Indexing chat convos doesn't solve the problem in my experience. The way the discussion is structured changes completely when someone on the other end responds instantly, and unless you're willing to replay their 20 minute discussion you won't easily be able to find what you were looking for. Mix that with different conversations happening in the same channel and others chiming in halfway through and starting separate discussions and you're up for a challenge.
There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.
Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse.
I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.
There's been quite a few cases where the only hit for an obscure error message I could find was some kind of Gitter chat, but I've learned to not even bother with those results.
Search engines also have trouble working with chat messages and even modern forums like Discourse. When you click a link you will have to spend significant effort trying to find the highlighted text, something that was a lot easier back in the static HTML days. You have to let Javascript do its fetches and queries to get the information supposedly found somewhere in the page, and it doesn't always load so you may need to scroll to the end to get the rest of the discussion, making "find in page" useless. Discourse tries to solve this by providing heir own control+f handler which is somehow even worse.
I understand the want for more and quicker interactivity. It's a better experience for the person writing the question or the response. This comes at a massive cost in readability and knowledge transfer, though.