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Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community (mooreds.com)
1631 points by gk1 on Nov 8, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 671 comments



I run forums, I write forum software, I am pro forums.

However I'd also add that it's important how to engage with a forum.

My top tips:

1. Financially fund a forum, but have the enthusiasts run it so it is arms length but official. If you run it, spin it up as a distinct thing so that future independence is possible and easy.

2. Bless it fully, point everything you have at it and have your support staff answer questions, and allow your engineers to go deep on details where they can. Transparency wins, if you can't do it don't run a forum.

3. Have someone else run it... That was #1, but it means "Don't moderate away dissenting voices". You will never have a more vocal and clear line of feedback to help you improve, you might not like it... your job is to either listen and learn, or to explain why you are where you are and not going to do something, etc. People aren't dumb, "for money" is a fine argument, but don't use moderation to silence feedback you don't like.

4. Forums are great for content that ages well, know your audience... it's not only the person you're replying to, it's the 1,000 visitors who will never create an account but found this issue via a search engine.

5. Don't use moderation to silence feedback you don't like! (Also #1 and #3). Don't even use threats of "we're withdrawing support" or "unblessing"... these are your users and customers, listen to them rather than fight against them.


I think #3 ("don't moderate away dissenting voices") is a pretty good line / tactic; it makes the community look more independent, instead of a "my product, my rules, I am absolute" community. I mean by all means be on staff, but stay out of forum politics - you are inherently biased towards e.g. criticism. Get some staff to help enforce rules / CoC / etc - if people are being dicks then ban them, but if they're providing feedback you don't like then just... leave it?

Having a community as a third party of sorts helps keep you unbiased.


Of course, that doesn't mean that you allow straying too much out of the topic. Competitor's product that does it better? That's for your improvement, don't shut off critics. Geopolitics? Well, you need to draw a reasonable line sooner or later.


Oh please do. This seems like the perfect time to bring this up:

I had a piece of software that used Discord for support. They required that users be verified, which requires you to give you phone number to Discord. I gave them my Google Voice number, which is the only number I have, and they rejected it because they don't support VOIP numbers. I asked them if there was any other way to verify my identity.

They told me, "Just use a friend's phone to verify. As long as they don't try to verify on Discord in six months it should be fine, we won't check again".

Their official answer to identity verification was to impersonate someone else!


I constantly run into this problem, I've used my google voice number for everything for years (yeah it's not a great move but very hard to migrate away from) and a frustrating number of services recently have been rejecting it for verification. I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone. It's such a hassle. This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks. Same thing with having a credit score. You're just assumed to participate in these systems even though there's no mandate to do so or protection for you if you don't.


Just a couple of days ago, I signed in to a gmail account using the correct username and password.

Gmail intercepted me and claimed to be worried that they couldn't recognize the device I was using. According to the flow, they wanted me to verify my identity in one of three ways: (1) I could verify the backup email address associated with the account; (2) if unable to do that, I could provide the 2FA code sent to that same backup email address (how would I be able to know this without being able to know what the address was?); or (3) I could provide a phone number -- previously unknown to Google -- on the spot, and then provide the 2FA code sent to that brand-new phone number. (How is this supposed to help them verify my identity?)

I went for option (2), the email 2FA code. After providing the code, I was informed that, before signing in to my existing gmail account, I must also provide a phone number and enter the 2FA code sent to my new phone number.

So I went back and went for option (1), typing in my backup email address. Same thing happened. Because Google "couldn't recognize the device I was using", I was not allowed to sign in to an account I obviously controlled without providing a phone number with absolutely zero authentication value.

I did find a workaround. If you attempt to sign in to an account afflicted in this way in an incognito browser window, Google will, for the moment, allow it.

"Don't be evil" is long gone.


Never ever ever ever give your phone number to Google for verification or authorization. People just don't understand how easy it is to find someone's phone number and then steal it for long enough to steal e.g. emails. Has happened, will happen etc. Like ssn, phone numbers were never made for this purpose. In fact phone numbers and services (e.g. SMS) are just the front end and are setup to be easy to redirect.

We had incidents in the past just because the colleague had given the number to Google and those were corporate accounts.

Every time a service moves to SMS or phone calls for 2FA a cry can be felt across the universe by any security engineer/cryptographer.

If you are a person responsible for this: please don't. If my antiquated bank that is insured and doesn't really care can understand this, so can you, if you care just a bit.


> Never ever ever ever give your phone number to Google for verification or authorization.

You literally do not have a choice, last time I checked you had to setup SMS 2FA first. Once you’ve done that you can setup a better method and remove the SMS, but you have to remember to do it.

> If my antiquated bank that is insured and doesn't really care can understand this, so can you, if you care just a bit.

My bank certainly has not gotten that memo.


Even if it looks like you can disable it, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they'll still let you recover access with the phone number if you fail to log in enough times. They want people using their accounts, searching and using other Google $ervices.


What even more sucks that you need to first set up phone 2FA before you can enable TOPT. You can remove the phone number afterwards, but why make it so complicated?


Because they want your phone number


Is it really that easy to steal a phone number and/or intercept SMS messages? Isn't the SIM supposed to hold all sorts of secrets to prevent that?


I don't think it's down to the SIM. It's more they call help at the phone company and say "hi I've lost my phone, number 0123123. Could you transfer it to my new handset with another SIM in." Or similar. I had my one (with Three UK) transferred to some random fraudster this year. I got it back but it was a pain and potentially dangerous. In fairness to Google they didn't manage to get in to that.

Suggestion to phone companies: When receiving such requests email and text the user saying "we've had a request to transfer your number, contact us if not you" rather than just cracking ahead.


> Isn't the SIM supposed to hold all sorts of secrets to prevent that?

The process has a security hole by design: SIM cards can get damaged/lost (usually with the phone) and you wouldn't want to lose your number just because you lost your phone or damaged your SIM card by accident. This hole is typically exploited by attackers after they have identified a high-value target. You basically outsource the control over your account to a telco employee.


I had happen after a promotion that changed my LinkedIn title to something more prominent.

Still can’t prove what happened but someone ported my number from my carrier to Sprint and it took easily 18 hours to undo it. And it required convincing sprint, which I had no affiliation with, that the original transfer was not intended, and that yes I want to reverse it out.

Crazy painful.


High level government members were hacked in Brazil using spoofed numbers to access voicemail. No social engineering, just bad systems.


It varies by country and the US is not very secure. In a lot of technically more secure countries social engineering and corruption are available for a determined attacker.


It shouldn't be an immediate problem if it's really 2FA: if the second factor fails, there's still the first factor. The problem is that many systems use phone as single factor.


It's especially nice when traveling. I was once asked by a client to do something while I was in other country about 5k km from regular location. Couldn't login to the apps account for this reason (no backup email or phone set). So I didn't do the work.

I suspect it's some work-life balance enhancing thing. :D

I don't really mind, since it also helps me bash Google services in front of my clients who still use them, without being aware of these failure modes.

Personally speaking, it's absolutely a no go service. I can probably handle service loss at home quite fine, but if I relied on google or other services with these "anti-abuse" features while traveling that would be very stressful. I usually print out everything important before departing so I don't rely on any electronics, anyway, because none of it is as reliable and as quickly accessible as a piece of paper or a bunch of cash.


If you look at the gmail login page, you may notice that they specifically recommend you sign in in incognito mode when using a device that doesn't belong to you.

Their expressed policy makes an interesting contrast with their behavioral policy of freaking out and locking you out of your own account if you ever try to sign in on a device they suspect might not belong to you.

And of course, they're godawful at recognizing whether a device belongs to you. They freak out and send me "urgent" emails (on a different gmail account) whenever my phone switches between wifi and the cell network. Responding "yes, that was me" does nothing to prevent this.


I imagine it has nothing to do with security and is more about tracking. A similar failure mode with apple is that I essentially need to own two apple products with the same account to accomplish things that should only need one apple product, like making a free download from the app store.


These features came online not long after there were news articles about journalists being hacked.

The fact that Google is inconsistent about it is probably due to Google generally not being good in UX and frequently making these kind of mistakes where it seems there are multiple teams doing their own things incompatible with each other.


>probably due to Google generally not being good in UX

You misspelled "product lifecycle management." Google's lack of accomplishments in this department is a testament to their research, innovation, and committment to the disciplines of Six Omega (6ω) process strategies.


Can relate on the freak out part. Recently I logged in and generated an app password and it triggered 3 emails per action and to 2 different emails I had as my backup.


I wouldn't rely on printing out cash, that can get you in trouble.


Maybe, but it sure is convenient. ;D


:)


I had that happen, too — even after successfully receiving the passcode at my recovery address, and entering it, they still denied login. Presumably it's a bug in their system (being generous), but who knows when they'll fix it, if ever?

I currently have an old (infrequently used) gmail account, with a valid recovery email, that I cannot log in to at all.

I don't have (or want) 2FA set up for it.

I tried an incognito window just now, and same problem ):


Just had this happen to me with my Microsoft/Minecraft account. I had migrated my mojang account 2 days ago and today I was told that apparently they "detected some activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" and locked my account. They did not explain what the violation was and apparently it would magically go away if I verified my phone number (which they did not have before).

Never doing any buissness with ms again.


>"Never doing any buissness with ms again."

No github for you then ;)


Well, gitlab is way better. Github is the Facebook of developers.


Gitlab docs say the absolutely bare minimum of RAM to run it is 4GB. And that's just for gitlab, never mind Postgres. That's something like $70/mo just to host some git repos on a major cloud provider.

And if you're talking about the hosted solution... we use that at work. We have what are effectively outages once a week on average.

I like the way Gitlab as a company is run and I really want to like it but... I use gitea at home and we're actively migrating away from it at work.


>That's something like $70/mo just to host some git repos on a major cloud provider.

Don't use a major cloud provider. That's $20/mo with Digital Ocean.


Okay, host it wherever you're comfortable, but 4GB of RAM is still an absurd requirement for hosting a few git repos.


> gitea

Can confirm that gitea's pretty nice. It's not heavier than a web-based git host should be. I really like that it has a SQLite database option, since that's plenty good enough for low-tens of users and operationally simpler.


CVS and Subversion still exist!


I self host my repositories. In this way I do not care about either. But when I am searching for code Github proves to be very good source. I would not say that projects hosted on Gitlab are any better


I was not planning to get a paid account there anyway. And regardless I prefer gitlab (due to the ICE stuff).


I've actually found it hysterical. The phone number question seems to be for their data mining as well as evidence. But anyone can get into any email address when prompted this way. It is possible to send a text to someone else's phone, the servers connected to phones online are often polluted but many times they are not. You can send a text to those and get the code.

Or of course, just send the code to anyone and SS7 hijack that specific text message. You aren't hacking them, after all, you're hacking yourself or someone else.


> the servers connected to phones online are often polluted

What does this mean?


there are websites or chatbots that will give you a phone number and show you the text responses it receives


>if unable to do that, I could provide the 2FA code sent to that same backup email address (how would I be able to know this without being able to know what the address was?)

I am one of those people using option 2, by virtue of keeping a lot of old email accounts that I have set up to forward to my main account. So I don't usually need to remember which account if was, and just wait for the email to come through from the void


Once upon a time not long ago, I got off from my flight into a foreign country (I don't have a SIM card that would work there). I turned on my wifi and was delighted to see they had a public network you can use. There was a captive portal, and the only sign in options (besides using a local phone number) were Facebook and Google. I chose Google, and entered my id and password. Google promptly went into the "sus" mode as you described.

Now I can't use option 1 or 2 because I don't have internet access until Google approves my sign in. I can't use option 3 because I don't have a SIM card that would work locally. Thankfully Facebook login worked.


That's when you turn on the DNS tunnel (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7619259 ). If they somehow detect that and try to block, change your MAC and repeat. Those bastards deserve it for trying to force users into megacorps' services.


Wow that's something devious!


When I sign into a Google apps account I have associated with a school about half the time I am forced to go through option (3) whereby I’m asked for a number they can send a SMS to. I am never presented with option 1 or 2. Per the tenant settings which I do not control, 2FA is disabled and users cannot enable it, nor provide a backup email last I checked. Extremely frustrating- especially not being able to use a VoIP number, landline to dial, or set up a more robust TOTP generator or the like. Perhaps the school should codify the requirement for students have cellular service just to enroll, since it’s the de facto case already. sigh


How does that story have anything to do with being evil, by any stretch of the definition?

Are you insinuating that Google has this convoluted verification flow to intentionally harm people in some way? Or even to intentionally harm privacy or further business goals at users' expense?

Or are you just using "evil" to refer to anything you don't like?


The outcome is that they hold your email / data hostage while escalating their demands for your personal information. That sounds pretty evil to me.

That may not be what they intend, but that is result, regardless.


>Or even to intentionally harm privacy or further business goals at users' expense?

Yes (and obviously).

Google, and other SaaS, have used such dark patterns to collect more user identity data (user profile info is what they ultimately sell - even if sold to advertisers "anonymized", the profile is richer and more worth the more data they have on you).


What never seems to come up is that as far as ads are concerned and with the amount and kinds of data that these companies are and have been collecting, your name is worth zilch. "Anonymized" is a red herring.


