Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it's threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There's only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don't have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more "boomer hobbies" and it's ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There's car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you're shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
In regards to the advrider comment, I don't find those ridiculously long-running threads all that convenient even though they are very useful. In your example the WR250R thread could have multiple subtopics being discussed at once in the same thread which I find frustrating.
For example, one guy might ask about tires and while that's being discussed another guy shows up asking about a big bore kit to make more power. Now there are two discussions happening at the same time and all I can do is view the thread chronologically. Then someone else shows up asking what oil everyone uses. Then someone new joins and says "Hey it's not possible to go back and read through all 2300 pages in this thread, what GPS are you all using?"
Like sure it's great that all the information is in that one thread but navigating through it only in chronological order can be super frustrating.
ADVRider is more of a "motorcycles in general" community and they try to limit the number of "subcommunities" (the Wr250 thread is in the Thumpers subcommunity), but a WR250 specific forum would have the discussions you're talking about split up.
The real solution though would be for a "Reddit style forum" to exist, where people can create new subcommunities however they want but to have it work like a forum instead of having threaded discussions that don't get bumped.
It actually drives me a little nuts that the 500 EXC-F thread is under Thumpers and not under Orange Crush. I get that it's a Thumper, but it's also a KTM. Why have a subcommunity based on engine type when all of the other engine types are in manufacturer-specific subcommunities?
I have been playing with the idea of a documentation.org. Something publicly funded (mostly through corporate and individual donations) that hosts technical manuals, white papers, guides, links to video tutorials (likely YouTube), FAQs, and even links to Discord and/or forums if they exist. Documents are public, free to index (no login to view), version controlled and held in perpetuity.
Obviously there is much more to it, but I think we have reached a point where something like it is required.
In the most technical terms, yes. The idea is not new or bizarre, but I see the same missteps repeated. For starters, the venture HAS to be a nonprofit with zero need for monetization. It will also need an inviting and easy to navigate user interface, accessible to the most nontechnical of users. You need to have a massive document library from multiple large players from day one, so you need to have a lot of contacts.
As I said it's not fully cooked, but I have spoken to a few people that could help me make it happen and they seemed open to it.
Please consider a Patreon for doc review. I don't mean reviewing the doc against the project for fitness, as that's the job of each project to maintain and review their own docs; I mean by a technical writer who can de-localize (you only think I mean 'internationalize') the document and make it syntactically and logically correct against a generic, classic style guide.
The rising popularity of really bad errors is definitely turning me off from videos or documentation from a few sources with a lot of churn. It ruins the flow and it robs the assumption of authority which I'd argue is an important part of any documentation.
That is a good idea. I am fairly certain I could get funding and/or loaned resource time for English, Spanish, French and German, but crowd funding incentivized localization for other regions is brilliant.
one time, I asked and got a reply that it has been answered already, followed by a rant of why the hell people were asking the same question over and over again. IDK man, maybe you could update the installation instructions in your readme, then people wouldn't be flodding discord with the same question over and over again.
(it was regarding the project being incompatible with the newest version of a library and you had to manually install an older version to get it to work)
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
Documentation is bad enough. But it's worse when that's the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.
I can't understand why someone would want to do that. Maybe it's my help desk and IT upbringing, but for the few software tools and things I've made, if you chat me without filing a bug/issue on GitHub, I'm not gonna help you.
Yep, and if it becomes a frequent request, add clarification to the readme / wiki / documentation.
Also, if you push folks towards issues, then they become indexable by search engines! So even if you have a solved problem you can at least find that... Discord? It's a black hole.
And then get it insta-closed withing 20 minutes saying that "this is a problem with your setup, not the software" even when "my setup" was literally setting up their project using their documentation (docker compose files).
That is how developers treat people with questions that they deem "stupid."
It turns out their documentation was wrong and some environment variable that they said was optional, was not actually optional and the service would go into a reboot loop without it. I figured that out no thanks to the devs.
Update your issue with a pull request fixing the documentation. When you're doing things on github, 99.999% of your audience is the general public, not the maintainer, because they will find your issue and solution through search engines.
