person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!
This, exactly.
Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.
It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen, and buggy af. It’s barely gotten any better too.
i mean, it’s far from perfect, but as someone that’s been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven’t found it.
Depends on what exact type of app you want, but as one example of something that can mostly replace discord and do a far better job-- Slack. There was an app in the early 2000’s for gaming voice chat which I thought worked far better too. It was called something like “Roger Wilco” I think. The only similar apps I’ve used which are obviously worse than discord? Teams, and once MS bought it, Skype.
Man Skype used to be so good when it was peer to peer… I don’t see anything that MS brought to that platform that improved it at all.
I hate Slack Overflow (using Slack as documentation) but it beats the pants off of Discord Overflow.
ah yes slack the app that won’t let you voice chat in groups or store chat history unless you pay $7 per user per month. I’m honestly amazed how they’ve been getting away with it this long when discord exists
Weird, I guess I have been imagining doing that at work for the past couple of years. I do understand though, when you’re used to apps like discord, you forget it’s possible to not only gain new useful features, but have them actually work.
Slack’s pricing logic makes perfect sense to me there. It’s free and works for a large number of users, but the ones who actually need chat history probably can/should pay for it.
Yeah it’s totally crazy that an app can be considered good enough that many thousands of businesses find it worth paying for. I mean why isn’t every business using free Gmail accounts? Or for similar shittiness in the UI department, why isn’t everyone using Hotmail?
I was pretty clearly only complaining about the features offered by their free tier, which I just checked does still not let you voice chat with three or more people or search chat history. (The chat history issue is more significant by far).
And yes $7 per user per month is not reasonable for an open source project with a few hundred members that doesn’t have a budget, especially compared to discord that gives you unlimited chat history for free. All the open source projects I know that use chat use either matrix or discord.
“I paid for nothing, I don’t I get everything? This janky shitty free app gives it to me!”
They give it for free to nonprofits. Anything else for the confidently incorrect movement today?
Can you share some of the bugs you encounter? I actually find discord to be quite stable.
You must have seen only best of the best UIs.
I don’t think fuck is as buggy as Discord.
Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They’re entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.
Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its… fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.
The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds…
Yeha, it should be done only for support.
I still think that support stuff should be opened FIRST in the forum tool because it gives visibility for search engines. Just label it as “Support”.
That should automatically open a thread in the discord server where people can discuss. The discord server thread should be tagged in the forum. If any bug/features come from that chat, then they can be linked to the support ticket.
If anyone has a similar support related issue, they’ll find full traceability using a search engine instead of having to find the discord server to search stuff.
I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.
I left that server right away.
They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
True. That’s why I recommend Discourse if you can’t use a proper development forum like Codeberg or something.
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
Same as Matrix tbh.
Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread…
Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I’ll never have a discord for a project because I don’t want to answer the same questions over and over.
It makes for a bad forum sure, but why should it have to be a forum?
To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
You can do that.
Sorry, I forgot to add “easily”.
Time zones.
Who is saying this is using it as a forum?
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.