I agree with the fact that Slack/Discord are terrible for keeping track of things long-term, but I will say that once you've set Discord/Slack up and running, operating it is typically pretty smooth - you've already likely got Slack and Discord running, and you can check it every so often.
Granted, things can completely explode, and moderation is still a requirement, but that's true of forums as well.
(Although due to their async nature, things boil over much more slowly, and it's typically easier to just put the entire forum or a user into a timeout.)
Slack or Discord live in the current moment. It is hard to get back into discussion which started a week ago. Channels do not provide much historical value.
Discourse does need a server and it's resource-hungry, but I cant say there any problem in maintaining it at all. Yeah, once in a few months it's worth to check for spam notifications and click to upgrade.
But overall all you need to do is setup it properly once and configure some backups sync.
Again, you need to pay like $10-15 / month for server to host it and backups.
Not the person you are replying to, but I would think that in this day that the answer to that question for most people would be "because it's Facebook". Giving more data over to their walled garden is probably not palatable for most people, regardless of the network effect.
I wish I remembered what it was I was searching for, but I found a github issue where a repo admin directed folks to some chat website about a year ago; naturally, in the year 2021, the whole thing was completely defunct, and more recent threads pointed people to Discord.
I wonder what'll happen next year, if/when the Discord community fractures, or starts making certain channels private, or it's just abandoned and closed down.
I remember when I used IRC to speak with developers of products. Everything felt temporary. I wonder if I still have any of the MIRC logs hanging out in a backup somewhere…
The poll results show the real sentiment, that close to 30% of people actually like synchronous chat. That is a significant chunk.
Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge base page, working something like a more powerful version of a pin in Slack or Discord.
Overall, though, I felt like the article was kind of bossy.
The poll is not exactly lined up with the point, though: it says that people want synchronous chat, while the article says synchronous chat is not beneficial to the community. Both can be true.
> Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content remains useful and findable later.
(We also have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer content), as well as GitHub.)
No data to back this up, but I have a feeling the industry is so bottom-heavy with juniors that we've started optimising towards their immediate need to learn. Juniors don't have a problem sitting in Slacks all day.
I have the same thought, and not just about technical chats, like who is spending so much time in Discords? Maybe the sibling commenter is right that there are a lot more junior developers now who want instant answers and to move on, rather than longer form forum discussions?
Dev teams also benefit a lot from having an async way to discuss bigger issues that require thoughtfulness and long form answers, especially remote teams. There's a reason mailing lists are still somehow alive and well in open source projects that have been remote first for decades.
We're using discourse internally for this (in conjunction with matrix) and it's allowed us to have discussions I don't think we would have otherwise had.
i've always felt like synchronous chat was best for operations, incident response and realtime help where long form communications like forums and listservs are best suited for deeper discussions and designs. chat can be fun, but it's really lossy!
The discord/slack as a means of communicating technical questions is a great example how an entire generation refused to accept a solid solution because it didn't fit their impediment desire. (Need is wavy here because the responsiveness isn't the original need.. it's the answering of the question that's a need.. being instanteous is just a convenience )
What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit, phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided to move to a more transient form of communication for everything.
In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is spreading, and we're running into development of technology that has a limited set of experience behind it.
What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there rather than completely scrapping them)
More importantly, I don't recall IRC ever replacing mailing lists / newsgroups / forums. People generally knew when to use either one appropriately. But these days, it's not uncommon to see a project page straight up saying that if you have any questions, Discord is it.
Note the (d)evolution here. IRC was an open standard, with numerous client and server implementations. The other chat apps are all bespoke proprietary solutions. Ditto with email/NNTP vs other async options.
If conversation threading were enforced adequately in a Slack/Discord, a bot could watch threads for a heuristic of usefulness and kick off the archival of some form of read-only SEO-happy forum-like store.
It's in Slack's financial interest to prevent this as that it would save messages that would otherwise only exist in their paid version.
Secondly, that assumed that the users are behaving in a way that classifies those messages as a threaded manner. Depending on humans to go back after a conversation has taken place to classify and organize that conversation isn't a highly rewarding activity.
Another concern: The medium is a temporary and off the cuff one.. this may lead to negative reprocutions for non-agreeing tribal members to defame someone. (A sabiture turning on that feature on discords that are private) [Given today's moralistic "cancel culture" - this is a very real possiblity]
I wrote this a year ago as my employer was starting up their forum[0]. While we have since added slack, the forum is the main support mechanism for our community (people who pay us money get support tickets).
I still stand by that choice for:
* SEO
* durability
* question quality
I can't recall the exact numbers, but something like 5-10% of our overall traffic is to the forum.
FusionAuth is a pleasure to work with. Thanks for the work and documentation :+1. You folks done saved me a lot of time, hopefully if I make a dollar will pay it forward.
I think "less capable moderation tools" is really underselling how purposefully useless and nonexistent Slack's moderation tools are for open communities. I cannot overstate how terrible Slack is in this regard.
To be clear, I really and truly don't fault them for this: Slack's always been clear that their focus is on business communication, which is a totally different animal when it comes to moderation needs. Discord is nearly infinitely better in the sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still considerably far behind the resources I've got when moderating a large Discourse instance.
I understand your pain. Even simple things like moving posts from one channel to another aren't possible for an admin to do in Slack, although this has been basic forum functionality since...ever?
I moderate (but I’m not admin for) a ~5k member Discord server, and the only tool I know of to move conversations is to tell the users to take it to #other-channel.
I tried adding this bot to my server, Discord gave me an error.
"This bot can't join more servers as it has not been verified or is requesting gateway intents it has not been verified for. Ask the bot's developer about https://dis.gd/bot-verification so you can add it to your server!"
I know that you're probably not the dev, just posting it here for visibility.
Do you not have seperate channels for that sort of thing? We have a channel called "big-wins" where the sales people can flag up new/extended deals. I have it muted but check it out from time to time to see if we've bought in any interesting customers.
Channels and channel discipline are the key to keeping Slack manageable. Have lots of channels with specific purposes and people can choose what they care about and ignore the rest.
Urrgh. We don't have a general channel for exactly that reason. We have a channel for general chit-chat that is nothing to do with work but that's as close as it gets. Anything else work related goes into subject/team/project specific channels. We even have a shoutouts channel specifically for bigging up someone who has done a good job at something.
general channels are cancer in any communication system as far as I've experienced.
I built a zap to store off slack conversations to google sheets (for a slack I joined a few years ago, where I would also notify the user I was going to do this).
But yes, an automated solution would be great.
Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good post than when I just toss out a slack q.
i think what's missing a functionality that would bring up previous conversations around the same topic. I.e. on stackoverflow you have strict no duplicate policy which forces people to add and update already existing topic. For that to happen user need to know question they have already exists, or a discussion. And then they can catch up, add scenarios and contribute to it. not sure how this could be added to slack tho.
I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life because:
- The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.
- The people who want to have the forum rarely have the tech skills to keep up to date on security issues, let alone keep the software up to date.
- There are 'forum as a service' sites but they inevitably become essentially ad spam platforms that are intolerable to use.
So you can do this, and I might even benefit from it showing up in google searches, but I'd actually still be way more likely to use discord if I have a question.
Also, I reject the idea that there even is a strict dichotomy between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" communication systems. If anything, you can always do what's usually described as async on a synchronous platform but you can't really do the opposite, so they're a superset/subset pair to me.
I don't care if the maintainer takes 2 days to get back to me on discord but at least if they do I get a notification and I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.
If you're putting PII on a random forum, that's your problem, respectfully. I have a specific email account for "random forums" and don't put real info in my account.
I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam posts.
You can set up email notifications to thread replies in most forum software, so you don't have to actively check if you don't want to.
Finally, I reject the notion that you can effectively search through years and years of discord or slack chat for topics related to your question. The nature of creating a thread differentiates itself from a "random" post. Perhaps if Discord/Slack's UI prompted a person to label a post "conversation starter" or "thread starter" then it would be better organized.
Cool as a cucumber that has been cut off from every single account they have the moment somebody at Google (or an algorithm) doesn't like you. Good luck!
never understand the purpose of that kind of question. What do you do when the forum owner closes your account? Complain or go somewhere else, as long as there's an account someone can close it by definition.
Chance that your Google account outlives everything else is if anything, pretty high.
