person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!
I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.
I left that server right away.
See I always wondered what the rationale was, hiding from indexers to not get canceled or smth? Bruh 💀
They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
True. That’s why I recommend Discourse if you can’t use a proper development forum like Codeberg or something.
Greatly improved usability, while still greatly hurting searchability, in that common bugs are still hidden away from indexable sight.
Discord has a robust search system
That is absolutely not true unless if you have exact word matches, and anyone with half a brain knows it’s not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.
Discord is a black hole of information. What happens inside is unknown from the outside. This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS - an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.
It absolutely is.
I’m gonna ignore your uncalled-for personal insult and instead point out that you might want to search a specific group for information rather than the entirety of the internet.
Then just…go inside? These aren’t password-protected communities.
Uhhhh no that’s not how that works.
I agree.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Linux community: A guy telling you to step inside the walled garden. Unironically.
I rest my case.
I don’t have the time for this.
What “walled garden”? I don’t think you know what that phrase means.
Good, go away.
No I will not sign up for ze discord chinese data harvesting op
If your project isn’t something I can index through a search engine - you don’t have a project. Want a forum? Make a subreddit or better yet a Lemmy community.
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Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I’ll never have a discord for a project because I don’t want to answer the same questions over and over.
You just gave me a fear I didn’t know I had.
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
That’s the problem. I know of a couple video games where the publisher closed their forums and opened a discord channel. I have no idea why people view them as equivalent things.
Same as Matrix tbh.
Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread…
It makes for a bad forum sure, but why should it have to be a forum?
To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
If only there was something called an Issues page attached to every code repository. Oh well, that is an idea that is probably impossible or whatever.
You can do that.
Sorry, I forgot to add “easily”.
If you don’t understand it, that’s ok. Maybe they could work on making it easier.
Making it easier is not the problem. The problem is having the search function actually find the messages you are looking for. The biggest problem I have with it is that word order matters too much. “Keyword1 keyword2” will find different messages than “keyword2 keyword1”. Not only that, but it will also search for different variations of the word with no way of preventing it from doing it. If there is a solution for these problems, then no one is taking about it.
Time zones.
Who is saying this is using it as a forum?
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.
Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.
Most of discord is toxic AF and is so prone to astroturfing it’s unreal. Literally just use reddit at that point I beg you.
Real time conversation is only useful for children with too much free time on their hands and that’s why WhatsApp group chats exist.