Agreed. I may not want to mix my discord identity with whatever project I'm looking at. I especially don't want to mix my personal online identity with my professional identity. I post too much politics for that.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It's still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I'll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for "free", will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It's been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it's doing to indexable information and it's only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight...
I'm unfamiliar with Directional Chat outside of things like VRchat, how that work if you're not manipulating your position in space relative to other users?
tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn't be used for documentation in place of forums though.
Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I'm not so sure about documentation though.
Of course an IRC chat won't be used for documentation, I meant for general chatting and support. Also I didn't know that, hopefully I'll be able to replace the absolutely proprietary discord with it.
Discord is better than IRC in any way except available clients, while also doing voice/video chat rooms so it replaced Teamspeak/Mumble. With the additional (at first) paid streamers and being free it took off especially with younger audiences. I remember how terrible Skype was and Discord just worked.
Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don't want all their stuff centralized to Discord's servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.
I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they're going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they'll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that's where everyone is.
That's absolutely not to say that it's a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.
I may be getting old, but I think D*scord (I'm all for cencoring it like a slur) isn't any more simple than a phpBB or something similar was. Quite the opposite actually, at least for any user trying to navigate the the darn thing.
Maybe navigating is the wrong term. It's just impossible to find stuff relevant to me on discord. On any given larger server, there may be a few channels I could be interested in - but they are just a single chat log, often with lots of off-topic spam, and many different people having almost separate discussions at the same time. On any given larger phpBB, stuff is mostly separated into different threads with all the off-topic posts being delegated to a single thread. It's better searchable and better organized.
What even is "relevancy"? Their search is just a search by matching keywords. There isn't a magic algorithm discord uses. Every time I had an issue with some sort of bug or function I just search for specific keywords and 9/10 times I find something. On the odd-chance I don't then I'll behave like a human being and ask. I just don't get what's wrong with that? You can already limit those keyword searches with specific constraints so you don't get much noise.
What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.
If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it's open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.
Element X for iOS, all right! Seemed to sync in ~5 Mississippi (~seconds) just now after setting it up when you first commented. Still some issues but seemingly better. Thanks!
I've tried to use matrix... Is there a good matrix client? Like, one with admin commands? Maybe I just didn't "get" it, but it seemed not even yet half baked.
I will never understand "forums are best". I've tried, but they are worse in just about every aspect compared to any other communication system I've seen.
The good thing about forums is that, once a problem is addressed, the solution remains there and is indexed by search engines for everyone to see. You can say anything about forums, but I doubt you never fixed some issue by looking at some old forum thread, without even having to bother anyone.
I have definitely solved the odd issue from forums... but only because forums were the only thing available. Reading through them is still a chore and a half. Especially when 90% of the posts are "has anyone found a solution for this yet" ad nauseum that you still have to scroll through to eventually (maybe) find the page with the post you actually need.
I may just be bad at forums, but that's been my experience with them for the last 20+ years.
If you want to learn from a number of car enthusiasts how to address one specific error code with one specific model of car, is there anything better than finding a five page long forum thread and reading a few dozen posts about it from the last few years?
So like... "Forums are a good communication technology for modern use" and "have you ever found a solution in a forum" are different things.
As a counterexample, I've had more luck finding weird ass computer hardware issue solutions by appending 'reddit' to a search string than just about anything else. On the other hand I've wasted hours and hours on forum threads that go nowhere, with a million dead ends, and terminates in "see this other thread for the actual answer" and then that thread is archived or otherwise inaccessible.
How does everyone feel about the "isolation" of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.
I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.
No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows
Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
and so many people are already searching for solutions to problems and cant find them, because they are locked away on discord.
I fucking hate it.
and its only gonna get worse with the years to come, as more data is centralized in discord and locked forever away from search engines, or worse, lost with the discord gets deleted or if the company goes under.
and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.
as annoying as havin all the answers on reddit was, at least they popped up in a search engine so you could find an answer to what your problems were.
and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.
Exactly. The problem is admins encourage it to be used for technical discussion as there are channels dedicated to that. And Discord has picked up on the need for structured discourse and have reinvented forums, just shittier and more closed.