The difference is that if Google blocks your account you might lose access to a hundred sites where you were using it for login. If a forum owner blocks your account you only use that one account.
I've never used "sign in with Google" for anything.
if OAuth had really succeeded at its goals and really federated authentication I'd be more interested in it, but no I'm not really comfy attaching my google account to random shitty things either because then we get into real name disclosure and such.
There's effectively only a few SSO providers that are viable to use on most of the internet (google, github, microsoft mostly) and they're all attached to more personal information than the forums were to begin with.
I do really wish federated identity had gotten off the ground the way it was promised though. That would be a better world.
What PII are you putting on a forum? All I can think of is email and password. Your password should be unique to the forum, and I would hardly say that an email address is PII. If you're super worried about email, just use an alias.
Yes and no; info@example.com used at one site is not going to personally identify you, but most personal and work email addresses are some variant of name or initials. Unless you expect the forum owners to individually mark each member's email address as personally identifiable or not, they ought to treat them as if they were all PII because most of them will be.
(the upshot of your suggestion that your email address sometimes doesn't identify you and so isn't PII would be what, forum owners can leak your email address tied to your forum posts so long as they don't know whose address it is? That doesn't sound particularly desirable.)
> I basically refuse to create accounts on random forums anymore. They've been the source of the vast majority of breached PIID for me over the course of my internet life
Why were you putting PIID on web forums? Why weren't you using a unique password?
> I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.
Discord is a nightmare. Someone mentions you in a busy channel, 6 hours ago? Try to find it. Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was mentioned" feature.
You're forced to use a (visible to everyone) unique identifier across every discord server, ripe for doxxing or stalking people. Targeting someone's account is attractive because their single login gets you into every server they're part of.
Their implementation of threading sucks. They rolled it out with little warning to server mods/admins and it caught nearly everyone off guard, with users going hog wild creating threads because it was a way to get something like "joesuckscocks" into the channel list. The icing on the cake was that threads created before the ACLs were rolled out couldn't be removed by server admins and mods, so they had to go around begging users to delete them.
Every server I belong to, I've had to spend a minute or two making sure I disable all the by-default-on notifications because people abuse the shit out of @everyone, @here, etc; some server admins even abuse roles to push a notification to everyone (ie, they'll create a role everyone is added to, and then spam it with mentions.)
Discord has done little to address problems like server raids and trolls targeting LGBTQ/PoC groups, 'rivals' to their favorite streamers, you name it. They've shrugged and said "we don't have the staff to do it", yet they have estimated profits around $130M/year. As a result people have had to add all sorts of bots to deal with the problem, and nobody has any idea what all these bots are doing with all the chat logs people share.
There's so much fragmentation, too. I play a not-very-popular tactical shooter game and the number of servers I've been added to and have to keep track of is crazy because everyone creates their own server.
Oh, and last but not least: tencent has a significant investment in them.
Edit: since I am on dang's naughty list and only allowed to comment five times per day despite having over 500 karma in a month or so, I have to respond via edit: Discord on desktop does not allow for any way to navigate to where you were mentioned in a channel. I've also found the "scroll me back to what I last read" function works poorly or not at all.
> Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was mentioned" feature.
You’ll have to excuse the HN pendantics, but it does. In iOS app, for example, open the left draw and there’s a navigation tab on the bottom. There’s a mentions tab that will show you a list of mentions (that is replies and pings) and tapping on one takes you to that message.
Since several people asked, yes, email addresses are PII and may or may not be sensitive.
And yes, my response to the number of forum breaches I've seen has indeed been to stop putting information on them -- that's exactly what I said. I stopped using them.
I raised this in a comment here a few months ago, so much information that would reduce support burdens is buried in slacks and discords. It can’t be found through Google, it’s hard to find information in the apps if you do manage to get in and then if they aren’t paying for the storage it all disappears after a few thousand messages anyway. Infuriating.
I loathe Discord for (non-dev but still software-related) community management but we tried launching a forum and realized users don't care and just want Discord or Slack. It's now in the "familiar" zone and registering for a forum sucks. They don't care that it's hard to find answers, or any of the other reasons listed here, many of which were our motivation for starting a forum. We ended up dividing users and now have a dead forum with a banner directing people to our Discord :P
I wonder if this is also part of the preference for Discord, but all of our most active/longtime users tend to prefer DMing us over posting publicly. We should probably discourage that so the community seems more active, but it probably lets them feel like they can speak more freely.
I’d be interested in seeing how that stuff went for you. I am also worried about a dead Discourse. I am now leaning toward just doing Discord. I am unhappy about it. But I think it’s the right move for the community I manage. I will email you this week if you don’t mind. :).
As discussed in a recent comment I made [0], I think the problem is that a good modern forum software simply does not exist yet. imo discourse doesn't cut it, feels almost as ephemeral as in slack/discord.
I concur. I somehow skipped PHPBB and VBulletin (I was more of a newsgroup/IRC kinda guy) and always found them super clunky and a step backwards compared to newsgroups, if only because of the lack of proper threading.
Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
Curious what you mean by lack of proper threading in phpBB and vBulletin? Are you talking about threading of responses within a broader "Thread" (top-level post entry)
Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.
Infinite scrolling on the threads combined with a very slow loading. A thread of 30 replies will not load everything, even though 30 replies is probably less than 1Mb of data.
It needs to so that it can search on the backend and show you all instances of that search rather than just what the currently loaded DOM elements contain.
On most modern apps, this is pretty much just what is on the screen right now + a little on the top and bottom. The elements get removed/reused once they scroll off the page for performance.
I only see this as an issue if the site does not reimplement find so that it is able to deal with this.
Because no amount of security patches can fix 00s forum software designed without modern security in mind. And the average user _likes_ Discourse. They don't give two shits that Ctrl + F is hijacked because it does exactly what they want. It finds the text. They don't want excuses like "Oh well it doesn't find that text because you didn't scroll down to load it". They don't want to click through 100 pages of thread.
I use that forum every day, and it hasn’t had any major security problems for the 15 years or so it has been used. I’m not seeing what you’re talking about.
I think this is one of the greatest fallacies in modern data science. We only know what we can measure. There's no data on the opportunity cost of design decisions.
In other words Discourse only has metrics on people who use Discourse.
I think this is probably why sign-up metrics are so common but those are perverse as well. How much do you set yourself back if you only work for people willing to sign up?
On pretty much any other web page, Ctrl+F will search whatever is on the page; why should Discourse be any different?
I don't mind them having a server-side search function that actually searches the entire thread. I do mind having a heavily-used shortcut hijacked to behave in a non-standard way.
Oh, I'm well aware of this workaround. The problem is that Ctrl+F is muscle memory by now, so I usually hit it and immediately start typing... then notice that it's the wrong search, swear, hit it again, and type again.
Because to remain performant, modem sites remove elements that have been scrolled too far off the page. So native ctrl + f would not be searching very much at all.
I don't see the problem with this tbh. When you create a JS app, you lose a lot of the native features of the browser and it becomes your own responsibility to reimplement them in a correct way. As long as the site pulls it off flawlessly, this is ok to me.
And from what I have seen, discourse does do this well.
> to remain performant, modem sites remove elements that have been scrolled too far off the page
This is done to remain performant specifically when the website thinks infinite scrolling is a good idea. In my experience it very rarely is, with the Ctrl+F thing being just one of the reasons why.
This is a great example of a "feature" that seems to make sense but, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, really bothers me.
Maybe it's that Discourse's search functionality didn't really work well, or suddenly started searching across threads rather than only the current one (IIRC); maybe it's that it's the only system I can think of (other than google docs) that hijacks the shortcut, but it gave me a very negative first impression of the tool.
For another similar example, the Blendle website (note - not the app!) hijacks Esc when reading an article, and interprets it as a shortcut to return to the main page of the site. I actually reported it as an issue to them, and they said it's by design and not going to change. :/
Their method seems really efficient to me. It infinitely scrolls, feels like it's actually native, and hijacks the shortcuts to make them work as if it was native.
I really like their timeline scrollbar as well which lets you easily move through hundreds of posts very quickly and has become a pattern in many apps like Google Photos and Telegram.
It does not hijack the shortcuts to "work as if it was native", because there's no way to know how the native function works in every browser, in most cases.