> How does that story have anything to do with being evil

Google forcing you to enter a phone number is dishonest/hostile and has absolutely not the slightest to do with any desire to make your account more secure.

It's basically just Google holding your account hostage to get your phone number.


It’s a false reason to collect more data by holding your Gmail hostage until you provide a phone number. It is a pretty shitty user flow with no benefit except for their data collection.


I think that comment refers to Google trying to know more identifiable information about the user: a phone number. Which adds to Google’s collection of private data, susceptible to more profiling and such.


FB were caught using 2FA phone numbers for 'evil' purposes.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/fixed-ftc-orders-faceb...


As noted in the parent, in the given scenario the phone number provides absolutely no improvement in security or verification that the person who enters the phone number is actually the owner of the account. At best, granting Google the benefit of the doubt, it is security theater.

So, since it isn't effective for its stated purpose, are there other reasons it could be in place?


It's not security theater, they don't verify whose phone number is provided. Whatever number they get is used to unlock the account.


That's what would make it "security theater" as opposed to "security".


I had this problem this week too. I have a secondary Gmail account that is forwarded to my main one. I tried to login to it, they demanded a phone number (even though I do have access to the backup email), and wouldn't let me in because the only number I have is one that's already in use on my main account. I guess now you need one unique fully-functional phone number for ever Google account you have?!


I think you can verify 6 Google accounts with a single number.


Hmm. I'm sure I don't have that many, and it told me I couldn't use that number, but maybe it was a temporary issue. I haven't tried again...


> if unable to do that, I could provide the 2FA code sent to that same backup email address (how would I be able to know this without being able to know what the address was?)

Two options from the top of my head:

1. you have email forwarding configured so received mails will be delivered to another account. That's generally configured in the settings of the provider (I.e. directly under account settings in Gmail iirc)

2. You have a logged in device which receives mails through an application password. You cannot read it out because it's masked and even if you could, it wouldn't help you because it's only allowed to receive mails, not login.

I don't think this is particularly rare, honestly.

But yes, it is obnoxious.


I have real anxiety about being locked out from "digital self" someday due to issues like this. Sometimes I really think this just isn't worth it anymore and I'm far too invested in "the Internet".


There's a workaround to fix an account afflicted this way, use a yubikey to add as a security key and then add a 2fa through the google authenticator standard (which works with 1password). Once that's setup google will never ask for your phone number again.


I seem to recall fb doing similar. It's similar to banks or telecom providers requiring a persons home address (or worse: to prove it using a utility bill).


Wherever I can I set up code generation / TOTP 2FA precisely to avoid lockouts. Then to avoid losing all of those whenever I change/reinstall my phone I opt for the less secure option of storing them in a password manager...

I can't think of another way not to get locked out in case I ever lose my phone.

Google, Paypal and a few others seem to be the worst offenders at "protecting me".


Phone numbers are tied to your identity. You cant buy a mobile sim card without showing your id and the phone number will be registered to your id.


This happened to me years back. What would you say to the argument that it's to protect users from identity theft


Check your internet connection and Google/Gmail certificates. It looks like you are taped.


Yep, the latest example was my credit card company rejecting my GV number. They easily have the means to see that I've been using it for 10+ years and it's definitely me. Luckily they wanted my business more than they cared about that policy; a CS droid was able to "force" the system to allow it.

Requiring cell phone numbers isn't about anti-spam or 2FA or anything else these services and sites claim.

It's about linking your account to a real person identity, so they can sell that to someone - either live, or later when they get bought out (privacy policies almost always have a clause that allows them to just fork over all your info to whoever buys the company.) "Where was phone number 111-555-1212 at any point in time" is really valuable these days.

SMS for 2FA is less secure because cellular accounts are almost trivial to take over. Carriers never intended for their accounts to become so important to security. These days you can get a second password added to prevent shipping out a new SIM or transferring the account, but that's bypassable by a cellular store on the corner, and poorly implemented (my carrier just adds it as a CUSTOMER VISIBLE AND EDITABLE comment on my profile. WTF?)

If you get someone's unlocked cell phone or a SIM card, you can get access to their email account, their bank and credit cards...damn near everything. How fast can you lock and wipe your phone if it was ripped out of your hands while you were using it in a public place?


> It's about linking your account to a real person identity, so they can sell that to someone - either live, or later when they get bought out

Yeah, this can't be emphasized enough. Phone numbers are established as universal identifiers. Discord is sitting on a giant heap of personal information including DMs from millions of young people. It is all centralized, both in terms of data, and in terms of accounts (instead of them having to correlate an account between multiple forums, most of which volunteer run and they don't turn over non-public data for money), and also associated with phone numbers. Making multiple accounts for different areas of life is made hard. Beautiful for whoever has access to the data.


Not only discord. Today it's easier to say what chat applications don't use phone numbers than those which do.


Asking for information for one purpose and using it for another is amazingly user-hostile and abusive, and it's an almost universal practice for technology companies.

I first noticed phone number abuse with facebook, which asks for a phone number for "security" but then uses it to match you with advertisers.

It's the same scam that sites have been running for years where you have to use an email address as a user login, and that address is instantly added to spam lists.

"Sign in with Apple" is hilariously useless since privacy-violating apps can just require a phone number for "security" or "verification" purposes.


> "Sign in with Apple" is hilariously useless since privacy-violating apps can just require a phone number for "security" or "verification" purposes.

Apple is one of the only companies with both the ability and a possible incentive to push back on that behavior. I wonder if they will.


It's 100% about linking identities between services. I've had my cell phone number for 25 years. It's basically a lifelong identifier at this point and I constantly have to use it for low value online accounts. I wish I could go back 10 years and get a dedicated phone number for online verification.

The security side is a total lie as well. Your post made me think about the biggest risk for myself and, like many people I know, I put my email address on my lock screen so that if I lose my phone someone can get it back to me. Now it just clicked for me and I realize I need to change that because if I lose my phone someone has everything they need to recover a lot of my online accounts. My Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. accounts all use that same email address and all they need to do to perform SMS recovery is put my (unlocked) SIM in another phone.


It’s the new SSN but even less private.


> This whole "you're not a human unless you have a phone number" thing sucks.

Oh it’s even worse than that. I have a land line that I use exclusively for when I’m forced to give a phone number (and also for faxing doctors and lawyers which is apparently still a thing). Many internet forms reject it because it can’t accept text messages. Yeah, that’s the fucking point. I don’t want text messages from your shitty service. It’s still a legitimate phone number you can call. Don’t ask for a phone number if you won’t actually accept a valid phone number! FFS!


Yeah same. ETrade recently changed their phone verification system and can no longer send me a text message to verify my identity. I'm actually ok with that because it forces them to use the security token instead, which they should be doing anyway!

And often I'll run into problems with silently failed messages because they don't accept the number.


I think this is completely different than having a credit score.

I’ve never ‘needed’ a credit score unless I was requesting a line of credit. I’m which case a credit score is better than the alternative where I need to personally know someone that the lender already trusts and trusts their ability to trust other people.

You don’t ‘need’ a credit score but if you want a line of credit then it’s good to have. Otherwise you get the products that they offer to high risk individuals which costs a pretty penny.


A credit score is used as a trustworthiness analog in arenas other than lending. For example renting a house or car, and some phone companies won't give you access to a post-paid plan, all of which can have a stratifying effect. The idea that because I don't take on debt that I am not trustworthy is wrong. I can pay a larger security deposit to offset risk, but often times that's not an option.

I've also heard tell of employers using credit checks to evaluate potential employees though I haven't researched that.


Post paid plans are credit. It’s allowing you to consume goods, then pay for them after the fact.

Sure, it’s short term credit (sub 30 days), but it’s still credit.


I believe that grandparents point was that by not taking on any debt they don't have a credit score which can be verified. You can't verify something that doesn't exist in the first place.


I thought their complaint was that without a credit score, businesses don't see them as 'trustworthy'. The OP separated 'trust' from 'credit score', and says they shouldn't be conflated.

However since all of the OP's examples involved credit (car rental post-pay, phone usage post-pay, etc.) then in those cases trust===credit score. Without a credit score, you're basically asking someone to trust blindly that you'll pay back a debt since there's no track record of your ever paying back debts.


The problem is that I don't have an alternative method of proving my trustworthiness and as a result lose access to some products. Often times prepaid plans are not equivalent to postpaid plans, I can't just put a security deposit on a rental car to offset risk, etc.


It's not goods, though, it's a service. And in general services are not paid up front.


Meanwhile the community is having a big debate over the CoC, deciding what exact wording they should use to say "be nice and include everyone".


Why just communities be forced to accept everyone? Or even be nice? When in a group of friends we can often times not “be nice” however because we know each other, we understand it comes from a place of love. Perhaps it’s a military background thing, but exclusivity has its benefits.


Because we're not friends.


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Why are you immediately assuming racism?


Maybe I'm misreading what he is getting at. Is it more of a politeness is bad thing?


I'm trying to point out the hypocrisy of a cultural impetus to be super inclusive towards everyone, except the people you disagree with


Because opinion is transient and can be changed on a whim, unless what is part of the identity of the person (physical apparence, religion and other cor values). Being exclusive only reduce cohesiveness.


> I end up having to take the sim out of my laptop and put it in my PinePhone

Just in case you are not aware, you can receive verification SMS on your laptop as well! On Windows 10 there is a built-in app simply called "Messaging" which shows you all the SMS received on that number. I'm sure something different exists for other OSes.

This is what I do when asked for a verification number and there is absolutely no way around it, I just put the phone number of my laptop's SIM card, that way I don't have to worry too much about spam too because I will never use that number in a real phone.


Nice, thanks for pointing this out. It's fucking annoying that I'll have to figure out how to install the Windows Store on my computer to get an app that can receive text messages, something that you know, should be available through a pipe/file/tty or some dead simple interface since it's not exactly rocket science to receive 160 characters of text.

But thank you none the less.


There are laptops with SIM card slots?


Sure, WWAN modems are not only a thing that exists inside mobile phones. ThinkPads (and I'm sure other business-oriented brands as well) often (always?) have optional slots for WWAN modems, so you can use them for a mobile internet connection without tethering. I've been using that feature for over ten years now.



Ah yes, thanks! I have used a similar USB dongle. I was wondering if it was a special built-in tray or slot in the laptop.


My laptop does have a sim tray and an internal modem, the antenna is in the screen. (HP Spectre x360 13" for those curious)


In my older ThinkPad, the SIM was a slot behind the battery. In a later model, it's a tray that has to be opened with a paperclip next to the card reader. The modem itself is a mini PCIe card like they're used for some laptop SSDs and antennas are in the screen like wifi antennas.


I had one around 2009. It even came with Linux.

They seem less common nowadays, since a tablet or tethered phone covers most use cases.


I tried to log into the IRS.gov portal, but it says I can't because I don't have any credit score. (I don't have any credit because I'm an immigrant)


I’m sorry you ran into that problem. I ran into the opposite problem, of thousands of fake accounts a day using VoIP phone numbers to create accounts. Almost all of them were fake/abusive when they were investigated manually. Blocking these numbers felt like the sensible thing to do, because it made the abusive account creators spend more time, money and energy creating their accounts. I’m sorry it impacted you.


Using SMS as a login verification thing is just so irritating. My bank asks me to enter an SMS OTP every time I login to the website. I know my username and password! Let me into my bank account!


They're trying to do that to break 3rd party financial integrations. Not for your security but because they think they deserve to get paid for your data and these other people haven't paid up.


Credential stuffing is a widespread problem. Im sure everyone on HN uses a password manager and different passwords for every service, but many people don't.

It's makes a lot of sense for a high-value target like banking to require 2FA, but SMS is the worst way to do it.


How does this work for Fi users?

I've had a Google Voice number for so long it's the only voice number I have these days. I can't say it's a recent experience that it doesn't work with certain things though it has been a recent experience the things are aware it doesn't work and will alert you. Overall though I've yet to run into anything I couldn't use an alternative method for authentication be it luck (e.g. got into Discord before they required phone numbers) or email or calls being a thing (and working when text doesn't).

Ironically the biggest PITA I had was when I decided to migrate my primary cell number to Google Voice it was my fallback contact number. Thankfully I only ran into that as an issue once and was able to get back in to set up Google Authenticator (which was also new and hip at the time).


I'm not sure if there are any issues on Google Fi, since they're an MVNO, so identical to any other cellular network.


As one point of anecdata, the IRS refused to honor my Fi phone plan because it didn't have my name and mailing address registered on it (or at least to their satisfaction). I don't know if they still require a post-paid cell phone plan for their auth scheme or not, because I gave up trying to make it through after about 6 months of requesting magic codes through the USPS

Anyway, that's a lot of words to say "MVNO" is for sure not identical to "any other cellular network" for a certain class of interested parties, in the same way that pre-paid credit cards are not the same as other credit cards


Isn't it a shame how the world got Google Voice backwards? The savvy among us saw it as a way to present our one true phone number/identity to the world, and have options for different back end phones and services we could use. Cell phones, land lines, Hangouts, computer voicemail, all that. But the average schmoe sees Google Voice as a way to get multiple disposable numbers to sacrifice to spammers and bar hookups and commit minor fraud. So it became useless for its main purpose: being your phone identity.


