A Discord is not a substitute for a website. Or a support forum. Or an issue queue.
Or really pretty much anything besides maybe IRC or Matrix if you're not worried about the openness of the chat platform.
@geerlingguy imo everything goes. remember how much and for how long software teams where coordinated via mail-lists. tho, discord... meh... to heavy to be on many places joined. my choice IRC :)
@geerlingguy I mean, it’s a perfectly valid substitute for a support forum for small projects… it’s user-friendliness is much better than Matrix (and I say that as a Beeper employee and Matrix enthusiast)
(IRC is worse than both, you don’t even get a message history by default)
@geerlingguy start using the phrase 'living daylights' more to describe things
@geerlingguy it's a bit of a conundrum on one hand a support forum can be great for documentation of projects.
on the other hand a chat room such as discord or matrix is amazing for quick help with an issue if there is a community around the project.
@geerlingguy I think it's worth pointing out that Matrix can be displayed in plain text without any gates or walls. There are numerous non-chat applications for Matrix.
So yes, it can actually work as a substitute of a website backend, forum, or issue queue.
Some examples:
https://circu.li/circles.html
https://cactus.chat/
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer
https://acter.global/
And more
@geerlingguy I'd love to see a solution for setting up issue tracking and/or a forum engine that is easier to use than Discord
@geerlingguy Additionally a "community support forum" is not a substitute for _actual_ support people.
Sure, it's great to foster a community, and capture community knowledge, but you need actual support staff standing behind your product and their answers.
@geerlingguy @onepict I hate Discord with the heat of a thousand suns. It is worse than useless, in that it is not only useless itself, but it convinces organizations they don’t need to set up actually useful services.
@geerlingguy I strongly want to agree with you, but I really cannot. Having a place to cowork and hang out with people to mutually help each other figure out issues as they come up is a blessing and this is what discord does best.
It is a place where you can have a text chat, a forum, and a voice- and video chat all at once. And this is pretty brilliant.
But it is not meant to be an archive, and this is the huge upside of support forums and the other things you've listed.
@geerlingguy Agree, one thing though is that Discord does have a forum feature (not chat rooms) that can be a substitute for any other forum software, if you don’t need it to be publicly accessible. But replacing stable ressources and pages with chat is indeed terrible, even more when hidden without an account.
@geerlingguy Or the fact it's literally owned and run by the CCP.
@geerlingguy YES AND NO, because IRC/Matrix can (and is oftenly) selfhosted. When discord terminates you (your contract) and your server, everything is gone.
@geerlingguy the problem I have with discord is the amount of knowledge that’s just being lost to anyone that’s not in that discord. Without google indexing it and a way to find it by *anyone* in the future is depressing. I think of how many 12+ year old forum posts have helped me solve the most random issues and wonder what we are losing to discord discussions.
@FunkyBob true! The best support forums have at least one or two staff on hand checking it daily. Sometimes a dedicated community person who can connect through to engineers or others who can give full answers if the support person can't.
@geerlingguy But you should ALWAYS be able to submit a support request directly to the company.
@cadey GitHub, issues + discussions, and search actually works, can be browsed without an account.
I like Redbooth. Dead simple, the free level is great - and when you want more project management depth, the prices are reasonable.
I am not shilling Redbooth, just a satisfied customer. It has saved me untold hours of futzing around.
@geerlingguy @cadey this. And if you care about selfhosting because you don't want it to disappear at the whim of corporations, use @forgejo
@hydrian @geerlingguy yes but as easy to use for "normal people" as it is to use Discord.
@cadey @hydrian @geerlingguy Discord isn’t easy to use if you have to track down a specific thing across a dozen servers with hundreds of channels. Especially when you get logged out during one of the nearly daily updates. Or when you ask a question that should be addressed in some sort of docs that no one ever bothered to write, and then people harass you for not digging through the server history hard enough looking for the answer. Plus, some people hate synchronous communication.