Let's look at Ctrl+F again. The standard Chrome search toolbar is search-as-you-type, highlighting occurrences immediately. It also shows the total number of occurences found on the page, and has arrows to navigate to next/previous. It also doesn't auto-hide (and thus lose focus) if you scroll the page.
What does Discourse replace it with? A search toolbar that requires an explicit submission to even start searching - and then, instead of actually scrolling to the occurrence of the search term, it shows a dropdown with snippets of posts in current scope that matched the term, highlighting it much like a search engine would.
So it basically has nothing to do with the native function that it hijacks, other than the broad concept of textual search.
I've found loading to be extremely fast. Way faster than pagination on most traditional forums, even over a slow mobile connection. On desktop it usually loads faster than I can scroll. Guess it depends on which server you're using?
Same here. The old vBulletin / PHPbb format felt positively archaic once I got over the shock of how different the basic interactions are.
I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
I think Discourse is the first real attempt to bring forums in-line with "modern" UI expectations, which is why it feels like it won. There's probably lots of room to grow here. There's forums out there that allow SMTP-only [1] or SMTP and NNTP reading/posting [2], there's forum skins atop mailing lists like [3], there's distributed forums like Aether or Lemmy like [4, 5]. Unfortunately these are all new/raw.
Your mention of NNTP reading/posting caught my interest, but I wasn't able to find any mention of it on tade.link; is that perhaps a now-deprecated feature, or is it just not documented?
I really miss NNTP. I appreciate that spam was a huge problem, but it was really nice being able to discover and subscribe to a large number of topics and navigate them all from the same tool. And there was innovation in the client space.
Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server.
As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.
With NNTP, I could access the entire archive and it's separate from my email account. As far as I know, Discourse notifications only start from the date you subscribe, which makes it fine for new conversations, but isn't terribly useful when trying to avoid asking a question that's already been answered. Trying to be a good netizen, I search the archive first, but that brings me back to an isolated Discourse web instance.
Additionally, with NNTP, the "sign up" process is very low friction. With Discourse, I need to seek out each community separately. It's enough work where I'm unlikely to experiment with new communities.
Reddit certainly has its flaws. I suppose I've been fortunate that most of the sub-reddits I'm interested in have pretty good members. There's invariably always a jerk or two. I've run into that on Discourse, too. I suppose it's just something ingrained to online communities. I don't love Reddit, but it is the closest thing I've found to a central hub for multiple communities.
With Discourse, you can enable mailing list mode and read all the Discourse instances from your email client. That’s what I do.
Personally, I only have one Discourse instance I keep up to date on, but if that instance weren’t right there in my email client, I’d have zero.
edit: The main caveat in my experience is that you probably want to click through onto the website if you’re planning to reply, both to be able to preview formatting, and to double-check that the post you’re replying to hasn’t been edited in a way that renders the reply unnecessary. (I wish there was a way to deliver edits over email.) But most of the time I’m just reading, and for that I just stick to my email client. The loss of edits doesn’t seem to be a big deal in practice.
I would argue that "modern UX expectations" is a large part of the problem with Discourse. Infinite scrolling is one prominent example. Wasteful whitespace is another.
Not exactly sure what your requirements are but vanilla forums have a clean look, mobile friendly, and have pretty good customization.
(Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though)
"The master branch is considered a stable branch capable of being released at any time. Reviewed, stable changes land against master via pull-request."
Last update was jul 13.
It's pretty stable and has been around for a while, so i wouldn't expect a flurry of constant changes (durability and stability are exactly what i look for when self hosting)
This might not be what you're talking about, but there seems to be a bit of a throw-back theme in the repo. Not the one I remember from when I last looked at Vanilla Forums, but certainly reminiscent of it.
Flarum is a built on PHP / Laravel and is easy to host even on shared hosting providers. It looks and behaves much like Discourse, but less resource intensive in my experience.
The SBNation article commenting system, introduced like ten years ago now, had a nice take on this. Nested conversations like HN, but with live updating as new comments came in, and tracking of read-vs-unread, and keyboard shortcuts to navigate posts.
That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.
I've yet to see a forum software that works as well as vBulletin and the clones of that did in the early to mid 2000s. Everything today is this weird "conversation" view and comments/threads constantly move around based on the whims of a voting audience.
The last vBullitin site I used was hacked and never came back online. The overhead from running forum software in the age of mass automated abuse is just too great. It's really hard to justify the value of a forum that gets hacked, spammed, costs money, etc when Discord is free and works better for most people.
Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.
Those home pages look pretty good and I like the go, single-exectable approach, but I have to say those docs look like more than I want to hassle with. That said, looks like you might be on a good path.
The docs shouldn't be needed by anyone wanting to run a forum.
But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript.
But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).
I'm extremely surprised by this weird dichotomy. vbulletin era was "low" on tech yet there were a lot of nice chill places.. there was almost nothing special, no ease, few rules, convos were mostly humans and fun. Now there's kilotons of resources (brain and money) trying to make all this go to mars and yet it only creates frailty. Super odd.
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
Just a guess, but that feels to be around the right time that smartphones hit a critical mass of value and usefulness.
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
Just around that time, I remember seeing facebook and twitter stickers on various stores in malls (with the 'slug' name of the business). I was a bit surprised. Why would you bring your customers to your twitter profile instead of your own homepage? Who says that most people are even using these websites? At the time I never used Twitter and to me Facebook was just a boring place (it still is). At best they were just glorified forums. It would be really strange if a business directed customers to the business profile on a random internet forum.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
It seems like a giant confidence game to this day. 80% of adults in the US don’t use Twitter, and of those that do, only a much smaller number are regular users, and an even smaller percentage care to follow brands, which most people rightly see as opt-in advertising. The timeline algorithm makes it even less likely that the pointless post from @reebok is going to reach many people, probably nothing close to the amount of free irl advertising that they gave to Twitter and Facebook.
Yes I’ve poked at twitter a few times but never saw the point. Have been drowned by news of them for almost a decade, right? Self promoters and journalists just desperate for “engagement” to their own detriment.
As someone grew up with 2ch forum(terrible place) I don’t get why vB gets such a high praise. Too much wasted screen real estate and already overcomplicated.
I’ve built a lightweight Discourse clone that you may be interested in checking out. We use it for the Nim programming language forum. https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum
Have you given NodeBB a try? It's comparable to Vanilla, Flarum, Discourse, etc. in terms of being newer entrants to the forum game.
The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today.
We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there
I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)
Not trying to be mean, but I hit a bug within 3 seconds of using this software and figured I'd report it here:
On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
Yep! That's exactly what you're seeing. Nice detective work!
Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week.
Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning
Is there any documentation about creating an integration with nodebb? For example, I have a course on gumroad, and I want to give write access to nodebb based on if a user has a current subscription on gumroad.
It’s been over a decade since I ran a forum but I recall phpBB specifically being chock full of security holes, probably more so than even Wordpress. If you didn’t stay on top of keeping it up to date you’d get hit with exploit-wielding bots that would cram your little forum full of spam designed to exploit Google’s ranking algorithms.
It's not though; all topics are permanent and searchable. So it's the best of both worlds. Have you ever tried searching chatrooms and 100+ channels? Excruciating.
I have used search in slack/discord/telegram and found it's super fast and fairly reliable. I can often see references to the same error messages or bring up the topic I'm interested in.
Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about.
IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer.
While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape.
The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.
If reddit is open source, can't we use reddit's software as a forum interface? Reddit is a great place for discussion chains which are visible and searchable.
It's not open source though. I think it used to be a while back but it hasn't for a long time. There's also the fact that it's more difficult to modify software and self host it when it was never built fir that, vs something that was (i.e. reddit vs Discourse
Zulip is also, last I checked, the only ones who offer completely free, archive-enabled, hosted chat for open source projects ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ ). Mattermost has some kind of "out of the kindness of our heart" setup, but it requires applying for it ( https://docs.mattermost.com/about/license-and-subscription.h... ), and Slack appears to actually retain the archive content, but only makes it available for those who pay
Development of high-quality forum software is something I have considered undertaking.
Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain.
So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments?
I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?
Best thing I ever did for EQE is shut down the Discord. Insane waste of my time. Now the only way to reach me is via email or the forum on https://eqe.fm
This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop"
Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site,
Simple fix: add login with google/github.
Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great.
Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.
"Throwaway email address" has gotten a lot tougher in the last 10 years. It's not impossible, but many providers demand a phone number or email verification. The ones who don't are used by bots, so those email addresses aren't universally accepted by sites that require email verification.
Fair enough. It depends on your definition of throwaway. I didn't mean totally anonymous, I meant anonymous to who runs the forum (which was, I believe the main objection in the original thread post: I don't want my private data available to the random owner of a forum).
If I set up foobarguy@gmail.com and use email verification because gmail requires me too, gmail can tie foobarguy@gmail.com to another email account.
But if I then use foorbarguy@gmail.com for $RANDOMFORUM, $RANDOMFORUM admin doesn't have any idea who I am. If they spam me or lose my password, I can just abandon foobarguy@gmail.com and set up barbazguy@gmail.com.
I agree, and I think OSS projects should learn from these commercial successes and use their learnings to feed into OSS product experiences. But to some extent, Discord and Slack are both quite new. They were obviously quite successful at encouraging people to sign-up. There must be something there that makes Discord or Slack seem more trustworthy than "random weird site".
I agree and I've been wondering, why doesn't someone make something like a Discord/Discourse hybrid? Guilded has forum channels and yet it misses so many of the bells and whistles for moderation and discoverability that Discourse has.
Basically, I want a Discord-type app, with it's UI and one login, and then blended with the Discourse forum power.
Are you imagining that the forum features are separate from the chat? I guess which aspects of discord would you like to merge with the forum concept?
I'm working on a topical chat site where instead of servers/rooms, it's posts w/chatrooms. Curious to hear more in terms of how you envision a hybrid that would have appeal.
Honestly, I like how Guilded has set it up but not how they seem to 1) not be developing the app that quickly and 2) not communicating much with their users.
They have separate channel types, where one is a chat channel (like Discord and other chat groups: a linear chat stream) and another as a forum channel (that has unexpanded topics that when clicked show a linear chat stream, also able to pin certain topics to the top).
What I like about it is that I can find slack/discord/group text channels to really frustrate me when I've missed some things. Seems very hard to sometimes get caught up on what people are saying, often many conversations happening at the same time, and having to scroll back a lot to figure out where it began. Ah! That may be it, channels don't seem to have a start, so I find I try to search for the beginning and get overwhelmed trying to see how the conversation "started." Whereas with the post/topic style channel that most forums have, it's quite easy for me to see where the conversation started (at least where this branch of it did) and don't feel the stress to go all the way back.
FB seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet has the posts expanded so one doesn't just sees the title, sees the whole post, which can make it hard to scan to see which to read. HN seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet, as FB, lacks many of the forum features or doesn't seem to do them well, like sorting/searching/filtering/pinning/moderation/etc.
I basically kinda dream of Guilded but with faster development, doubled or tripled down focus on their forum channel, and a superpowered member directory.
> I'm working on a topical chat site
I checked it out and I like the look. Seems like HN or reddit in a way, but without the indented threads and just having a linear chat form. If a lot of people chat on each post, I think I may get similarly lost to Discord. I do have a few ideas that popped into my mind that excited me, please feel free to take them or leave them:
1) Embed the article/content directly in the post column? Not sure how technologically feasible/legal it'd be, but I'd love to have one site that brings content in reader mode and then having that chat column next to it, so that I could read and then comment in the same spot. I don't like clicking away and coming back, especially with the columnar setup, I think I'd love the full side-by-side.
2) Somehow limiting who can type in the chat column, maybe per article or per community or something. I think I've dreamed of having a place where I can watch 2 people chat, maybe 3. I think conversations can get quite diluted/convoluted with more people and I love the idea of just reading what two people think, especially ones I respect, especially who may have expertise on a specific topic. Maybe it could be less of a pure open-to-everyone chat, and maybe has separate 1-to-1 chats in there about the topic. I dunno. Something about me would love to see a 1-1 chat of you and your friend talking about Incubus, and then maybe a former Incubus person and another famous rocker talking about their reflection on this, etc. Perhaps this is too out there and not clear enough, not sure.
Anyway, would love to chat more with you on your endeavor if you'd like to :-)
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site
1. It's the project's web forum. https://forums.fooproject.org/ . Not random at all. If you're lucky, your registration for fooproject works for the forum as well.
2. Well, we don't like registering with a large corporation either.
> and figure that sites navigation,
Suppose it's a web forum, one of the trusty varieties from the 2000's. What's there to figure out? The exact placement of settings in the user profile pages? You'll live.
> let alone their privacy/data policies.
In this day and age, the effective assumption is: It's all potentially public and the US government keeps a copy forever. Wish it were otherwise.
... and actually, the privacy is typically better on smaller independent platforms than on large ones. The large ones are probably already hooked up to the NSA, while for the smaller ones it's just a potential.
> Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Slack is a painful experience, and not even that easy .
Reddit... yes, but there's not much of a UI to be difficult.
Discord - I have almost no experience with it TBH.
> People are comfortable using them.
No, they're not. Some are. Those who aren't, tend not to use them unless they have to.
> They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
A web forum is a pretty uniform thing. I hope you're not complaining that not all forums are controlled by some huge single company...
This recurring complaint is very "nothing existed before me" millennial-speak.
In fact, no one wanted Reddit outside of Digg users, the vast majority of its traffic are bots and it's a poor substitute for the forums we're talking about.
As for Slack it's basically a rebrand of IRC for corporate Windows users, and Discord is just a testament to the laziness of the author of Ventrilo.
What no one cares about is your opinion on "privacy/data policies" if you think that the whole world being filtered through 4 sites is somehow a net positive in terms of "privacy/data policies."
> This recurring discussion is very "This is the year for Linux on the desktop"
The only people I see unironically talking about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people that talk about _other people_ supposedly proclaiming the year of the Linux desktop. "This recurring discussion reminds me of a decades-old strawman/dead meme" is not a good way to introduce any straight-faced argument.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Why do you speak of Discord and Slack as if they were eternal, and that we were all taught to use them as surely as we learned our ABCs and cut up our food? At one time Discord and Slack were that "random weird site", and I'll note that for vast numbers of people outside of nerd and tech communities they still are. As for me, given a choice (and outside of work I do have one), I'd touch neither because I find them both to be terrible software.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site
Definitely better than being forced to provide my cellphone number...I'll take registering on "some weird site" (weird way to talk about a projects community hub) over giving a dubious company that keeps escalating its hunger for new policies (usually just to grab more data) my number.
People say it's hard to create a forum, but for software projects there's one built right into Github - Github issues. Yet so many times I see Github issues answered with "We answered this in Discord. Go check there." Then there's other projects where they're super anal about opening any Github issue, yet are happy to answer the exact same question in Slack.
Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer questions there, your users will find it.
For knowledge sharing purposes chat is way too ephemeral.
Forums have an ephemerality too as threads get too cluttered or buried under new threads. When an old thread takes too long to find or filter through, new ones are created and then redundancy sucks up everyone's time.
The answer is moderation - preferably with "elected" moderators. The other key is to have a system of escalation of key knowledge to a Wiki, which again needs moderation in the form of reviews to keep the knowledge up to date.
I’ve tried to use forums so many times but I just can’t use them effectively. I don’t want to create accounts and get the notification settings correct so I don’t have to log in to see replies to my messages without getting spammed.
The only forum I’ve had success with as a user is Reddit. It isn’t the best forum software in the world but it is miles better than the usual php bulletin boards.
Having run a forum before, it’s so much work to keep anything secure and spam-free. I had to geo-ip block all of France and Russia just to stay above water. I gave up.
I too like mailing list, but most of the mailing list software I have seen isn't that great. Essentially, it would be like a glorified Google Groups which I am not a fan of. They are prone to spam and often leak your email address. I could see a modern system working with remailer support built in, but at that point it isn't much different than a forum. It is essentially Usenet, and at this point I'd rather see Usenet make a comeback.
I don't know if it exists yet, but I can see ActivityPub (or even Matrix?) be used as a federated method for content sharing by combining the base protocol with some basic grouping and threading.
I'm not well-versed in ActivityPub and the systems interacting with it, but I believe Mastodon can do threading at least. I don't think it can do the categories to build a full forum system out of it, though.