Every one used to use your social security number instead to uniquely identify people but that was made illegal because of the many problems this caused. But company's want a unique identifier for people. Now that everyone has cell phones people never change their phone number so it is a great unique identifier that is legal to use. Not enough edge cases, yet, like yours too worry about. Maybe it will be made illegal in the future.


It's never been made illegal to use, or even ask for, an SSN.

You can refuse to provide it (unless it's required for tax/employment purposes) but whoever's asking can then just refuse to transact with you.


Thanks for the info. I guess I remembered when companies stopped printing out social security numbers on everything (badges, informational letters, etc.) and using them generally due to, probably, this California law[1].

[1]https://www.kmm.com/articles-195.html


I had been using my gv number for 9 years for everything as well. I recently ported it out of gv into my mobile carrier since no one knew my carrier number and I was running into too many annoying voip restrictions. So far I don’t miss gv.


Wait what? You literally put a sim card into a phone for it to be treated as a cell number? Thats odd and interesting to me how does that work?


> You literally put a sim card into a phone for it to be treated as a cell number?

Well of course -- the SIM is the (as others have pointed out, "currently assigned", yada yada) phone number. So what else would any device with a working SIM slot be treated as, than a cellular device?


The SIM has its own phone number, so when they put it in a phone they can do "phone" things like make calls. In their laptop it's just for data.


Or to be really pedantic, 'is currently assigned a particular' phone number.

Since you can change phone number without changing SIM (I don't know if it's global, but in the UK you just text a certain number for a transfer 'PAC' code) and clone them.


It's harder than that in the US, but it's possible. Mostly it depends on the carrier's policy.


Or SMS. Calls may also work, depending on the modem.


For calls and sms you'd need a client configured for that modem. I think this is what callcenters use?


SMS are easy, you can do that with AT-Commands. Voice calls, I don't know, haven't tested that. ModemManager has support for it though, and for SMS.

https://github.com/freedesktop/ModemManager/blob/master/NEWS


I don't understand, isn't that how SIM cards are supposed to work ?


Instead of "phone" do you actually mean "laptop"? Interfacing with a SIM through a computer seems pretty Futuramaistic to me. How does _that_ work?


My laptop has a built in cellular modem, I find that being connected to the internet constantly is much more useful in a laptop form factor. Phones mostly just try to serve me ads in invasive ways and I'm not here for it.


AFAIK cell modems generally have functionality to send/receive SMSs, and you should be able to do that with the right software.

Completely agree about the walls of commercial surveillance closing in though.


Yeah, I'm sure it's possible to do so, but unfortunately my BIOS locks me into the OEM modem, there is no linux driver for it and the windows one is not documented so no luck for me in that regard. At some point I'll pour some more sweat into it and try to unlock the bios or something but sadly for now this functionality that my computer absolutely has is unavailable to me.

Same with getting NMEA sentences off the GPS, I have to use windows' idiotic location API for that. 9600 baud serial worked just fucking fine, I don't understand why that isn't available as well. It's so annoying that I have to fight this hard for functionality my hardware already has.


Whatever comes with should work mostly fine, whitelist unlocks are for those didn’t option a WWAN. All WWAN modems are same, usually they have 3-5 serial ports for modem control, data, debug, and NMEA. My hunch is your ttyS2 takes “GPS enable” command and it’ll start murmuring it on ttyS4.

Refs:

https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/sierra_advanced_gps

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/problem-accessing-gps-data-from-...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mobile-broadband/ModemManager...


None of the TTYs that Windows exposes will even let me connect (access denied error even as admin) and there is no Linux driver, or maybe there is now with very recent kernels?[0]. It would surprise me if it worked well but I will spend some hours to find out soon. Intel/Fibocomm don't provide support for their modems except to OEMs afaik and I don't see any mention of successful connection under linux w/ my modem. (Fibocom L860-GL/Intel XMM 7560) around the internet. I have tried with some other LTE modem (model forgotten) in the past and I wasn't able to see it under Windows or Linux at all.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-M....


Use USB-Mode.

[0] says it also supports MBIM which is supported ootb with ModemManager and somewhat recent kernels. If your BIOS does not allow this, you probably need to tape over the PCIe-Pins with some non-conductive tape.

[0] https://fccid.io/ZMOL860GL/User-Manual/Users-Manual-3993200....


It doesn't have some AT capable "serial" port avaiable? A bit surprising.


What device?


An increasing number of tablets and computers offer LTE. It was an option when I got my last gen iPad Mini, though I didn't need it.


Phone verification can certainly be annoying, but anyone who's been part of large Discord communities will know that spambots that DM users with all kinds of scams are a huge issue. Phone verification stops someone from raiding a server with it enabled with hundreds of bot accounts. As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the whole purpose of phone verification.

Personally I think that giving server admins the ability to require phone verification is a good thing. It's not mandatory and it's only used if the server admin enables it. I don't think it's fair to blame Discord when it's a choice made by the server admin, plus a forum could have the same requirement.


My problem isn't with the phone verification. I totally understand why they do that. I don't even have a problem with not accepting VOIP. I get why they do that too.

My problem is that they don't have an alternative, and there is no way for channel admins that turn on that feature to know how many people can't get in because of their choice.

They should either have an alternative way to verify oneself, or a way for the channel admin to allow you in without the verification, or both.


The alternative is to have an admin/mod assign you a role. If you read the the text under "Verification Level" https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe... you will see that members with role don't need to have phone verification.

That being said, anecdotally I have heard Discord locking/terminating accounts without verified phone numbers (usually if suspicious activity has been detected).


Definitely, I agree that phone numbers are a flawed verification method. Something better needs to be created, but I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the same or different flaws.


There’s an ID verification service, at least in the US, where you go to webpage A who wants you to confirm identity, A then redirects you to the service. The service asks a bunch of questions like ‘which of these cars have been related to you’ or ‘which of these addresses belonged to you when you lived in town x?’

That generates a score where the service determines if you are who you say you are and returns the result to the calling web page.

But I assume it uses background check/credit check information which may be limited to the US and is a paid service as compared to phone validation.


I've had good luck answering those questions by pretending I know nothing about my own life, and using only information I can find from search engines to answer those questions (eg "What city is LAKE STREET in" - search for each option they give you to see if it has a Lake St). The few times this has failed (probably 70% success rate), they usually just want to send you a letter in the mail instead. I'd much rather wait a few days than end up confirming their surveillance records about me.


Pay $5 via crypto, venmo, whatever to add a similar cost barrier. Make it separate from nitro.


I will abandon a piece of software before I pay five bucks to join their non-archivable support channel.


The difference though is that verification through phone numbers relies on money that you've already spent, which is a lot more reasonable for the majority of users. People would still be unhappy if they had to pay 5 bucks if they didn't own a phone.


Its about increasing the cost of spam right? For some money is better than using your phone number, for others, they can continue to use the phone. Neither is exclusive of the other.

I know for some they would definitely choose the $5 over the phone for very good privacy reasons.


i wonder how many hours have already been wasted by people solving captchas...

everything old is new again :)


Less unhappy than the current situation where they can't use the site at all.

Also there's precedent of sites doing this. MetaFilter charges $5 to create an account. The bitcoin wiki used to require a fee (in bitcoin)[1]. Something Awful forums have a fee.

[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/10932


Admins can just lower the verification level for the server, can't they?

https://discord.com/safety/360043653152-Four-steps-to-a-supe...


Isn’t that an all-or-nothing choice? What if I want to manually allow a single user who can’t pass the phone verification routine?


That's possible: Users with roles don't need to be verified, so you can just give the user a role.


There’s a bot that will ban most of those spam bots called Beemo. You realize a lot of bots are verified right? I’ve seen scripts to verify accounts on GitHub and spoken to the kinds of people who would automate accounts via scripts just to have a bunch of alts. They get numerous alts into servers just to spy. Its a kind of art I guess. I wouldn’t recommend doing any of these things.

Personally I just wish Discord wouldnt rate limit bans if they’re not going to make a true effort to catch these bot farms. Gee I wonder how likely it is that three thousand accounts will decide to join the same exact server at the exact same minute? Having modded a decent (tens of thousands) sized Guild I gotta say people pop in every few minutes or seconds. Unless something big and relevant to your server happens that draws more traffic, but even then never thousands in seconds.


Spy bots get away because they don't spam or do anything weird. No one is sitting there auditing users who haven't spoken much. Spam bots will end up with their account banned and phone number blacklisted.


Yeah, they definitely need to do better, but forums can have the same phone verification requirements, it's not really a negative of Discord compared to forums in my opinion


>As for VOIP numbers not being allowed, that also makes sense; VOIP numbers are extremely cheap and allowing them to be used would defeat the whole purpose of phone verification.

Cool, except whoever or whatever is deciding what is and isn't VOIP is not doing a good job at making that determination. A few years back I ported my old cell phone number to a VOIP provider. I now have a new phone number on a different carrier. $OldPhoneNumber is apparently not a VOIP number and $NewPhoneNumber is. So I had to use the $OldPhoneNumber on a VOIP provider to verify my account because $NewPhoneNumber with a carrier wasn't acceptable.

But hey, it's their closed platform and they can use whatever means of keeping people off of it that they want. I don't really care for it anymore.


> It's not mandatory

That's not true at all. At any point your account can be flagged by their internal system and on your next login you will be forced to add a phone number "for security purposes". It happens to people all the time, but in particular, though not limited, to TOR and VPN users. So, yea, sure Discord's not at fault in the situation where a server admin turns on the phone number requirement, but they are definitely to blame when they force users, some who prefer to remain anonymous, to either give up personal information or lose their account forever (support will not help you).

Not sure if this can still happen if you've got 2FA turned on, but seeing as I see it mentioned more often from tech literate people (e.g. on here) who are more inclined to setup 2FA I doubt it makes a difference.


> It happens to people all the time, but in particular, though not limited, to TOR and VPN users.

The best part is that this only matters to people who care about their account. Most malicious actors won't care and will just create a new one.


Phone verification would be fine if discord had support for multiple accounts/identities. It's a fundamentally important feature of any online social service to be able to retain privacy and have different identities for different purposes. Discord makes this very difficult.


If they allow the user a chance to send an appeal or out-of-band alternative method to verify then this becomes less of an issue. It's when people presume certain baselines — like a phone number — that it becomes a showstopper to community.


I have seen Discord servers that use 3rd party verification systems, but very rarely. An alternative to phone numbers would be ideal, but there will always be flaws similar to the flaws of phone verification in my opinion.


I totally get all the frustration over phone number verification but it simply is the easiest and most effective method. It's really hard and expensive to get more phone numbers while every other method is easy to get unlimited accounts. Almost every country has phone numbers tied to ID as well so you can report the worst of users to local police.


Discord pushes SMS verification because it a)gives them your identity which is valuable and b)avoids them having to spend money on proper bot/troll mitigation.

VoIP number bans don't accomplish much because there are lots of services that sell real-sim-backed numbers and nowadays there's even eSIMs.


> Phone verification can certainly be annoying

Not just that. Why do you need to share such private information for every service out there? It's pure madness. It is, and will be used for tracking you online everywhere.


I have a regular phone number in Singapore from a new range of numbers that doesn’t work with many services, even with some government services.

Customer care typically replies by having me first prove that the number is real (by showing a phone bill for getting an verification OTP, think of the irony) and then goes silent because they can’t work around their (human) robot way of thinking when something is unaccounted for in the handbook. (Already shifted a significant portion of my regular spend on groceries to a different provider, but they don’t seem to care)

It’s very frustrating because there are other ways to prove my identity (government even provides a digital Id / signature app) and contacting me.

Services should work with the minimal needed set of properties from the user, discord and slack are very annoying , there’s no need for all this hassle for a small question. I would spend the extra time looking for an alternative product where I can than signing up.

What happened to people caring where users drop off in the funnel?

Losing a user or customer once you’ve spent all that time, effort or money acquiring them by having barriers that don’t have any benefit is just silly.


On the other side of there are bots that impersonate users to send spam or raid servers to overrun moderation and “DoS” the server’s communication. Part of the value proposition of running on Discord or Slack is that they handle offloading a large amount of user verification/spam prevention and moderation tooling. The only one you really have to do is manage rules and have some sort of rotation so at least one moderator is online to handle potential issues.


Is this the only viable solution today? Fully opt in to a provider that isn’t user friendly?

For a free service maybe ok, but then you typically shouldn’t have the bot problem to such an extent if it’s small enough.

For a paid service: no way, please find a way around this or I’ll find a way around your service as soon as a problem pops up and causes me extra inconvenience just to sign up.


What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help.

I support a FOSS project via Slack, and information sparse requests are sadly the norm, I found that 95% of my responses are "Can you please provide more logs/configuration/actual description of what you were expecting, and what happened instead".


> What I like about forums is that a) they're indexable by search engines! and b) because there's no expectation of an immediate response, people tend to put more time into their requests for help.

For me there is also c) I can browse the content that is already there without signing up. Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.


>Not going to join your Discord "server" when I don't even know anything about your community.

Why not? It's just as easy to join a discord server as to visit a site. If you don't have a Discord account already you can just type something random for your nickname.


