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I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "sear

I don't want to throw dirt at the project in question, but I signed up specifically to ask a question regarding a configuration problem, and the reply was "search for <specific term> in the channel." like they apparently already had enough people ask the question that they immediately knew how to find the relevant discussion containing a solution. Versus in the old days, asking on irc and getting a link to a forum thread, or even better, finding the thread on Google. I don't know how much of an outlier this is, as said, I didn't ever use it again and that was at least two years ago. But at least here on hn I've read similar stories.

aaravchen 2y ago
That is the exact reason Discord isn't sufficient. I've had to support enough projects as a maintainer to know that you will always get hammered with the stupidest questions and the same questions all the time. The less you have to repeat yourself the better, and Discord, or any chat application, ensures you have to repeat yourself as much as possible. There's virtually no way to retroactively follow the stream-of-consciousness that is a chat-style discussion with no single topic instead of the post-style single-topic threaded discussion. I have seen exactly 1 project ever have a solution to this, and ironically it was actually on Discord. Of all the many many chat applications out there, Discord seems to have the most flexible admin control of retroactive chat organisation, and 1 huge development community I'm in has actually proactively created threads when a reoccurring topic comes up again and then moved them to a common FAQ channel.