Matrix is currently optimized for chat applications, but its "rooms" architecture could prove to be very powerful for building forums. You use rooms within rooms for categories and subcategories, and then either use threads (feature in beta) or more subrooms for the topics themselves.
You could make an overlay that renders the entire system as a forum, and people using Matrix chat clients could use it as an instantaneous chat system. Signing up for a forum could be done through a regular Matrix account, without forum accounts for all their users, or it could host its own Matrix account for new subscribers if they choose to partake in chats. The annoying chat popups you get in "modern" forums from direct messages would just be bog-standard Matrix chatrooms.
You know what, I'm kind of intrigued. I'm adding this to the pile of projects interesting projects that I'll probably forget about or never finish.
Cactus Comments [1] is a comment section replacement, but the comments are just posts in a Matrix room - effectively a public Matrix room viewer!
I've thought it'd be cool to expand on this to build a strictly chronological social network - that just interleaves messages from your group chats (or a group chat that only you can post to, which becomes your "feed").
I however am not a fan of relying on JavaScript to use comments. Although I guess there are third party Matrix clients, it seems like they are second-class citizens. If Element and Matrix devs focused on a native client like Telegram, I'd have been recommending Matrix long ago. However, for now IRC, XMPP, Usenet, and mailing lists all seem like better options due to the number of clients and lightweight options.
Reddit can absorb off-topic digressions better than traditional linear forums at the expense of conversations becoming repetitious because five separate conversations each say approximately the same thing. However, the "one login to rule them all" trumps that UI hurdle.
I like the idea of Discord in general. It certainly does have uses like making voice communication more accessible.
But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any discoverability.
One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure.
This is why tagging is so much better.
Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type? You see how quickly it breaks down.
Discord channels are a hierarchy.
So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and someone might only be interested in those posts.
Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on different parts of the screen.
I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example, to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it seems?).
So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or you're going to have a bad time.
Prior to Slack I spent many years as an OSS maintainer. I also participated in a Slack channel that discussed my OSS tool's general problem space. That Slack workspace was on the free plan, so messages older than 6 months were memory-holed.
In practice that wasn't too big of an issue. Most developers understood that GitHub was the place for concrete actionable things and long-term discussions, whereas Slack was the place to build relationships and address burning questions quickly. Most developers understood this distinction, though occasionally some would have to be steered towards GitHub when discussing potential bugs that benefitted a proper write-up.
I also worked at a large company that paid for Slack, and it was much more of a long-term memory resource. But as always, whenever I found myself repeatedly searching in the message history for a particular piece of information it always made sense to put it somewhere more defined — in a readme or some other sort of document.
At Slack we have the same basic breakdown — Slack (the software) provides a really useful context for why certain decisions were made, and in a pinch the search feature is great for finding particular nuggets of information, but that doesn't stop us using Quip, GitHub and Jira for tracking longer-lived information.
As an end user, I find that in practice most projects don't actually move any information to a suitable spot.
I can't tell you how many times I've Googled an obscure error message and the only two results were the source code where the error came from and that self-hosted, open-source Slack alternative that Google can index. At that point, I already went to check the source code, and when I click the chatroom where the message is supposed to be, I reach some kind of archived page that's clearly at completely the wrong place in the chatroom history with no way to find what I was actually looking for.
At least the open source clone is searchable, so many troubleshooting could've been avoided if people had used forums rather than Slack/Discord/Mattermost for "support forums".
If they'd been using a forum, would you have a good record of the solution? Or would the problem just never have been solved? The low friction of slack-like tools matters.
695 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadGranted, things can completely explode, and moderation is still a requirement, but that's true of forums as well.
(Although due to their async nature, things boil over much more slowly, and it's typically easier to just put the entire forum or a user into a timeout.)
But overall all you need to do is setup it properly once and configure some backups sync.
Again, you need to pay like $10-15 / month for server to host it and backups.
I wonder what'll happen next year, if/when the Discord community fractures, or starts making certain channels private, or it's just abandoned and closed down.
Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.
I could see potential for a feature in a chat program where a message or series of messages could be selected and enshrined in a search engine-indexed synchronous knowledge base page, working something like a more powerful version of a pin in Slack or Discord.
Overall, though, I felt like the article was kind of bossy.
The Rust community has had great luck with Zulip for that. It works well live, as well as asynchronously, and the content remains useful and findable later.
(We also have forums, which serve a different purpose (longer content), as well as GitHub.)
Basecamp?
We're using discourse internally for this (in conjunction with matrix) and it's allowed us to have discussions I don't think we would have otherwise had.
I have used this to great effect in my teams.
What am I saying: We've had technical mediums to discuss technical problems asyncly for a while now. (Usenet, reddit, phpbb, hackernews) Instead lots of younger people in the industry decided they weren't obligated to use those and foolishly decided to move to a more transient form of communication for everything.
In doing so we're losing technical knowledge, misinformation is spreading, and we're running into development of technology that has a limited set of experience behind it.
What I suggest: Figure out how to enhance async communication to switch to syncronous and store the results of that. (in other words identify deficiencies and try to solve the problems there rather than completely scrapping them)
Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists.
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IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / instant messenger style communications.
Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker News are async and slow.
You can't write a bot to archive this.
It's in Slack's financial interest to prevent this as that it would save messages that would otherwise only exist in their paid version.
Secondly, that assumed that the users are behaving in a way that classifies those messages as a threaded manner. Depending on humans to go back after a conversation has taken place to classify and organize that conversation isn't a highly rewarding activity.
Another concern: The medium is a temporary and off the cuff one.. this may lead to negative reprocutions for non-agreeing tribal members to defame someone. (A sabiture turning on that feature on discords that are private) [Given today's moralistic "cancel culture" - this is a very real possiblity]
Then the heuristics can just happen with the pulled down content.
I wrote this a year ago as my employer was starting up their forum[0]. While we have since added slack, the forum is the main support mechanism for our community (people who pay us money get support tickets).
I still stand by that choice for:
I can't recall the exact numbers, but something like 5-10% of our overall traffic is to the forum.0: https://fusionauth.io/community/forum/
When it launches, I'd love to interview you for a community story like https://fusionauth.io/blog/2020/11/18/reconinfosec-fusionaut... if you'd be game. My email is in my profile.
To be clear, I really and truly don't fault them for this: Slack's always been clear that their focus is on business communication, which is a totally different animal when it comes to moderation needs. Discord is nearly infinitely better in the sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still considerably far behind the resources I've got when moderating a large Discourse instance.
Could you expand on this a bit?
A lot of this thread seems to be coming down to opinions. Are there specific moderation features that Discord lacks?
The official feature is still TBA
"This bot can't join more servers as it has not been verified or is requesting gateway intents it has not been verified for. Ask the bot's developer about https://dis.gd/bot-verification so you can add it to your server!"
I know that you're probably not the dev, just posting it here for visibility.
I’ve tried looking a bit for others. Most discord bots seem to be for the same few things
I have no professional reason to communicate with this team, why should my day be interrupted with their whooping and macho sales competitiveness.
Channels and channel discipline are the key to keeping Slack manageable. Have lots of channels with specific purposes and people can choose what they care about and ignore the rest.
Hearing people like 'head of people' or 'release manager' spout inspirational management quotes just makes me cynical and miserable.
I'm far happier with my job and probably also more productive without their input.
general channels are cancer in any communication system as far as I've experienced.
But yes, an automated solution would be great.
Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good post than when I just toss out a slack q.
- The software is usually poorly written - even the big guns. I helped maintain a vbulletin forum for years and oh my god is that codebase a disaster. It also for the longest time, if not still, stored passwords in plaintext in the database.
- The people who want to have the forum rarely have the tech skills to keep up to date on security issues, let alone keep the software up to date.
- There are 'forum as a service' sites but they inevitably become essentially ad spam platforms that are intolerable to use.
So you can do this, and I might even benefit from it showing up in google searches, but I'd actually still be way more likely to use discord if I have a question.
Also, I reject the idea that there even is a strict dichotomy between "synchronous" and "asynchronous" communication systems. If anything, you can always do what's usually described as async on a synchronous platform but you can't really do the opposite, so they're a superset/subset pair to me.
I don't care if the maintainer takes 2 days to get back to me on discord but at least if they do I get a notification and I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.