Click the link, hope you're not inadvertently joining with your porn account, type a nickname, sit in the waiting room for 10 minutes until you can click the emoji that says you read the rules, get in, get notifications from unrelated channels because someone used @here begging for boosts, write out your question, get pinged again by a bot because you levelled up, then discover it wasn't the server you were looking for after all.


Why would a support discord do that?

>porn account

literally no one cares

>type a nickname

You don't need to

>sit in the waiting room for 10 minutes until you can click the emoji that says you read the rules

Most servers don't do this and you can set up your server to not do this

>get notifications from unrelated channels because someone used @here begging for boosts

This doesn't happen to me in the servers I am in.

>get pinged again by a bot because you levelled up

You don't need a bot like this in your server.

Instead of hating discord just hate when people set things up like that.


I disagree. It's harder.

> you can just type something random for your nickname.

See, already harder.

I don't want to join something just so I can read it. I'll join it if I want to interact.


most people already have an account so it's not harder

and is like 5 key presses that hard?


Oh yes, that's an amazing reason.


Slack is great for the masses to get someone's attention. Not much else. I'm betting most of those requests start with:

"Hey, I have a problem, can someone help?"

No actual information follows, just minutes idle, waiting for someone to respond.

Slack is like a bird's nest. Baby birds chirp loudly, open up their mouths, and hope you'll regurgitate some worms into them.


And a cuckoo bird managers who said „i implemented slack on this project“ then threw out those little birds you mentioned and put his little bird in


I have often thought of cuckoo bird analogies in this context.


For me it starts with:

"Hello."


I wish it wasn't suicidal to point people to nohello.net in professional contexts.


In cases like this I reply "Hi" in 10 minutes and close, so people see it would be easier to start with actual thing instead.


I don't think it's really about identification. Binding user accounts to SIM-based phone numbers is an effective way of limiting account creation as it's effectively binding it to a physical token.

I can only guess why Discord wants to do this (fighting scam bots?), but for example for Tinder this is a very effective way of preventing abuse on the huge early discovery boost after signup or long inactivity.


I understand why they do it, and I have no problem with that. My problem is their lack of an alternative. Either have an alternative way for me to verify, or a way for an admin to let me into their channel without verification.


what if that alternative was "worse" than the phone number method? Would you then complain that there's no "easier" alternative?

For example, a photo-id as an alternative, which imho is way worse?

The problem with presenting an alternative is that if it is "better/easier" than phone number, then it gets exploited by the spam bots. If it's worse than the existing phone number method, then you'd have the exact same complaints, or worse.


I would be totally fine with a photo ID alternative or any other "harder" alternative. At least there is an alternative.


The real issue parent and many sibling comments are running into has answers all the way down in individual liberty and sovereignty. Technology companies have pulled out the rug from under us to deliver the illusion of convenience and safety. Benjamin Franklin seems to be ever relevant: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

But we're here now, and as much as I might fantasize I can't make myself believe that anyone would willingly accept a significant regression on the convenience front. The only way out that I see is to reconstitute sovereignty in a modern form.

We need "something" and I think we're getting close. Web3, dapps, and cryptocurrency are all aiming in that direction, and even if some instances are a miss I think we'll hit it eventually.


This is super frustrating. Discord requires server operators to enable phone number verification if they want any of the additional "Community" features. It's a hugely backwards requirement and it's the main reason I haven't given the community feature set a second look for any of the servers I run.


> Members of the server must have a verified email on their Discord account before sending messages or DMing anyone in the server. (Note that this doesn’t apply to users that have assigned roles!)[1]

I also help with running a community server which doesn't have the phone number requirement enabled either. It's also not required for partnered servers as far as I'm aware.

You can even get around the email requirement if you just add a bot that gives every new user a role, since any role will automatically verify you as mentioned here.

[1] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047132851-E...


Ah, I was misremembering whether email or phone verification was required. Either way, it's still a very heavy-weight requirement for what's basically a drop-in drop-out support channel for us.


From what I see the only verification related setting you need to enable for community features is the member email verification requirement - Please correct me if I'm wrong.


I have to imagine that most SWATTING is done using a VOIP number of some kind. No one would use their cell phone or land-line connected to their real identity (also: your real identity likely isn't physically located in the area you want to perform swatting. You wanna change your area-code to match the target)


sounds like they are more interested in keeping bots out than verifying identity


It's also not required by discord. Discord doesn't even require that you have an account. They leave it up to "server" admins. You can pick options from allowing guests, allowing only accounts, and requiring only phone number verified accounts.


Quite possibly, but they should still have an alternative other than "impersonate someone else".


Any alternative would have to be inconvenient by design in order to work though, that's why phone numbers are used in the first place.

An effective verification system usually involves money at the root; verification in the style of phone verification works using proof of ownership of a limited resource, and most limited resources cost money (phone numbers, IPv4 addresses, etc).

In the real world this is analogous to charging money for access to an event purely in order to ensure it's not overrun with attendees,improving the experience for people who care enough to pay to get in. There are similar downsides to this; people who don't have money are left out.


Why not? It still limits bot creation (same number can only be used every 6 months). They don't actually want to know if the number belongs to you. Not much different than using a burner number.


Not everyone has a friend with a phone that doesn't use discord that they can use.


> Not everyone has a friend with a phone that doesn't use discord that they can use.

I believe Discord can afford to ignore those 3 people. Not saying it's convenient for the user, but it's not enough of an issue to encourage Discord to find a solution.


I simply don't use services that demand a phone number to use them.

It won't get better if we keep caving.


And hope we can find a way to educate the staggering masses of children who are growing up thinking this is normal and good.


One of the best ways we can educate people is not being reachable on these sorts of platforms. Delete your Facebook accounts so you can't be reached on Messenger or WhatsApp or Instagram. Delete your Discord account so you can't be reached on Discord. Delete your Clubhouse account so you can't be reached on Clubhouse.

The choices we make affect those around us.


That is bad enough, but the worst part is that the content is not really discoverable outside of Discord. Sometimes you don't want that of course but I have seen communities pretty much dying because they only met there with no influx of new users.


every time I sign in at asks me to input my university email address

I cancel it then it comes back next time

I'm in my 30s...


You’re probably deleting its cookies. I had the same problem until I set up a (Firefox) container for it and whitelisted its cookies in that container. Now, no university reminder and no need to re-login either.

(I use the Cookie AutoDelete extension to automatically delete cookies.)


I've just been filling out the form with bogus school names and pointing the invite email to (randomword)@discord.com.


I used a VoIP number with Discord, because, f them, "I don't [need to] have a mobile phone". Also I think we should call ADA violations on any company that requires people to have a mobile phone.

It's possible to use a VoIP number. Happy to share how if you can prove to me that you don't work for them.


https://www.burnerapp.com/ ?

Note: no affiliation, just a satisfied user. Also, not free.


Hmm, something in my uBlock Origin filters blocks their signup page.

Anyways, I've been using https://www.numberbarn.com/ for SMS-based 2FA for a few years. Works great for stupid services that demand a US phone number (I'm an American who lives abroad, grrr) and don't have time-based one-time passwords.


Microsoft does the same thing. Crazy beans.


just wait til they roll out 2FA with the phone number being needed for a confirmation call (no authenticator app, there was a bug found in auth app 7000! voice calls only way!)


this won't happen on Slack or Matrix though


I just wish people would use a system that's integrated into where the code is. I don't want to have to register for a forum when GitHub has a perfectly good ticketing system (and now discussions), and yet I have to register at another place where my details can be leaked from because who knows the technical capability of this one single person who may or may not have done any security.

If it's a company, please have the forum integrated into your software.

I seriously do not want yet another login unless there is a good reason. It's ridiculous. I have nearly 700 logins in my password manager and I'd say probably 500 of those items are websites I've registered once to ask a question (quite often questions that go unanswered). Half of these forums do not even provide the capability to removing my account without contacting the admins, which is just an unnecessary hassle.


> If it's a company, please have the forum integrated into your software.

Counterpoint. Other companies absolutely suck at making forum software. It's because it's not their core business, so why would they put more than token effort into it?

Edit: upon re-read this seems to be exactly what you are suggesting, so please disregard my reply. The solution here is a forum set up with robust and plentiful SSO solutions, so existing authentication providers can be used.


> register for a forum when GitHub has a perfectly good ticketing system (and now discussions)

At least if using github for code, enable an option to login with github in the forum software?


I’m a believer in just creating a subreddit. It’s free and easy, many people already have Reddit accounts and it’s a much better forum than the ones that would be self-hosted, including moderation tooling and bot ecosystem. The threaded discussions are also better than what Github offers.


I agree that subreddits have a very low barrier to entry, but all that comes at a cost. Among other things, one of those costs is that your content is no longer owned by you.

Should Reddit decide to take itself private, or make ethically questionable decisions, etc., you are locked in due to the networking effect.


There’s risk in everything…self-hosted forum software run by an open source project also has a potential of going offline, either because hosting becomes onerous/expensive or some sort of database issue. Discord and Github have the exact same potential you’ve mentioned for Reddit. There’s no perfect answer.


That isn't different for Discord though and reddit can be crawled at least.


Telegram group/channel can take care of those concerns


Right. Good luck having a conversation as the channel grows. There's been several times where I've joined a channel, asked a question, and my question is gone from the screen before anyone is able to answer. Slack/Discord are way better than Telegram for support.


How is Telegram different from Reddit in that regard? If anything, it seems much less accessible while sharing all the risks mentioned by GP.


The biggest downside of Reddit is that it's so darn hard to find your own posts. The Reddit search seems completely broken for this, so you rely on DDG/Google etc. but this is far from perfect.

I downloaded all my messages with some script, but that doesn't seem complete either since there are messages missing I'm *sure* I posted on Reddit. It's also not very convenient.

Why do I want to find my own posts? Sometimes I write something at length explaining X, and then a few weeks, months, or even years later someone asks about X again and I want to link my previous detailed post.


IMO if you write "at length" explaining something, copy that to your own blog or at the very least a markdown file on your own computer. Don't rely on a 3rd party site for archival.

And this is where you find your own posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/posts/

And comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/comments/

Searching is crap, but it's Reddit so no news there =)


I usually save things (not just Reddit comments, also HN etc.), generally speaking the bar of what I publish on my site is higher than what I may write in a comment. Sometimes I get around to polishing stuff, sometimes not. Other times it's just too specific to really publish on my site.

Finding stuff in the chronological list takes forever.


You need a certain amount of reddit karma to make a subreddit IIRC. You can farm it, but it's yet another thing unrelated to working on your project you need to do, plus it takes time (could take days).

The whole process is opaque too, it feels distinctly like "we have arbitrarily bestowed upon you the privilege of operating subreddits... for now".

I like the reddit format so I've tried this option myself.


The iphone 6 is actually a very decent device. I don't consider it safe to alienate users for using it.


Use a person generator if you worry about your details.


This could have been posted by me. :-)

GitHub just has critical mass. Everyone has an account. UI is not bad. Just use it.


Author here. Thanks for submitting!

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.

0: https://fusionauth.io/community/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.


Thank you, glad we can help you out! Hope your project is a smashing success.

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.


Which platform your forum is on. Or its custom?


It really looks like a good ol' nodebb


But it still looks 10x better than Discourse.


Yup, it is nodebb.


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?


Not even for open communities. I'd love an ability to mute annoying sales colleagues boasting about this week's big win, etc.

I have no professional reason to communicate with this team, why should my day be interrupted with their whooping and macho sales competitiveness.


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.


#general. I'd quite like to be able to mute almost all middle management.

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.


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.


> Discord is nearly infinitely better in the sense that they have any tooling at all, but it's still considerably far behind

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?


How do you move conversations/posts from one channel to another? I assumed this had to be built in because of so much meme ish talk of discord mods.


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.


There are bots that can do that: https://discordbotlist.com/bots/movebot

The official feature is still TBA


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.


Like sibling says. This hasn’t worked for months.

I’ve tried looking a bit for others. Most discord bots seem to be for the same few things


I prefer forums due to similar reasons, but I found asking questions as a user on Discord more "successful", so to speaking.

On a forum, the chance of your question being totally ignored is much, much higher. Some do have some staffs that seem to be obligated to reply, and they will just.. copy and paste some templates.

On Discord, even the devs and staffs are not always there to answer questions, there are often enough other users that can help you, and they are willing to discuss with you if details are not clear (as soon as you're polite). Even though they don't always solve the problem, you can tell someone actually looked into it. And all these happen in real-time, without at best half day delay between each exchange (it helps that Discord is hella popular so lots of people are online all the time, and the chance to notice your message on a server they're in is much higher. Can't say the same for any random forum.)

I still prefer GitHub issues, but after that, Discord. Forums (or the communities it normally forms) really don't cut it.


I totally agree, and I believe that was also the reason why IRC was so successful in F/OSS communities.

Traditional thread-based forums are great for archival but also seem to encourage a full-sized post, which is a conversational barrier by itself and also limits the potential engagement by reducing the number of people willing to reply. It doesn't seem to me that the discouragement of short posts is inherent to forums though, for example traditional South Korean forums had been traditionally evolved from BBS and had a strong dichitomy between posts and comments, so short comments and quick reactions were norms (longer replies are typically posted separately in a post). GitHub issues seem to be somewhere between those different models.


