to the AP account? I think that would be a great idea. But it's also highly phishable. And full AP integration allows users to own their data if they want.
proactivesvcs 3y ago
Discourse is currently working on AP federation: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117 https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117 I am pretty excited for the future of the open Web for the first time in a long time.
julianlam 3y ago
The fact that the Socialhub uses Discourse is as you said, no forums pursued ActivityPub integration at that time. NodeBB, Flarum, and yes, Discourse, are pursuing it now.

FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago

For me, Reddit is basically my forum of choice (yes, the "old" version is in fact a forum). You can concat several subreddits together that recreate the forum experience of yesteryear. For instance one of the many I follow daily: https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+msp+sysadmin+sysadminjobs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+m... Not the greatest but it gets the job done (mostly)

xp84 3y ago
Neat trick!
poisonborz 3y ago
I never got why big forums/engines back then weren't converging more to reddit structure, like the ability to subscribe to specific threads and have a custom starting screen.

bitcurious 3y ago

A useful LLM-based product would be something that can scan discord discussions for "useful" information and replicate it in a forum format, for posterity, but ignore the mundane/trivial.

animeepisode 3y ago

[flagged]

wslh 3y ago

Seriously, a critical issue when deciding to use a forum software is security. Once a software is popular (or insecure by default) you are required inviting hackes while you are sleeping. Security is very expensive and few companies have the budget and the attitude to be continuously awake and proactive.

symlinkk 3y ago

Nice that should make it much easier for ChatGPT to access that information and make it so that humans aren’t needed at all!

jkmcf 3y ago

I’m surprised I haven’t seen a chat interface on top of the Discourse, or other, forum. Discord introduced subject-based chats, but they seem secondary to the fire hose of the topic channels and not used much where I participate.

julianlam 3y ago
NodeBB has one

vfclists 3y ago

How come so far there has been only one mention of Zulip?

crossroadsguy 3y ago

Duplication and painful search and information access seems so intentional in tools like Slack and Discord. And these feed each other in a vicious cycle.

l72 3y ago

What is the best opensource forum software?

ParetoOptimal 3y ago
Discourse is popular and pretty good. I think Zulip could be better, but less popular.
SushiHippie 3y ago
From a user perspective I really like Flarum https://flarum.org/ https://flarum.org/ Some example forums that use flarum: Flarum itself: https://discuss.flarum.org/ https://discuss.flarum.org/ GrapheneOS: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ Kagi and Orion: https://kagifeedback.org/ https://kagifeedback.org/ https://orionfeedback.org/ https://orionfeedback.org/ Mailcow: https://community.mailcow.email/ https://community.mailcow.email/ Many more can be found here: https://builtwithflarum.com/ https://builtwithflarum.com/

julianlam 3y ago

Awesome trend! > Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS. So, they did no research on actual modern forum software. Got it.