I disagree that random forums are spam-fests. That is purely a matter of moderation and user activity. Overclock.net and bronco6g.com are two (non-reddit) forums I can think of that I've been to recently, and neither have a large amount of spam posts.
You can set up email notifications to thread replies in most forum software, so you don't have to actively check if you don't want to.
Finally, I reject the notion that you can effectively search through years and years of discord or slack chat for topics related to your question. The nature of creating a thread differentiates itself from a "random" post. Perhaps if Discord/Slack's UI prompted a person to label a post "conversation starter" or "thread starter" then it would be better organized.
slack doesn't have categories and tags and some search terms in slack bring up too many results without context to be useful
Would you be cool with “log in with google”?
Either one of the big companies is controlling your account (and, crucially, securing it) or you have many accounts across many platforms.
I'm genuinely at a loss here for solutions that are decentralised yet... centralised...
Chance that your Google account outlives everything else is if anything, pretty high.
I've never used "sign in with Google" for anything.
There's effectively only a few SSO providers that are viable to use on most of the internet (google, github, microsoft mostly) and they're all attached to more personal information than the forums were to begin with.
I do really wish federated identity had gotten off the ground the way it was promised though. That would be a better world.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) say they are.
(the upshot of your suggestion that your email address sometimes doesn't identify you and so isn't PII would be what, forum owners can leak your email address tied to your forum posts so long as they don't know whose address it is? That doesn't sound particularly desirable.)
Why were you putting PIID on web forums? Why weren't you using a unique password?
> I don't have to keep hopping on a damn forum every day to check if they have or not.
Discord is a nightmare. Someone mentions you in a busy channel, 6 hours ago? Try to find it. Go on. I'll wait. Discord has no "skip to where I was mentioned" feature.
You're forced to use a (visible to everyone) unique identifier across every discord server, ripe for doxxing or stalking people. Targeting someone's account is attractive because their single login gets you into every server they're part of.
Their implementation of threading sucks. They rolled it out with little warning to server mods/admins and it caught nearly everyone off guard, with users going hog wild creating threads because it was a way to get something like "joesuckscocks" into the channel list. The icing on the cake was that threads created before the ACLs were rolled out couldn't be removed by server admins and mods, so they had to go around begging users to delete them.
Every server I belong to, I've had to spend a minute or two making sure I disable all the by-default-on notifications because people abuse the shit out of @everyone, @here, etc; some server admins even abuse roles to push a notification to everyone (ie, they'll create a role everyone is added to, and then spam it with mentions.)
Discord has done little to address problems like server raids and trolls targeting LGBTQ/PoC groups, 'rivals' to their favorite streamers, you name it. They've shrugged and said "we don't have the staff to do it", yet they have estimated profits around $130M/year. As a result people have had to add all sorts of bots to deal with the problem, and nobody has any idea what all these bots are doing with all the chat logs people share.
There's so much fragmentation, too. I play a not-very-popular tactical shooter game and the number of servers I've been added to and have to keep track of is crazy because everyone creates their own server.
Oh, and last but not least: tencent has a significant investment in them.
Edit: since I am on dang's naughty list and only allowed to comment five times per day despite having over 500 karma in a month or so, I have to respond via edit: Discord on desktop does not allow for any way to navigate to where you were mentioned in a channel. I've also found the "scroll me back to what I last read" function works poorly or not at all.
You’ll have to excuse the HN pendantics, but it does. In iOS app, for example, open the left draw and there’s a navigation tab on the bottom. There’s a mentions tab that will show you a list of mentions (that is replies and pings) and tapping on one takes you to that message.
And yes, my response to the number of forum breaches I've seen has indeed been to stop putting information on them -- that's exactly what I said. I stopped using them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033
answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines
But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.
Discourse is comparatively very pleasant I thought.
e.g. for a refresher some random vbulletin site: https://forums.devx.com/forumdisplay.php?105-VB-Classic
Because each of those entries on that page are a thread to me, but if discussions within a thread go off on a tangent there's not really a way to group/organize those sub-threads.
I only see this as an issue if the site does not reimplement find so that it is able to deal with this.
In other words Discourse only has metrics on people who use Discourse.
I think this is probably why sign-up metrics are so common but those are perverse as well. How much do you set yourself back if you only work for people willing to sign up?
I don't mind them having a server-side search function that actually searches the entire thread. I do mind having a heavily-used shortcut hijacked to behave in a non-standard way.
I don't see the problem with this tbh. When you create a JS app, you lose a lot of the native features of the browser and it becomes your own responsibility to reimplement them in a correct way. As long as the site pulls it off flawlessly, this is ok to me.
And from what I have seen, discourse does do this well.
This is done to remain performant specifically when the website thinks infinite scrolling is a good idea. In my experience it very rarely is, with the Ctrl+F thing being just one of the reasons why.
Maybe it's that Discourse's search functionality didn't really work well, or suddenly started searching across threads rather than only the current one (IIRC); maybe it's that it's the only system I can think of (other than google docs) that hijacks the shortcut, but it gave me a very negative first impression of the tool.
I really like their timeline scrollbar as well which lets you easily move through hundreds of posts very quickly and has become a pattern in many apps like Google Photos and Telegram.
Let's look at Ctrl+F again. The standard Chrome search toolbar is search-as-you-type, highlighting occurrences immediately. It also shows the total number of occurences found on the page, and has arrows to navigate to next/previous. It also doesn't auto-hide (and thus lose focus) if you scroll the page.
What does Discourse replace it with? A search toolbar that requires an explicit submission to even start searching - and then, instead of actually scrolling to the occurrence of the search term, it shows a dropdown with snippets of posts in current scope that matched the term, highlighting it much like a search engine would.
So it basically has nothing to do with the native function that it hijacks, other than the broad concept of textual search.
I second the other comments, XenForo is the best currently.
Just can't guarantee it will be useful
Example of a long thread, just so we're all on the same page: https://meta.discourse.org/t/trading-buttons-buy-sell-exchan...
I can understand some hesitance from people who are naturally wary of infinite scrolling, as the vast majority of implementations are terrible. Where Discourse succeeds, though, is in managing state such that it doesn't feel brittle when you're deep into a thread's history. The developers built an infinite scroll that has feature parity with classic pagination, plus the far better UI of a "timeline" scrollbar.
Maybe feature parity with classic pagination from 20 years ago. Discord takes forever to load content when scrolling.
[1]: https://lobste.rs
[2]: https://tade.link
[3]: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-sf@lis... for example
[4]: https://getaether.net/
[5]: https://lemmy.ml/
Reddit is probably the closest alternative I know of today. But, several communities treat an associated sub-reddit as unofficial in favor of their Discourse instance. However, I simply can't navigate 20 different Discourse instances every day. Likewise, I can't keep hopping between different Discord or Slack workspaces/servers. Yes, they're in the same client, but I have to keep making expensive context changes to load channels from each server.
As a result, I've mostly given up. There are a few communities I'm attached to that I'll put up with the poor tooling, but the others are basically invisible if there isn't a sub-reddit. I'd suspect this has made communities more insular, even if the tooling is less obtuse than something like IRC.
Additionally, with NNTP, the "sign up" process is very low friction. With Discourse, I need to seek out each community separately. It's enough work where I'm unlikely to experiment with new communities.
The communities on Reddit is in my experience always lower quality, more combative and less friendly than communities on discord, discourse and irc.
Personally, I only have one Discourse instance I keep up to date on, but if that instance weren’t right there in my email client, I’d have zero.
edit: The main caveat in my experience is that you probably want to click through onto the website if you’re planning to reply, both to be able to preview formatting, and to double-check that the post you’re replying to hasn’t been edited in a way that renders the reply unnecessary. (I wish there was a way to deliver edits over email.) But most of the time I’m just reading, and for that I just stick to my email client. The loss of edits doesn’t seem to be a big deal in practice.
We really need a new NNTP, designed for p2p or federation.
Lemmy/ActivityPub or Briar are the closest thing we have.
It's amazing how quickly the software community forget lessons from the past.
Personally, I love that Discourse allows j/k for keyboard navigation. I get the hate over infinite scrolling. I feel mixed over the two approaches.
https://forum.vbulletin.com/forum/vbulletin-5-connect/vbulle...
https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
"The master branch is considered a stable branch capable of being released at any time. Reviewed, stable changes land against master via pull-request."