This. I help moderate for the community surrounding Obsidian.md. We have a discourse forum, a subreddit, and a discord. The discord is by far the easiest place to actually get help — and not because the forum isn't active (it is) but because it's real-time and there's always someone around.

Whenever I have to go find a forum for a product I'm using that doesn't have a discord, I have to twiddle my thumbs for a day before maybe getting asked a clarifying question.

Sure, there's a "static knowledge base" but in my experience, most search features suck for figuring out if something has already been asked before, but at least discord doesn't make you feel dumb for not having found the old relevant thing already. Plus, it's a lot harder than it used to be when I was active on jcink boards to actually trawl all the new content (a problem for me because I write the community newsletter every week — consistently the one thing I don't actually read all of is the forum. I'm able to keep up with everything else, including twitter).

I understand the value of threading, but don't underestimate the value of linear, chronological thought, either. As a moderator, there's a lot of emotional relief in being able to be sure that I saw everything, and didn't miss a new comment in a thread I stopped reading a week ago.


+1. Also, IMO many users already use Discord for other purposes, so they're more likely to check your project's channel while checking other things. Meanwhile, nobody really goes out of their way to look at a project-specific forum, not until that project build sufficient momentum.


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.


When pushing instantaneous forms first and async forms second, you're creating a barrier from moving the conversation over.


Basecamp worls really well for this. It has team and project based message boards with tight access controls that help to keep boards focused.

I have used this to great effect in my teams.


Slack developer here, views are my own.

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.


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.


That brings up a good point. If forums are going to work, they need some form of federation that doesn't suck.


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").

[1]: https://cactus.chat/


I really like this idea and great work!

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.


Yes, matrix is designed as a distributed database and chat is just one application. Check out https://matrix.to/#/#beyond-chat:matrix.org


Mailing lists!


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.


Hyperkitty provides a nice web interface on top of mailing lists:

https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty

All Fedora mailing lists use it and it works well IMHO.

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/


I've seen reddit fulfill the function of a "federated support forum" for quite a few things.


If only there was some open protocol to authenticate against a third party… ;)


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 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…


I will patiently wait for the real internet to return.

RSS/Blogs/Forums.

This is the only way for archiving and communicating sustainable information repos which will serve people without a middleman.

Creating federated silos with "modern" UX is serving only the owners of this SaaS hell. It is logical for those type of businesses to optimize for "engagement" and profit.


Many of those things are still there. I've run an old-school style forum since 2009, and it is still going strong. Many of the people using it are very different than the HN crowd: non-tech savvy, relatively old, mostly women relatively low-income. The design has barely changed since it was first created, though I've incrementally added useful features (and not useful features) specifically geared towards helping the community.


bless you brother. may i ask what is this forum is about?


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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29016033


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.


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.


The software didn't change; the people did. Starting in 2014, everyone went online.


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.


What shook me even more was seeing companies hire people for the sole purpose of crafting tweets. They call it "PR".


What happened in 2014?

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.


https://xenforo.com/ — Paradox Interactive uses it for their Stellaris/HOI4/EU4/CK3 communities.

edit: e.g., https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/forums/europa-universal...


Xenforo is also used for a lot of vehicle-specific forums. It works very well; modern design / features while still having good usability & UX.


I've set up a few instances of xenforo in the past (2013 ish). Really good kit. I didn't know it was still a thing.


I have something in Go that isn't too bad... it looks like this https://www.lfgss.com and powers sites like this http://forum.espruino.com/

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).


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.


So why not continue using it today, until something better comes along?


It's not "web 3.0" ~


Meaning that you can use it with javascrit disabled?


errr. in Discourse conversations are strictly chronological, 100% of the time.


vBulletin is still available, isn't it?


From vB4 onwards it has becoming more and more of a hot pile of crap.

XenForo is where it's at. Never used IPB but heard they're slipping.


Yep, works great. Nobody uses it for anything new though.


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.


Presumably mobile compatibility was the issue, no? Everybody nowadays wants to do everything on their phone.

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.


ProBoards exists and is nice to use, but it's not obvious to me it does anything better for software than Github issues.


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


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?


> 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.

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 :)


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)

https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla


I remember Vanilla Forums! I loved the old look so much. Is it possible to still have that old look (the pink and blue one). It was really minimal!


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.

https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/blob/master/themes/2011Co...


Yeah, this looks close to it. Thank you. :)


It doesn’t exactly look active though? Last release was in 2019.


Are we looking at the same page? Because I see multiple releases in 2021: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/releases


From the readme:

"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)


Yeah discourse feels like such a regression when compared to the phpbb and vBulletin of yore


In what way? As a lurking user I think it's miles better.


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.


On the desktop, it also hijacks standard browser shortcuts such as Ctrl+F.


This drives me crazy. I feel not enough people are complaining about this. Is finding text from the currently-loaded discussion such a niche thing?

I second the other comments, XenForo is the best currently.


I honestly usually give up and close the tab when I press Ctrl+F and this happens.


Hitting it a second time will open your browser's regular search dialog

Just can't guarantee it will be useful


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 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.


Try pressing CTRL+F twice and see what happens


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. :/


What if I want to search only currently loaded DOM elements?


Usually you repeat the search hotkey to activate the browser's native search function.


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.


Why can’t we just use normal forum software from the 2000s, but with security patches?


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.


Does the average user likes Discourse? My anecdotal experience hosting a Discourse forum for non-techies is certainly not indicative of that.


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?


What kind of security problems are you talking about?


That seems like a direct consequence of the non efficient infinite scrolling that they implemented.


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.


What do you mean by "native" here? Is pagination non-native?


IMO, that should not even be possible. Browsers need to start being user agents again.


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?

Example of a long thread, just so we're all on the same page: https://meta.discourse.org/t/trading-buttons-buy-sell-exchan...


This took 4 seconds to load here and I'm on pretty good hardware. In contrast https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=243917 took less than a second.


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.


> 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.


some forums I could have them load 100 or 200 threads / comments by default back in like 2004.. way faster than this garbage today


I know of roughly 0 ways discourse is better. Its slower and has vastly less information density


Security-wise etc. it's probably better than a pile of (I'm guessing) mostly abandoned/assumed 'done' dependencies.

But yeah mostly, user-facing-wise, I agree.


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)

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.


interesting, they did at some point have a threading option but I hated it. I preferred reading comments in time order and threads were clunky to me.


Do you ever use forums for asynchronous communication?


discoverability

answers to questions in slack will never be indexed (let alone archived) by search engines


Yeah but that isn't the case for Discourse


An interface like PHPBB or vBulletin, combined with the Markdown formatting + live preview and tagging/search of Discourse, would be ideal for me.


I still prefer phpbb and vbulletin to slack and discord...


Does vBulletin have a way yet to jump to the first new reply in a thread?


Well, in Discourse press the pound key to jump to any date or specific post. Press ? to see the full set of keyboard shortcuts.


Zulip [1] is open source and (IMO) fantastic.

[1]: https://github.com/zulip


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


Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they're working on creating public chats, readable without logging in, from the browser?


Yes, the web-public view is being actively worked on: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+w...

There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive


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.

[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/


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 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 pay for a Reddit subscription, but it’s honestly not a great place for communities.

The communities on Reddit is in my experience always lower quality, more combative and less friendly than communities on discord, discourse and irc.


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.


> I really miss NNTP

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.


Is there a reason why Discourse’s email notifications aren’t helping?


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.


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.


With signatures and details about the user who posted, vBulletin and phpBB use up so much white space for shorter comments (which is most of them).

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...


Not everyone has the same UI tastes _shrug_. There's no need to turn this into a bikeshed on UI tastes.


You're right. But the way to do so is to give users a choice, instead of using solutions that bundle the server side with the UX.


I can definitely agree with this.


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?


It's just not documented. Take a look at https://github.com/epilys/sic/blob/main/tools/nntpserver.py and another file in the codebase.


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'm curious why Discourse feels almost as ephemeral as chat to you?


It's probably the UI/design of it. Discourse supports infinite scroll and live updates so it kind of looks like an IM thread with a lot more padding.


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.


I suspect you’re right. It just doesn’t exist.

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


that's lemmy.ml


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.


Sure! Custom integrations are our bread and butter (free software kind of doesn't pay the bills otherwise!)

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.


Do you already know Flarum? If so, did you tried it?

https://flarum.org


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.


analysis paralysis. PHPbb works fine, it 's only old if you re ageist.


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.


What open source program isn't?


I agree with the OP for open-source projects, but I thought I’d share what a great thing Discord has been for my first year programming students. They share questions, glitch screenshots, and interesting websites. They are also able to get help on simple problems quickly. More often than not they help each other before I can answer their questions. I know the OP is about open source projects, so I’m not sure if it’s totally relevant, but I thought I’d share how much it has helped my students foster community, get immediate help, and feel more comfortable as they learn to program. They wouldn’t feel comfortable or ready to post to a forum and my Discord server provides a safe space to get started.


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 agree, but I don't think those things serve the same use cases, and I know some projects that have both a Slack workspace and a forum.

A forum is great for getting technical support, and is ok-ish for technical discussion and planning, but I don't think it's a good replacement for real-time chat, which is great for developing more nuanced, personal relationships (for distributed developers and users that aren't going to do things like regular video chats). Certainly real-time chat isn't going to give you as rich an experience as a video or in-person chat, but it's much better than the asynchronous back-and-forth of a forum (or email).

So I would say "Use IRC/Matrix rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community" would be a better position to take (and set up a bot to automatically archive conversations to somewhere searchable on the web), as well as "Supplement your real-time chat with a forum or email list" (which can also be searchable). On top of that, know where to capture information for the longer term: for example, if discussion on IRC or the forum leads to an understanding that the project's documentation is confusing in some areas, write up a ticket on GH Issues or Jira or whatever you're using. That way you (or someone else) will remember it needs to be done.


> Problem #2: Google can’t see inside chats

Search engines seem to do well with Gitter. It's very searchable and the search results lead to the exact timestamp where the discussion happened.

I used to find decent support for Apache Airflow this way. A while ago they voted to move to Slack, not for any good reasons but because it was the popular place to be; The Slack setup was invite-only so search engines couldn't index it, and it was one with limited message retention, about 30 days I think. Very disappointing.


And since Gitter is being turned into a frontend for Matrix, you might as well just have a Matrix room for your project. Or several rooms, grouped together in a "space".


I hate Gitter with a passion. It's indexed, but it's chat after all, meaning it's painful to read as there are multiple conversations going on, and whatever you're looking for needs to be extracted from below the noise floor.

It always keeps coming up in my search results but it's absolutely never been useful to me.


I find googling for existing answers on forums, StackOverflow and Reddit to be great resources when I need to solve a problem, but I really dislike asking questions myself on those kind of platforms. I hate having to write a formal post and then hope someone responds, and then if anyone responds the conversation slowly crawls along post by post.

When I need help, I greatly prefer more casual, real time environments like Discord. To me, asking on forums feels like posting a newspaper ad for help and hoping someone mails me a letter, compared to asking on Discord feeling like walking into a room of knowledgeable people and discussing my question face to face.


The thing is that StackOverflow is not meant just for the asker; it's meant to serve as a searchable Q&A repository, so that when you google "how do I do X?" it's one of the first matches.

If you ask your question in a messaging system, it will help you but then be lost to the wider audience.


So you're actively participating in reducing the amount of useful solutions/answers available for everyone via a search engine.


Discord is great for developers who provide support, because all incoming issues are instantly drowned in the noise, and you can pretend that they don't exist.


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.


YES - I hope we see a return to mid-2000s approaches for web applications across the board. I'll take 2008 Google Maps over 2021 Google maps. Heck, I'll take 2008 Google SEARCH over 2021 Google Search. Things have regressed over the past decade.


No, please don't. I don't want to make a separate account for a random forum, and I especially don't want to use Discourse.

Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much simpler for everyone.


> Just use GitHub Issues and Discussions, please - it's so much simpler for everyone.

This is a totally valid choice and I know folks who have gone that path. If you are focused on an OSS project, it is a nobrainer.

From a company standpoint, there are downsides:

  * who owns the user? GitHub
  * who owns the posts you and your community are making? GitHub
  * who owns the links and the other residual benefits from knowledge being shared on the site? GitHub
Weighed against all of that is the fact that there is a tremendous number of developers on GitHub and you are engaging with them where they are. At $CURJOB we try to separate bugs/feature requests (which go to GitHub) from support (which goes to a forum).

Again, it's a tradeoff that anyone trying to foster a developer community should consider.


It seems like you need a new service to create accounts seamlessly /s


I've only used discord as part of a MOOC, and it seems absolutely useless for such a thing.

Since discussions aren't threaded, you can't really keep track of what people are talking about.

I joined slack at work basically the week after they added threaded discussion, and I was very surprised to learn it was a new thing. The whole premise of "slack instead of emails" seems ludicrous without threaded discussions. Like, how did anyone get that idea initially?


You can create Threads on Discord since a couple of months[0] Granted, it's not perfect to use in my opinion. But at least the feature exists :)

[0] https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4403205878423-...


Discord has threads now.


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.


what you said

slack doesn't have categories and tags and some search terms in slack bring up too many results without context to be useful


It’s not extremely hard to set up SSO with the big (tech) providers like GitHub and Google.

Would you be cool with “log in with google”?


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!


So, what's the alternative here?

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...


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 to do when Goog closes your account and won't reinstate it?


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.


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.


> “I would hardly say that an email address is PII.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) say they are.


Only if it can be associated with your person somehow.


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.)


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 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.


Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community. Many open source / free software enthusiasts are reluctant to use them, or flat out boycott them. What's more, you are putting your worthy community somewhere out of your control if you do this.

Slack and Discord are not cool and do not make your project cool. They make your project unreachable, now and in the future (archives). You won't be able to trace the history of your project when you will want to do it.

What's more, Slack and Discord are hype now but will probably be old-fashioned in a few years and you don't know when they will disappear. Just pick something already old-fashioned today but that somehow does not die.


>Discord are not cool

In fact, it is.

It is unparalleled in its segment, that's why I moved from all other VoIPs to it.


Element sounded better for me and my friends than Discord but it is hard to convince people to use it when the client is incredibly buggy on desktop and Android.


I haven't had any issues on desktop with Element, but OLM decrypting errors and stuck messages do appear on android from time to time


I have been having a bug of having been shown a couple of past messages on the bottom. It always gets below new messages. They cannot be deleted. I had it on both Linux and Android. Now I seem to be having this only on Android.


Are you going to host and maintain the forums for them? I'm not a fan of this particular use case for Discord but it's pretty much the easiest solution to online discussions that's currently available.


NodeBB can, for qualified open source projects. I think some other softwares also offer similar deals for open source projects, especially those with a following.


Maintainers should do exactly what they determine is best for them and the project.

open-source puratism isn't a guiding principle for maintainers believe it or not.

Running a discord allows maintainers to foster somewhat friendly relationships with users instead of purely transactional & functional relationships.

Your comment comes off as entitled although I will concede that slack is not cool. Good day.


> Maintainers should do exactly what they determine is best for them and the project.

100% in agreement!

> open-source puratism isn't a guiding principle for maintainers believe it or not.

No, it's not, but in my experience, about 50% of the people who contribute code I want to merge avoid proprietary garbage whenever they can. Why increase the friction for them?

> Running a discord allows maintainers to foster somewhat friendly relationships with users instead of purely transactional & functional relationships.

There are plenty of options that aren't actively user hostile if you're of the opinion that real time chat is that important.

> Your comment comes off as entitled although I will concede that slack is not cool. Good day.

I'm not sure I got that from his, this needless insult did make me feel that way about yours though.


> I'm not sure I got that from his, this needless insult did make me feel that way about yours though.

Just a little joke, didn't mean it in a bad way.

> No, it's not, but in my experience, about 50% of the people who contribute code I want to merge avoid proprietary garbage whenever they can. Why increase the friction for them?

PR critical discussions stay on PR. Would be silly to have that discussion off platform if it pertains to an open PR. My point was more aimed at the claim that the historical record should be of any concern to the maintainer.

> There are plenty of options that aren't actively user hostile if you're of the opinion that real time chat is that important.

Discord without verification and without overzealous rules is a good in between. I make sure to not require verification for my project's discord because verification is needless friction when somebody wants to ask a question/advice. The off-platform chat needs to be as frictionless as possible. Other than that I don't see how else a discord can be user hostile.


Discord does not allow third party clients. In my book that is as user hostile as it gets and due to my FOSSisms I'm effectively barred from using it.


Well I think you'd find that your first barrier would be the fact that most open source projects are run off of GitHub which is a company owned by Microsoft.


Does github limit what clients you're allowed to use with it?


>They make your project unreachable, now and in the future (archives). You won't be able to trace the history of your project when you will want to do it.

That has nothing to do with the software being open source or not, it's a question of whether you have a robust archival system in place.

I use open source software for plenty of things but most of it will at some point be lost to the ether because nobody's backing anything up


> That has nothing to do with the software being open source or not, it's a question of whether you have a robust archival system in place.

With Slack, your only option is to pay per user in order to have access to older messages, which is almost certainly going to be cost-prohibitive for most projects. I don't have a source for this, but I believe using a bot that automatically archives conversations elsewhere is against Slack's free-tier ToS.

I agree that this doesn't inherently have anything to do with closed vs. open source, but these sorts of shenanigans just aren't possible if you're self-hosting an open source discussion platform.


Self-hosting has a cost as well. Not sure why you are comparing a free-tier to a non-free option.


If they want to boycott them, they can go ahead, but I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now and I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC (which in my personal opinion is inferior and a relic of the past) just because they don't like Discord or non-free software.

And it doesn't matter if you can't archive or return to stuff if you're putting important stuff on Github Issues or something and using Discord for the rest.


> I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now

Why so?

> I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC

Sure, but they can kindly ask, I guess! Don't you think using readily available open source software is a reasonable ask from an open source community?

And well, IRC is not the only alternative to Slack and Discord. You have Mattermost, Matrix, Telegram, Wire and numerous other tools which are decent modern chat apps. However, the points about using chat in the original article still stand with these tools.


> Why so?

Not OP but building a community is best on discord because it's an environment that encourages focused discussion with everything being hierarchical in the form of server (guild)->channel category[]->channel[]. If someone is only into the general discussion of an OS project and isn't interested in the talk about maintaining it, they can mute the channel and/or collapse the channel category. IRC fails in this regard since things aren't situated as collections of readable-to-all channels unless every member specifically joins the respective IRC channels for the separate segments of discussion.

The reason Discord is chosen over the likes of Matrix and Telegram is because Discord is the clear winner in network effect. The chances of someone having a Discord account versus having a Matrix account or Telegram are small, so setting up there will severely reduce the amount of people that join just to be part of the discussion; people will join anything, even a phpbb forum, if they have a specific question or request to ask of the maintainers of a OSS project. With that, it makes sense to optimize for building a community that actually wants to chat, and part of that is making it super easy to check in on the discussion. Nothing is easier than just clicking on a different server in your Discord server list.

Discord is chosen over Mattermost and Wire because signing up for either of those is a joke. Wire puts you into a funnel with questions you have to answer when it asks you to "Create a Team" - even worse, the placeholder text is "Work email", they've obviously given up on the community-building/friends & family market segment. Mattermost is similarly trying to capture as many high-paying customers as possible with the homepage being about work, and both "Cloud" and "Self-managed" options having the button say "Start Free Trial". People just want to start their community for free. If they don't already know that it's possible to use these for free without being put into a sales CRM, they're not going to find out from visiting the home pages of these services.


Why does every piece of software need a community?

I don't want to be part of a "community" to use software, I just want to do the thing I set out to do.


Because if it's open source or aimed at developers in some way, it wasn't built for you. It was built for everyone. It works by everyone helping everyone else use it.

Maybe you should get out your credit card and call a commercial software vendor if you want personal attention?


I am a developer and I understand the need for person-power to continue the development of software. But that doesn't mean I have unlimited time (or money) to support the development of all of the software I might engage with.

If a new user (including devs using libraries) needs to join real time chat in order to get help with a "I tried X and I thought I'd get Y, but I saw Z instead" type problem then that seems pretty hostile.

Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not. The community around software grows over time as the top of the iceberg of users forms a community of active participants.

But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.

Edit: Plus as a Kiwi I am, as a general principle, against anything that reinforces the tyranny of time zones. Which synchronous communication definitely does.


> Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Just last week I saw a GH issues post in which someone was reporting problems with the HTML output of an MIT licensed email template editor, and someone had replied that he fixed all of the tags/CSS, and then edited his link to a gist with the changes, saying that "his boss told him that was proprietary."

What was surprising was not that a random corporate stooge is both a complete scumbag, and thinks table tags are valuable, but that everyone else in the thread accepted the response without mockery, and no one bothered to look up who that guy worked for and harass the company on social media.

> But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.

I don't think community denotes real time communication. Community is also when Theo was widely praised for dropping all Adaptec drivers from a release version of OpenBSD quite a few years ago, to punish them for giving him a run-around on drivers about 'iNtElLeCtUaL pRoPeRtY' (despite the fact that they were a hardware company). Community is also when people find a hidden daemon in OSX that contacts an NSA / CIA server and post it publicly rather than anonymously to a journalist without the details of the process used to uncover it.

Community was better 15-20 years ago than it is now, by a wide margin. All those "transactional" had people better pick the right jobs with valuable equity, otherwise they'll find themselves short of keeping their kids and grandkids middle-class when everyone else has "transactional'd" themselves all the way to slums and soylent green patrolled by Amazon-branded Ring / Terminator cops.

edit: while I'm at it... the company who is using an MIT licensed email template editor but doesn't think employees should post PRs for it to fix bugs is https://www.linkedin.com/company/flexmr/about/


Bravo, great essay on the tragedy of the commons.


I agree with you. At the same time, people use GitHub and see no issue with it.


I definitely see an issue with this. Fortunately, at least GitHub is readable without running non-free code and is searchable. I guess you can also participate with one of those alternative clients.

You are still not in control of your community, and I'd like this monopoly to vanish.


Discord is readable from a web browser just like GitHub is.


Not really. GitHub is also "readable" through a search engine, and can be used (read-only) without signing in. GitHub also allows you to use automated tools to read and manipulate the data stored there. Discord does not allow you to do any of those things.


Discord is not really readable at all, in any format. It's a mess.


You can read Github project pages just fine without logging in, not so much for most if not all discord server instances.


GitHub.com is almost entirely non-free code, when seen through a web browser. Unless you're talking about just the git portion?


It is more of the content inside GitHub is widely accessible without needing to log in whereas Discord are not really accessible and often would need "invitation link" to find those servers. GitHub is far more public in this sense than Discord is. Discord/Slack is a instant message system, far different, than forums style which are "static", which make archival extremely difficult to do in Discord/Slack.


Probably because you're nowhere near as "locked-in" to GH. You can move your source code and all of its history to another hosting platform in minutes with git.

If you want to move your Slack/Discord community to another platform, there is no easy way to export the content AFAIK.


Not true. Good luck exporting the issues, pull requests, comments, discussions, wikis, etc. and bringing those to another platform.

Ironically (and I am not defending them), Slack[0] is the only one of the three that has an official way to export all messages. GitHub does not, unless you're counting their API, but then maybe you want to consider Discord things like this[1]?

[0] https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

[1] https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter


Gitlab can import pretty much all of those things from Github.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html


Wow, TIL! Can't believe I missed that, thank you.


There are third party whole-server backup bots for Discord. Import elsewhere is a different problem though.


> Please don't ask people to run non-free software to participate in your open source community.

Doesn't that imply the end of all macOS related projects? Not that I'm complaining, I'm actually very surprised by the amount of effort individuals put in to open source efforts (such as homebrew) to support a proprietary closed platform like macOS.


I didn't think about this case, but obviously a project related to a proprietary software will require running this software and that seems reasonable.

I guess I'm thankful to people making open source software for closed platforms so they are available should I ever be exposed to these platforms.

It's not this surprising, people can see the value of open source but be okay (or forced) to use non free software.


People who bemoan Slack and Discord have never used MS Teams or tried to bring multiple friend groups together on Mumble.


>Just pick something already old-fashioned today but that somehow does not die.

Sounds great. Do people have recs here?


Zulip is a good one.


Thanks!


I own two fairly popular github projects (2.4k and 500 stars) - I have a Discord server. What do you recommend for me? I don't want to spend a penny on hosting this since it's a for fun project.


I think just putting g some effort I to keeping a FAQ on the repo up to date with things people run into and post on discord is a great solution.


Are you saying make the FAQ. and that will make the Disord unnecessary? New stuff always comes up. This doesn’t seem right


"Keeping it up to date" means updating with common issues that pop up on discord.

Those who only need support are helped and not victims to discords search and discussion -issues.


GitHub has a discussions section.


Right, because IRC (the prior state-of-the-art) is eminently accessible.


I haven't mentioned IRC, and there are several, more modern, alternatives to IRC.

But actually, what is so wrong about IRC? I used to listen a popular webradio which had an IRC channel, people managed to join it no problem, including me as a child. Surely a developer is capable of joining and using IRC with ease?

IRC had this interesting property that chat logs were often provided publicly, making them searchable.


>But actually, what is so wrong about IRC?

1. IRC doesn't have any form of persistence or history, requiring the user to run a bouncer 2. IRC doesn't have any formatting - this makes it annoying to talk about code

My experience with IRC is that I joined a channel, asked the question I wanted, waited for a few hours without a response, and turned my computer off. If anyone answered it after that, I have no way of knowing. I don't regularly use IRC and so I don't run a bouncer.

This wasted both my time and the time of people who answered my question after I was gone.

In better chat systems, you can e.g. get an email notification if someone replies to you, allowing you to check back later.


I see, fair point. You convinced me.


I agree mostly, but I'm going to nitpick: not all open source software is "free" in either sense of the term.

I think slack and discord are _awful_ support forums (I'm saying this as I manage a 30k user slack and a 15k user discord server). The detriments of these platforms as a support portal stands on its own without any sort of philosophical musings.


> I agree mostly, but I'm going to nitpick: not all open source software is "free" in either sense of the term.

To a first approximation, it is. The opensource definition [0] and the free software one [1] are basically equivalent in outcome, just not in the philosophy behind them.