Last update was jul 13.
It's pretty stable and has been around for a while, so i wouldn't expect a flurry of constant changes (durability and stability are exactly what i look for when self hosting)
https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Co...
https://flarum.org
That interface + "topic threads" like an old school forum front page instead of "comment just on today's article" would be nice, I think. Let's you chat in real-time when folks are also online, but search and minimize/expand subthreads and such for when viewing later.
Also, didn't vBulletin have a lot of spam and security issues? It's kind of like WordPress in that using it is nice but managing it is hell.
XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.
edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...
Does need a bit of polish on the getting it to run side though... it was designed as a platform rather than a standalone, so it's hard to set up. But the fundamentals are sound as it's just a PostgreSQL database with a Go API which is documented here https://microcosm-cc.github.io/ and at the moment has a Django Web UI (just calls the API, it has no database) but to make it easier to run I'm very very slowly porting Django to Go so that there'll be a single binary to use.
But the whole forum is web API first, and the web site is just a client. The docs are there to say "anything you see this website doing, you can do it through a client you create"... and it doesn't have to be everything, if all you want to do is list publicly visible new conversations on a different website then it's a single API call that you can do from client side JavaScript.
But... if you do want to create an entirely new application using the forum as a platform for it, i.e. a full blog system with the forum hidden but driving discussions, or an app where the forum is at the heart of it but the app looks like a cyclists ride database oriented around events and a calendar but with discussions per ride... well knock yourself out, the API makes that pretty easy and there are apps that do both of those things (though natch, they're closed source and the rides one charges over $200 per year per user for it).
I say the beginning of the end was when the millenials were in enough positions of power to utilize the internet for PR. I feel like in North America, the Obama campaign in 2008 opened a lot of eyes to the power of the internet. Maybe his second term more so. Certainly was a tirefire by the end of his run (Trump).
I remember the Nexus 4 / Nexus 7 era to really change how financially accessible it felt to get online with consumption-oriented devices that weren't painful performance-wise.
But I guess for the "normies" it was not just another forum. It was the internet. The internet to them was just facebook and twitter.
People also started using terms like "Social Media" as if it was a new thing. This made no sense to me because the internet was always social. I used to spend a lot of time in forums and chat room in the 2000s. So like, what are these people talking about?
The concept of forums is solid (as evidenced by the articles I see here monthly, seemingly), we just need forums to work better with the devices and user flows we're accustomed to today.
We've reached feature parity with older forum softwares years ago, and since then it's just been carving away at the software to really make it the best offering out there
I also created NodeBB, so I am of course biased :)
On the demo instance in Safari Version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612) if you navigate into the Announcements -> Demo instance post and then quickly hit the back button a few times you don't actually get taken back to the top level. Instead I get stuck at the previous forum, and if I go back and forward a bunch I can get stuck in a state where all my history is just the one thread I clicked into. Not totally sure what is going on here, but feels like the type of thing that shows up with manual JS page history management failing to handle rapid events quickly leading to race conditions.
Definitely some papercuts with that system that I'd be happy to spend some time optimizing. I'll probably file a bug and look into it this week.
Don't worry about being mean, if we didn't know how to take criticism, we would've gotten out of this game a long time ago. Every bug report (no matter how pedantic) ends up improving the software as a whole, and that ends up with everybody winning
Shoot me an email at support@, and I'll give you some pointers. If you want us to do it, we can do that too.
Discourse has the advantage that it is indexable by Google which is a big one, but I don't share the frustrations that many here talk about.
IM has always felt faster and more responsive than forums ever did. I used to be a huge forum user and I remember posting questions and having to wait at least a day to get to an answer while on IMs I have often found people start to help out immediately and provide their best guess even when they don't have the full answer.
While forums felt too formal and if you didn't post a well researched and correct question, your post would immediately be locked/flamed/sunk down.
Discord and Slack both fulfill interesting niches, but everything else is composed of chewing gum and tape.
The closest thing is Reddit, but it’s not great because subreddit names can be taken over and it’s hard to topple moderators that refuse to give up power.
[1]: https://github.com/zulip
There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive
Hypothetically, If one were to offer something that was hosted and provided a trivial one-click sqlite export facility, would HN generally agree to participate in that sort of ecosystem? A public webhook could be exposed so that enterprising users could build their own replicas or other event-sourced systems on top... Account management would be simple and robust. PBKDF2 scheme over unconstrained passwords with optional 2nd factor of user's choice. All account facts aside from the primary key, email address, hash, salt and iteration count would reside in the public domain, so compliance with regs simply involves allowing the user to remove these items from the system. 1 simple button with a "are you sure" and that's that. The only traces are everything you knowingly placed in the public domain.
So, we are just talking about plaintext/markdown here, right? Hackernews comment-tier feature set, but threads stay around forever like reddit? This really doesn't seem like rocket science. Maybe add a tagging/labeling system like GitHub has so that users can quickly go lateral on related topics or comments?
I feel you could take what HN has and add another 5-10% unicorn dust on top and have the best forum solution on earth. Keeping the tools heavily constrained and simple is the key to success here. Twitter is a good example of both. Look at the quality of conversation on HN. Arguably unparalleled as-is. What if these awesome conversation threads just kept going after the initial 24h? Wouldn't that be incredible?
That's cute. I thought the same back in 2014 when I started building forum software.
As it turns out, there's no one "perfect" feature set, and basic feature parity took far longer than I expected it to.
But I love reading about new entrants to the forum software scene... Do it! Give me a run for my money :)
Only issue with SO is that you (as a company or community) don't have as much control. That may or may not be an issue depending on goals.
Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use. People are comfortable using them. They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
Simple fix: add login with google/github.
Slack is great for the question asker, no question. Quick response, great interface. But for the question answerer, not so great.
Reddit and Stackoverflow are different beasts and share some of the value of forums; the downside there is that someone else owns that content/SEO value.
But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right way around it for you?
If I set up foobarguy@gmail.com and use email verification because gmail requires me too, gmail can tie foobarguy@gmail.com to another email account.
But if I then use foorbarguy@gmail.com for $RANDOMFORUM, $RANDOMFORUM admin doesn't have any idea who I am. If they spam me or lose my password, I can just abandon foobarguy@gmail.com and set up barbazguy@gmail.com.
What am I missing?
Intense mistrust of google; a desire for the unattainable: true anonymity.
Then use a password manager. Pick your poison.
Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just phone number/sms verification
No one wants to register for slack or hand over government id for discord or use the reddit app.
Basically, I want a Discord-type app, with it's UI and one login, and then blended with the Discourse forum power.
I'm working on a topical chat site where instead of servers/rooms, it's posts w/chatrooms. Curious to hear more in terms of how you envision a hybrid that would have appeal.
They have separate channel types, where one is a chat channel (like Discord and other chat groups: a linear chat stream) and another as a forum channel (that has unexpanded topics that when clicked show a linear chat stream, also able to pin certain topics to the top).
What I like about it is that I can find slack/discord/group text channels to really frustrate me when I've missed some things. Seems very hard to sometimes get caught up on what people are saying, often many conversations happening at the same time, and having to scroll back a lot to figure out where it began. Ah! That may be it, channels don't seem to have a start, so I find I try to search for the beginning and get overwhelmed trying to see how the conversation "started." Whereas with the post/topic style channel that most forums have, it's quite easy for me to see where the conversation started (at least where this branch of it did) and don't feel the stress to go all the way back.
FB seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet has the posts expanded so one doesn't just sees the title, sees the whole post, which can make it hard to scan to see which to read. HN seems to have a similar post/topic style organization, yet, as FB, lacks many of the forum features or doesn't seem to do them well, like sorting/searching/filtering/pinning/moderation/etc.
I basically kinda dream of Guilded but with faster development, doubled or tripled down focus on their forum channel, and a superpowered member directory.
> I'm working on a topical chat site
I checked it out and I like the look. Seems like HN or reddit in a way, but without the indented threads and just having a linear chat form. If a lot of people chat on each post, I think I may get similarly lost to Discord. I do have a few ideas that popped into my mind that excited me, please feel free to take them or leave them:
1) Embed the article/content directly in the post column? Not sure how technologically feasible/legal it'd be, but I'd love to have one site that brings content in reader mode and then having that chat column next to it, so that I could read and then comment in the same spot. I don't like clicking away and coming back, especially with the columnar setup, I think I'd love the full side-by-side.