The license lists are also basically identical, except for the Open Watcom license, where, tbh, someone at the OSI smoked the wrong thing. It's also essentially unused.

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd [1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html


Forums are awesome for this context. It is most of the time better for privacy as well.

But is it just me or whenever I use Discourse forum, my FB container in Firefox shows it has blocked something which FB uses to track me! This is in multiple discourse forums self hosted and otherwise. So am assuming it is bundled with Discourse. This bugs me the hell out. And Discourse is everywhere too since it has an open source version.

I think Flarum is awesome and maturing! (https://flarum.org/)


It may be Facebook login. They don’t have native support for a Facebook pixel or like button to my knowledge and it’s not likely that every discourse forum is manually adding those things - it almost seems antithetical to have a self-hosted forum and be promoting a Facebook group/page.


I hope they remove it. Anything and everything FB sends data. Their share button alone does it. Don't you think their auth does it too?


Couldn’t agree more on this

Using public forums would do greater good for developer community and the future developers as it retain the knowledge and can benefit a lot more than just sharing within chat apps


I quite like Zulip, which is basically chat software but with great forum-like properties. Plus it's open source and can be self-hosted. It really hits my sweet spot.


Reddit + discord + github.

Be active and push real issues and bugs into the github channel and use the content of forum / chat for documentation / faq / guides.


Have you found it easy to start a Reddit community? This isn't something I've explored much.


This resonates as true to me - chat software encourages urgency over quality in responses. The archives are mostly unusable because they're so stream-of-consciousness where context is essential to understanding messages.

Forum software is just so difficult to use and manage. It often requires setting up a server from scratch, and take some technical chops to run or manage.

I've wanted asynchronous forum software for my groups - whether professional or personal - for some time. And, I've wanted something that's as easy to set up as a Notion or Slack - meaning no domain tinkering, no custom server, and easy for less-technical folks to use.

So, I'm attempting to build it! My project is called Booklet, and I am trying to make it a better Google Groups - with a focus on asynchronous, threaded conversations alongside a robust member directory. I'm a few months into building in the open, and hope to be ready for some early testers before the end of the year. If you're interested in trying it or following the journey, check it out: https://bookl.et


There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord group, though.


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.


It's virtually impossible to do so in Slack, unless someone ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large slacks.


It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being threaded-only and having great UX.


Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to be useful, though.


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.)


We use Discourse's hosted solution and it's effectively zero maintenance


Why not use a facebook page? Super easy to maintain and some moderation


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.


basic privacy, ethics


Setting up a Discourse seems pretty easy from what I can tell. Seems like it's as easy as setting up a cloud instance and running a docker container.


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.


> Why do people use Slack/Discord/etc?

One reason seems missing: chat is arguably easier to set up and maintain.

Synchronous communication also means that messages won’t pile up.

No past content means fewer places to keep up to date; plus there are always users who ask questions without reading existing topics.

I could give more examples; to me chat seems a more lean approach.


I'm working on a new open discussion site at https://sqwok.im that mixes chat with topical posts in an open and accessible UI.

The issue of highlighting/indexing important messages and series of messages has come up recently and it's something I want to focus on in the near future.

While not specifically designed as forum software, I would be curious to learn if it could solve some of the issues people have brought up regarding searchability, indexing, and displaying more long-lived content.

Posted a recent dev update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28750996

PS If you'd like to work on something like this drop me a line.


Vladimir Panteleev wrote the forum software D uses:

https://forum.dlang.org/

It's all completely searchable, it works with NNTP (yes!), and I wrote a program:

https://github.com/DigitalMars/ngArchiver

to turn the message database into simple, fast loading static web pages:

https://digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/index.html

It has served us well.


I really wish more systems had a NNTP bridge. If we can't have nice things with regular federated Usenet servers, something RSS-like where you could subscribe to different "proprietary" servers would be awesome. For the web interfaces people can do all kinds of things, be Web X.0 etc., as long as the conversation format maps well enough to NNTP.


I agree. In my case, I have a NNTP server, but would also be OK to have a web forum and mailing list which bridges to it. The web interface could be any as long as the conversation format maps to NNTP, is readable and writable in usual NNTP clients without difficulty, that the formats are readable just fine as plain text, and that even if JavaScripts and CSS are disabled that it must display a link to the NNTP. I want to treat the NNTP as primary, though, even if other interfaces are also available.

This can either be done on my computer (and read the SQLite database containing the messages directly; also will need to be compatible with what I have), or on some remote service which the messages are mirrored (and then I can set up a cron job if I wanted to). However, I have not found a suitable one for my specific use.

(Also, my NNTP server is not currently in use by anyone other than myself, it seems. However, I would like others who are interested in my projects to discuss there. There is also a IRC channel for discussion, which also isn't used (there are a few people on there, but nobody else other than myself seems to write messages there). IRC logs are kept.)


The NNTP web forum software D uses is exactly what you specify. Some people interact with it using the forum software, others use conventional NNTP news readers, like Thunderbird's. Still others use the mailing list interface.

https://forum.dlang.org/help#about


The main issue with Discord/Slack is that it is difficult to get up to speed with the context of the discussion. You essentially have to read the entire history, and you might or might not be interested in every topic.

Email is much better, since only a select set of persons receive email on a given topic, making it more likely they are interested in it.

For documentation purposes, Discord and Slack are essentially completely useless, due to poor structuring of the conversations and poor search functionality. Anything with more structure would work much better.

The only case it works well is on small teams that are 100% into solving a particular problem together, and they can context switch every few minutes into the chat.


Yes, 1000% this. I've found reddit and stack overflow to be way easier to search for content than slack/discord. Creating a subreddit for your app/service/topic is trivial and moderation tools are decent as wel.


I think slack/discord are also bad for business, but that’s a discussion not many have had yet. It remains to be seen whether forums are the better midpoint between emails and meetings but sure wish more people would try


What if you don't need a community? Why does everything have to be a community now?

To that point: slack/discord/irc/whatsapp/pub conversations are a great way to bootstrap a community before you invest in something longer term, if it's needed. Find your like-minded friends and then grow it out.

In fact, I can use my own experience in the mid-2000s as an example: we used existing forums like Gamesradar and rllmuk and neogaf to bootstrap our offshoot forums. Most failed, some succeeded for a while (one was PoopGang IIRC).

Discord servers aren't really so different from that.


"Why does everything have to be a community now?"

It always did. The key is searchability - you can find discussions through Google and they will have an answerr to your question


Or maybe you can do both, that's the reason behind the tool I'm building right now: https://www.channelsync.chat/ In this way you can mitigate #1 "the memory hole" and also the #2 "Google can’t see inside chats" while creating a mirrored forum version of the best content you have on Discord.

It's still in closed alpha right now. But I would love to know what you think about it.


That's a pretty cool idea, can you choose which channels people can see while not being in the discord? You know why


My stance on interaction mechanisms "to support developer community":

For any project size:

1. Issue tracker.

2. Mailing list (or similar mechanism) for announcements (not discussions with the users).

For a larger project:

3. Forums

4. IRC/Matrix channel for chatting ... if core developers are chatty enough to sustain this.

For an even larger project:

5. A publicly-editable wiki and/or a Q&A platform

6. Multiple chat channels, mirroring them on different chat platforms

I'm not saying nothing else works, only that this ladder seems to work well on the projects I have encountered.


The benefit of a forum is searchability. Answers from a forum can be indexed in Google SEO which ended up driving a ton of traffic.

I think forums struggle when you're building a product that is changing/evolving quickly. The information becomes dated and can even end up misleading users since workflows, terms, feature implementations are always changing.

The success of a forum or any place where interaction occurs depends on engagement. Is there enough activity? Are people responsive? Is it discoverable? If you're not seeing traffic in your Slack/Discord server, then a forum will most likely not do much better. I also think empty forums feel like a graveyard, so I wouldn't expect my question to get many eyes. If you do go with the forum route, you'll need to seed content.

One thing you can do is run both and see what happens. There are tools now out there that help you see all interactions across your various community channels. I work for a company called commonroom.io that shows you all activity, categorizes it, and enriches the user information, making it easy to see what's going on in your community and quickly segment for reporting or segmentation.


I feel like the current state of forums kind of sucks. Discourse is the common one I see and it's not that great, it loads weirdly sometimes, it's a bit hard to read threads with the layout, and it's just not that nice to use.

Figuring out notifications is still just as much of a pain as always, and they never seem to work right.

One forum I use a lot is using XenForo and I actually like that one reasonably well, it seems to get most things right.


You can have both. One doesn't invalidate the other.

Forums are no different from instant chat apps like Discord, in that, once you reach a certain size, you'll stop being able to stay on one topic most times, unless you heavily moderate and people hate that more than conversations diverging from topics(speaking from experience in both sides). But they're also great to engage with strangers and a wider amount of people at all times.

The main issue is that one is instant messages and the other has a delay that could be hours or days even, since people aren't going to wait there for someone to reply. The instant messages have a similar problem, in that, it can be hard to follow a conversation once you reach a certain size with comments flooding the chat and comments are mostly lost (there's the log, obviously) unless you're willing to go back and read everything. Discord and similar apps, are great to engage with people who are regulars, since you're already acquainted and can have a more casual and faster conversation.

They both have their positives and negatives and there's no good reason to not use both.


This is something that the Racket community has faced. We have an active discord, but the search ability is not great. We also have a mailing list, but have been getting increasing amounts of spam.

Hopefully the Discourse forum that was created in the past few days will solve this [1]

1. https://racket.discourse.group/


This is a little off-topic, but does anyone have a good way to manage different identities on Discord? For example I'm in one Discord with real-life friends, one for a game community, and one for programming. I'd like my account to have different names and profile pictures for each. So far that appears impossible but maybe there's a way I haven't found.


Right click on server icon > Edit server profile.

Custom nickname per server is a free feature. Alas, custom profile pic per server is a paid feature.


Thanks, I guess for the price of Nitro that'll be good enough.


It doesn't go into issues which I think is the most important.

Slack / Discord being free?

Who is setting up the forum? Who is paying for it? Who does the maintenance? Who does the moderation with Spams?

Part of the reason why Discourse took over most of the forum for Open Source is that they are free for Open Source Project. And there are little to no maintenance involves.

Not to mention to this day, forum software still sucks.


In reality the best solution is to mix all available tools in a way where individual interactions always have a specific place to be addressed effectively. For example, I encourage people to introduce issues in the discord. If it is fixable with the given context and I am available, I will fix it there and then + publish a new version of the package/patches within minutes. This way others don't even have the time to experience the problem in the first place.

If the problem seems more complex, I direct them to fill in an extensive issue template.

On boot of the library, I also log a link to an issue template with most of the context filled in.

If the issue has a few bits of information missing & there seems to be miscommunication, I direct them to message me on the discord.

Most projects are maintained by a single person, so the communication landscape of the project should be optimised for that person and how they deem effective to communicate. It's not for users/passers-by/etc.


Classic forums never actually felt convenient. IMHO the best could be a StackExchange-like UI + HN-like hierarchical comments + allowance and convenience of repeating similar questions as the time passes (as the old answer may be inapplicable to a newer version or just not complete enough for a new person facing the same problem even why satisfactory for the previous one) + more permissive policy in regard of opinionated questions and answers.

The best engine for this I have seen so far in Reddit (I men Old Reddit of course) and IIRC it has its source code open so anyone can run their own.

From the pragmatic point of view I can see nothing comparable to GitHub Issues + Pages. A problem would have to be hell of importance to me to motivate me sufficiently to register on another website like a specific project's BugZilla but on GitHub everyone can find everything at one place and participate straight away as everybody apparently has a GitHub account nowadays anyway.


Have you ever used a Discourse forum? I've found them to be by far the most convenient, and would rate above old Reddit.


Not really. Any example I could take a look at? I generally hate every more-than-2-user discussion engine which doesn't enforce hierarchical threads (making message-response relation always defined and clear and the whole chain easily traceable) and/or encourages real-time communication.


Where are the forums? StackOverflow, GitHub/GitLab issues are a good alternative?

Very rarely I just open up a question in Slack/Discord for some projects but I also get very rarely any answers, either I am lucky that someone else with the same issue there or it just stales forever or while I dig very deep and eventually find a solution.


GitHub apparently has a “Discussions” feature although I’ve never used it.


Or something like StackOverflow


ding ding ding!

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.


SO is great except for all the wrong and stale answers


The problem with self-hosted forums is that you have to host them, and that adds Yet Another Thing already overworked developers and maintainers have to worry about.

Self-hosting will not make a comeback until hosting software can be installed and maintained as easily as, say, mobile apps. Install a forum on your server, set an upgrade policy, and mostly forget about it.

So much developer work goes into overwrought boil the ocean attempts at decentralization when solving this boring-but-hard problem well could lead to a renaissance in the simplest and yet most robust and most accessible form of decentralization: people hosting shit themselves. Docker could have done this but really didn't. RedHat or Ubuntu could do it, but they're not. Nobody is really doing this, or if they are they are doing it in an overly complicated way.


Installing a web forum is one click in damn near any web hosting/VPS provider's admin panel...


What about updating it? What happens if you need to move it? What happens if something breaks? Who fixes it? Who monitors it?


You open a support ticket for your web hosting provider, and they do the upgrade/fix.


I remember updating and moving VBulletin/IPB/PhpBB being painless 15 years ago.


There are pros & cons of both the forum & chat based communities. Really, it should be determined by the kind of community you're managing and how you want your community members to interact.

Forums are great for debugging & keeping a record of information. If your community works together on projects, chat is the way to go.

I've been curating lists of online communities at the Hive Index. For example, here's my one for programming https://thehiveindex.com/topics/software-development/. In this case, it's about 50/50 split between forum & chat. There are also community platforms experimenting with both forum & chat in the same place, for example circle.so


Is Hive Index yours? Curious why you don’t put that in your bio?

I like the initiative! Nice site


Format migration seems to me to be a key feature - the ability to lift ephemeral discussions into more permanent and deliberate mediums as required. Something like chat -> forum -> wiki, for example. Have set processes in place for determining when something can usefully be pushed upwards. Also encourage a culture of pointing to documentation /first/ to ensure the more permanent documents are well-maintained and robust.

Stack Overflow got close to this, but is still quite a ways off. The chat element is present but very much cut off from the site, and it lost its way over time as its focus changed. It may be worthwhile trying to assemble recommendations for how to select your own tools that give you these benefits, and perhaps to ease migrations between them.


Agree with this, with the addition that the format everything eventually flows into should be either plaintext or HTML 2.0.


Mailing lists (and newsgroups!) are really really really simple forums. Still used widely in the open source community. Lots of hosts out there, very low investment in cost/time/maintenance, the 'friction to post' is a feature not a bug, you don't need a weird client or server, the archives are publicly searchable, you can filter them at your leisure and use different lists for different topics.

If you want to gamify your community engagement, StackOverflow/Reddit is better. But if you just want answers to questions, a mailing list is the simplest thing in the world. If you have a lot of questions, you need to make a FAQ, and StackOverflow basically does that by sorting.


I could not agree more. Chat is great for coordination and hand-holding when you can spare the cycles for supporting someone directly, but it is a mess for retaining knowledge or documenting past issues/resolutions.

Also, if you’re on a significant timezone offset, you will seldom be able to chat directly anyway. To assume otherwise is somewhat naïve, really.

Most people don’t know GitHub now has Discussions, which is enough of a usable forum to fill in that gap without turning Issues into a pastiche of random arguments, and I hope other dev platforms follow suit to spare me the trouble of spending hours sifting through random Slack/Discord channels asking for very specific things I could just search for.


What forum though? An intuitive, modern, free, fully managed forum software is non-existent.


Forums are the obvious right choice for a developer community. But chats feel friendly while forums are formal and cold.

Developers need a chat tool alongside the IDE. I was saddened when the ReasonML/ReScript community closed their chat for this reason.


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)


I mean, a lot of developers used IRC as far back as I can remember?

Forums are newer than IRC chat, though arguably Forums are based on USENET, BBS, or email-lists.

-------

IRC / Discord / Slack / Skype are real-time communication / instant messenger style communications.

Email / Forums / USENET / Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Hacker News are async and slow.


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.


IRC adoption never really peaked like slack and discord has


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.


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.


Being a bit pedantic in the case of Slack:

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]


Does Slack’s API still allow pulling down all messages? I coded something quick to do that many years ago.

Then the heuristics can just happen with the pulled down content.


I gotta say Dlang has my favorite approach to this problem, if only we could turn their forum into a simple Debian or Linux package, I wonder if that would help. Basically, you can see t he website or you can open them up with an NNTP reader (Newsreader) client and download the entire history of their forums for offline friendly reading. I don't know what's better than that, bonus points: you can post too!

They also load blazing fast, and post to IRC and I forget what else they do. Regardless, they're not running bloated JS or anything, they just work.


Discord, Slack, Gitter all gate messages so much, they are not well indexed but search engines (if indexed at all) and very chaotic when a lot of people are posting.

Please use something like Github discussions.


Isn’t Gitter the one that is fairly well indexed? I wouldn’t lump it in with the others.


It is indexed but it is impossible to follow a conversation in a busy channel, like the others


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.


> 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.)


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.


Yeah I could see in a few year Discord/Slack having "chat" channels, voice channels, and "forum" channels. Maybe even add in wikis, or dashboards.


And then people can live in their closed ecosystems where exporting data will be ever more difficult.


Who are these people and how do they have time follow synchronous chat on deep technical products all day?


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?


>Perhaps there's an unmet market need for a product that both excels at synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Basecamp?


Don't think #2 should be so Google-centric, just like dev communities shouldn't be slack/discord-centric. "Web crawlers can't see inside chats" is just fine.


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 cannot agree enough.

For example, in the bevy[0] discord alone, there's a remarkable about of advice, plugin recommendations, and technical help that's essentially just lost in noise.

It's a real shame; I can't help but wonder how much effort is repeated, or how much beginners needlessly struggle because they couldn't effectively find information.

[0] https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy


I'll throw this out: I would love to see an open-source version of Guilded.

Discord-like design, but with forum channels, open-sourced so it can be tweaked and guarantee data longevity.


I've been working on an interesting concept precisely for this sort of thing. It's pay-to-post and DM authors in a decentralized and unmoderated way (moderation happens via the micropayments).

I cross-posted this blog over there:

https://web.stampchat.io/#/forum/014ad3ec1c9c5488af76abf68c7...


To paraphrase an old saying, there are two kinds of community software: the ones everybody complains about (Discord, Slack), and the ones no one uses (forums, IRC).


I think both a forum (async) and some form of IM (sync) communication are needed, but I think IM should really just be just for developers.

Mailing lists are a great option as far as async comms go, but maybe are a little intimidating for laymen for whatever reason. Other than that, they're well trodden and Google Groups is still pretty solid, although the lack of categories (other than just a ton of different mailing lists, which an option)


Chat rather than ticket based support is great for people who are more timid, inexperienced, who don't have the knowledge to peice together a good question.


Hopefully we'll eventually have better bridges for going between the live discussion and the persisted artifacts. Discord has lightweight threads now, so a thread <-> issue/discussion bridge like https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/12340 is viable there.


My favorite forum is https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com

Nothing fancy and little changed from the 00s. Works great and allows pretty in-depth technical analysis with images, etc. It uses Simple Machines forum software: https://www.simplemachines.org/


Many people are constantly logged in to Slack in a native app. Viewing discussions is a click away, and replies will show up in the sidebar even if they aren't currently viewing that Workspace.

A website is another place to forget about.

It would be neat to merge the durability and SEO goodness of a Stack Overflow with the accessibility of Slack.


For our Founder community, we went from Slack, to Discord, to Circle: https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/our-communit...


Nice article and there is also indepth analysis of alternatives https://kb.founderculture.net/public/posts/460yq0p9. Intresting read!


> Problem #3: synchronous communication is synchronous

I love synchronous communication sometimes. Specially if you're a builder it's invaluable to have the person right there and ask them as many questions as you want. Not having any latency in each back and forth increases the efficiency by orders of magnitude.


I'm still evaluating this myself but:

Alternatives exist in various ways https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28830640

I still like IRC but understand why its being left behind for plenty of purposes. Yet still useful for plenty more.


Sooo, back when I was growing up, phpbb was the shizzles.. What is the new style of persistent/web forums?


Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/) seems to be used very frequently, at least for open source projects.

EDIT: forgot to mention that Discourse is self-hostable, if that's your thing: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/docs/INSTAL...


Nice, thank you! :) I will investigate this. Self hosting is very very much my thing indeed.


Not just to support a developer community, but maybe communication in general.

I've mentioned this in the past and have thought this for years and years now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25273869


Somewhat related, I'm looking for few good folks to start some forums of their interest at https://discoflip.com (shameless plug for my covid side gig). #developer is still available at the time of this comment.


Great article and covers all the points.

Important information should not be trapped in apps or walled gardens. This is a major problem today. People talk about worse search results today but that is largely due to information grabs by these systems locking that up to own it.

Anything not indexable is a problem.


Forums are the ultimate in async workflow. You can post a message, and when get to control when you come back. Little features like search, threads, search engine integration, are amazing!

Slack/Discord is fine for an IRC alternative. But they should be additive not the only option.


This continually comes up.

It doesn't matter. The people who don't already agree aren't on Hacker News.


There's a lot of value in both. I love being able to hop into a Discord for an open source project and get an immediate answer to a problem I'm dealing with. What we really need is something that logs out chats to a publicly available search indexed archive.


It seems to me Github Discussions does the job for a forum (for open source devs at least). Are there significant advantages to setting up a standalone forum suite like Discourse? I imagine you do have to spend quite a bit of resources to setup and maintain such thing.


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!


FortressOne dev here. We use a Discord and it was the perfect fit for us. Since we're game focused. A forum simply would not have worked. It's a matter of the right tool for the job as usual. Though, it might be nice to publish the logs somewhere.


Yep, have recently had some troubles with provisioning two relatively new products (Redpanda and Materialize), and both of them relied on Slack communities and it's really not an experience I enjoy or find helpful.


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


Still a link to discord that still exists ...


Most forums I come across when searching for things (usually obscure problems in embedded software) are slow and they have very poor layout.

Can someone recommend forum software that is fast and doesn't look terrible?


If you like Discourse but want something a bit lighter, check out: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum


I still don’t understand what were the problems that Slack/Discord solved. Almost all its features can be done with IRC, admittedly not easily, which kind of answers my own question, but……


Ok cool set up a forum. Who's going to moderate it to handle the tons of spam it will immediately receive? Will it be the same person keeping security updates current? They're going to be busy doing that and fielding support requests because someone forgot a password or someone is being a jerk to them.

I'd love for FOSS projects to avoid things like Discord but they choose free managed services for a reason. Unless someone wants to dedicate a fair amount of effort to running a forum, IRC channel(s), or other service it's a big ask of a bunch of part time contributors.

Running a forum is usually orthogonal to developing some software. It's a lot of extra effort for minimal benefit for a "community".


I have very rarely if ever seen spam on Discourse forums.


I used to use Yahoo Clubs/Groups but now they are all deleted. Had a lot of good developer talk in those groups. All you needed was an email address to subscribe to the newsletter.


A stack overflow style seems better than either a forum or a discord

Support requests are usually questions, and QnA based solutions handle questions well, including search based on prior questions


Setting a forum these days is a legal nightmare and big tech is lobbying to pull the drawbridge up even higher.

I think this is already lost. Only a mad person would host a forum these days.


Dev communities are actually primarily for writing ad hoc documentation. From that perspective, the answer to which platform one ought to use for them is very clear.


Agreed. We see about 25% of our traffic come from our forums.

https://forums.ironmansoftware.com


Apollo Graphql (Meteor) moved to Spectrum chat for this reason, all conversions are basically searchable.

It seems now they've moved to Github discussions which is also nice


I do agree, slack and discord become way to heavy and bloated. Forums might be the best way, but it need a new iteration or something. phpBB is way too old


Discord makes sense for my project due to the dynamic nature of it. I agree it's probably redundant for stable projects with minimal updates


Is there a product that lets you effortlessly build a forum? Can’t think of one off the top of my head but I’m sure there’s one out there.


100% agree ! Slack/Discord is like the Medium.com for blog posts.

I dont want to start and app(even a webapp) just to get the info i need.


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

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...


> 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.


I don't want that either. Why should I tell google or github which sites I use... And tie also the accounts there to my google account.


"I don't want that either."

Then use a password manager. Pick your poison.

Thats how we end up with apps without passeords, with just phone number/sms verification


This is what openid (the original) was designed to fix. You get to own your identity and delegate it if desired. But adoption didn't really happen.

But I get it. Maybe a throwaway email address is the right way around it for you?


"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.

What am I missing?


> What am I missing?

Intense mistrust of google; a desire for the unattainable: true anonymity.


Fair. A bit beyond the scope of the original article, but fair.


Why need openid when pgp exists?


Because pgp is broken and obsolete


Citation needed?


> 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.


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".


Most board software follows a simple tree layout. Not hard to navigate.

No one wants to register for slack or hand over government id for discord or use the reddit app.


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."


Do you think we should replace HN with discord or slack?


can we get oauth on HN so i can login everywhere with my HN account?


I, for one, am not comfortable using Discord or Slack because of the very nature of synchronous communication.


The only time I tried to use Discord it demanded I send them my government ID.


> 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.


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 :-)


Thanks for all this great feedback! I'd love to chat and will reach out tomorrow! I know of Guilded but haven't used it, will check it out.


I think Matrix or Mattermost have Discourse and Discord bridging. Wonder how that can work.


Nope. Nope. Nope.

Discord is GARBAGE, and you don't know what you're talking about.


But they'll register for Discord/Reddit/Slack.

Then presumably complain about the Internet becoming 6 big platforms and a search engine.


Discourse (selfhosted, open source forum) > Discord (proprietary, centralized, censored spyware chat)


It would be great to help the newcomers browse for previous discussions compared to the chat software.


I used the OpenPhone app to side step many of these checks as a Google Voice alternative.


Nice app. Paying $10/mo is not expensive. But a lot if the only reason is side stepping when VoIP number verifying doesn’t suffice