2) Somehow limiting who can type in the chat column, maybe per article or per community or something. I think I've dreamed of having a place where I can watch 2 people chat, maybe 3. I think conversations can get quite diluted/convoluted with more people and I love the idea of just reading what two people think, especially ones I respect, especially who may have expertise on a specific topic. Maybe it could be less of a pure open-to-everyone chat, and maybe has separate 1-to-1 chats in there about the topic. I dunno. Something about me would love to see a 1-1 chat of you and your friend talking about Incubus, and then maybe a former Incubus person and another famous rocker talking about their reflection on this, etc. Perhaps this is too out there and not clear enough, not sure.
Anyway, would love to chat more with you on your endeavor if you'd like to :-)
1. It's the project's web forum. https://forums.fooproject.org/ . Not random at all. If you're lucky, your registration for fooproject works for the forum as well.
2. Well, we don't like registering with a large corporation either.
> and figure that sites navigation,
Suppose it's a web forum, one of the trusty varieties from the 2000's. What's there to figure out? The exact placement of settings in the user profile pages? You'll live.
> let alone their privacy/data policies.
In this day and age, the effective assumption is: It's all potentially public and the US government keeps a copy forever. Wish it were otherwise.
... and actually, the privacy is typically better on smaller independent platforms than on large ones. The large ones are probably already hooked up to the NSA, while for the smaller ones it's just a potential.
> Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Slack is a painful experience, and not even that easy .
Reddit... yes, but there's not much of a UI to be difficult.
Discord - I have almost no experience with it TBH.
> People are comfortable using them.
No, they're not. Some are. Those who aren't, tend not to use them unless they have to.
> They provide a more uniform experience across different servers/subreddits/etc...
A web forum is a pretty uniform thing. I hope you're not complaining that not all forums are controlled by some huge single company...
Then presumably complain about the Internet becoming 6 big platforms and a search engine.
In fact, no one wanted Reddit outside of Digg users, the vast majority of its traffic are bots and it's a poor substitute for the forums we're talking about.
As for Slack it's basically a rebrand of IRC for corporate Windows users, and Discord is just a testament to the laziness of the author of Ventrilo.
What no one cares about is your opinion on "privacy/data policies" if you think that the whole world being filtered through 4 sites is somehow a net positive in terms of "privacy/data policies."
Discord is GARBAGE, and you don't know what you're talking about.
The only people I see unironically talking about "the year of the Linux desktop" are people that talk about _other people_ supposedly proclaiming the year of the Linux desktop. "This recurring discussion reminds me of a decades-old strawman/dead meme" is not a good way to introduce any straight-faced argument.
> Nobody wants to register on some random weird site, and figure that sites navigation, let alone their privacy/data policies. Discord/Reddit/Slack/etc... are easy to use.
Why do you speak of Discord and Slack as if they were eternal, and that we were all taught to use them as surely as we learned our ABCs and cut up our food? At one time Discord and Slack were that "random weird site", and I'll note that for vast numbers of people outside of nerd and tech communities they still are. As for me, given a choice (and outside of work I do have one), I'd touch neither because I find them both to be terrible software.
Definitely better than being forced to provide my cellphone number...I'll take registering on "some weird site" (weird way to talk about a projects community hub) over giving a dubious company that keeps escalating its hunger for new policies (usually just to grab more data) my number.
Be active and push real issues and bugs into the github channel and use the content of forum / chat for documentation / faq / guides.
Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer questions there, your users will find it.
Forums have an ephemerality too as threads get too cluttered or buried under new threads. When an old thread takes too long to find or filter through, new ones are created and then redundancy sucks up everyone's time.
The answer is moderation - preferably with "elected" moderators. The other key is to have a system of escalation of key knowledge to a Wiki, which again needs moderation in the form of reviews to keep the knowledge up to date.
The only forum I’ve had success with as a user is Reddit. It isn’t the best forum software in the world but it is miles better than the usual php bulletin boards.
Having run a forum before, it’s so much work to keep anything secure and spam-free. I had to geo-ip block all of France and Russia just to stay above water. I gave up.
https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty
All Fedora mailing lists use it and it works well IMHO.
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/
I'm not well-versed in ActivityPub and the systems interacting with it, but I believe Mastodon can do threading at least. I don't think it can do the categories to build a full forum system out of it, though.
Matrix is currently optimized for chat applications, but its "rooms" architecture could prove to be very powerful for building forums. You use rooms within rooms for categories and subcategories, and then either use threads (feature in beta) or more subrooms for the topics themselves.
You could make an overlay that renders the entire system as a forum, and people using Matrix chat clients could use it as an instantaneous chat system. Signing up for a forum could be done through a regular Matrix account, without forum accounts for all their users, or it could host its own Matrix account for new subscribers if they choose to partake in chats. The annoying chat popups you get in "modern" forums from direct messages would just be bog-standard Matrix chatrooms.
You know what, I'm kind of intrigued. I'm adding this to the pile of projects interesting projects that I'll probably forget about or never finish.
I've thought it'd be cool to expand on this to build a strictly chronological social network - that just interleaves messages from your group chats (or a group chat that only you can post to, which becomes your "feed").
[1]: https://cactus.chat/
I however am not a fan of relying on JavaScript to use comments. Although I guess there are third party Matrix clients, it seems like they are second-class citizens. If Element and Matrix devs focused on a native client like Telegram, I'd have been recommending Matrix long ago. However, for now IRC, XMPP, Usenet, and mailing lists all seem like better options due to the number of clients and lightweight options.
But I think I must be in the small minority who thinks that Discord UI/UX is beyond terrible and Discord is nothing more than a terrible walled garden where none of the content has any discoverability.
One thing we've learned in the last few decades is that hierarchical organization doesn't work. This was obvious in the days of the Yahoo Directory and probably long before. Trees are bad tools for humans to organize things because the mental model you have for how to organize things is likely not obvious to other people so to use your hierarchy requires users to take on and unfamiliar and opaque organization structure.
This is why tagging is so much better.
Think of something as simple as organizing an MP3 library. Is it Artist -> Album -> Song? What about year? What about artist type? You see how quickly it breaks down.
Discord channels are a hierarchy.
So for a developer or project Discord, what should your channels be? #bug-reports, #suggestions, #feedback? Well already you've run into problems as a given submission might be more than one of these. Or it might apply to a particular major version and someone might only be interested in those posts.
Furthermore, every time I try and do anything in Discord, I can never intuit my way to it. I have to google it almost without exception. There are multiple places where settings are, all on different parts of the screen.
I tried to use a personal Discord to organize select information from multiple other Discords. There's functionality, for example, to follow a given channel... except some owners disable that (it seems?).
So I'd go wider than the developer community: don't use Discord for anything that's meant to be discoverable or searcchable or you're going to have a bad time.
Prior to Slack I spent many years as an OSS maintainer. I also participated in a Slack channel that discussed my OSS tool's general problem space. That Slack workspace was on the free plan, so messages older than 6 months were memory-holed.
In practice that wasn't too big of an issue. Most developers understood that GitHub was the place for concrete actionable things and long-term discussions, whereas Slack was the place to build relationships and address burning questions quickly. Most developers understood this distinction, though occasionally some would have to be steered towards GitHub when discussing potential bugs that benefitted a proper write-up.
I also worked at a large company that paid for Slack, and it was much more of a long-term memory resource. But as always, whenever I found myself repeatedly searching in the message history for a particular piece of information it always made sense to put it somewhere more defined — in a readme or some other sort of document.
At Slack we have the same basic breakdown — Slack (the software) provides a really useful context for why certain decisions were made, and in a pinch the search feature is great for finding particular nuggets of information, but that doesn't stop us using Quip, GitHub and Jira for tracking longer-lived information.
I can't tell you how many times I've Googled an obscure error message and the only two results were the source code where the error came from and that self-hosted, open-source Slack alternative that Google can index. At that point, I already went to check the source code, and when I click the chatroom where the message is supposed to be, I reach some kind of archived page that's clearly at completely the wrong place in the chatroom history with no way to find what I was actually looking for.
At least the open source clone is searchable, so many troubleshooting could've been avoided if people had used forums rather than Slack/Discord/Mattermost for "support forums".