The way to prevent all this information going into a black hole is for admins to stop encouraging Discord for this kind of usage, in addition to users moving to more open alternatives. Godot for example is moving in the right direction. It has recently opened a shiny new Discourse instance, now the only thing that's left is to burn the Discord forum with fire.
I can't wait until Discord have to start charging for features that are currently free (since they have to be profitable eventually), projects using it freak out about it, and end up switching to a different closed-source hosted system that'll do the same thing years later. It already happened with OSS projects using Slack that migrated to Discord. People just don't learn from the past.
It's actually quite worrisome, many projects exclusively have their troubleshooting or support on Discord now what's going to happen years down the road when all those Discord servers have closed or no longer active and the invite links expire this is going to be a vast knowledge base that's just lost to the world
No, there was MSN in the 70s but communication was made through a machine called Microtron. They are largely lost to the world due to being made from degradable PCB plates.
Another way to think about this is that those projects that have a more structured approach to documentation have a better chance at lasting longer, attracting more contributors, and making more lasting impacts
If it's open source and the license allows it, I wouldn't consider that stealing. If a fork gets more popular than the original, then it either addresses a major missing feature of the original or is simply more active. If this displeases the original dev, they can hopefully work it out with the maintainers of the fork. This is a feature of FOSS, not a bug.
If you host a forum, you can easily access the database to move threads into some kind of archive if you no longer want to host it. It could also be moved to another server. Stuff like that.
Using a proprietary service instead is just a bad idea.
best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what's that? you're looking for a fix to an issue you're having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we've already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
I think we fixed that for someone a few months ago, maybe you can scroll back and find it. I think the guys handle was user-something, might have been around May...
Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don't have it? Well, I'm sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!
Step 3: Run " program name" and .... "insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens"
Step 3 again: When you run it, get error "k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can't fix this"
Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it's 12 dependency hadn't been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.
This is why I like Docker. It's basically "works on my machine" as a service.
Similarly, I'm starting to really like dev containers. They're Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.
I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.
There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it's really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.
Maybe it's a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.
LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there's things like myst markdown.
Both are powerful tools, though with different strengths as you describe. I was thinking more with automation in mind. But regardless, anything is better than a discord server. Even .txt documentation!
I personally don't like LaTeX for documentation because it doesn't benefit much from advanced features of LaTeX, while being more difficult to read/write than Markdown.
Discord is great for building a community because it's the defacto chat service for communities. It replaced IRC and does that quite well. Having a place to casually chat with people more invested in the project has its advantages.
Now I really dislike it if they think discord can replace a wiki. Iirc discord added a wiki-like feature a while ago and it's terrible because it's not indexable by search engines.
I think you give Discord too much credit even with that. They're closed source and have very little openness with their data. We have no clue how they store and archive our data and conversations, or what they do with it. I don't think the open source community should trust Discord an inch.
I'm really hoping an open source alternative starts gaining traction.
A agree with everything you just wrote. Discord is the platform of choice for many projects because most people are already there, so it increases engagement (and often enough some people actually ask for an official discord).
I personally prefer projects to use matrix, despite all it's faults. Some already do.
It's not really about the tools, we have plenty of tools, plain text, markdown, latex, web pages. Putting content to readable format is the easy part.
The hard part is knowing what to put down and how to organize it, and making sure that your documented explanations are actually understandable.
Particularly when you want to get traction going you might really want conversations to help you understand where the project needs fixing versus how documentation needs fixing and get a sense for what documentation might be helpful.
Imo this kind stuff probably because these "dev" having safe space on those discord servers rather than using something properly setup site/forum.
Heck you can make your own documentation using github/gitlab built in wiki or if you want something fancier, setup a site using JAMstack/static site generator, pick suitable theme then use gh page to host it.
I even more hate this stuff when the files is gated inside discord server, dude out of all possible file hosting services why the heck you would use discord?
Not exactly the same thing, but the xone (XBox One controller driver for Linux) project disabled Issues on Github and uses a Discord server instead. Which is stupid as heck, because I'm not going to join a Discord server just to check if someone has already encountered the same issue as me.
It's generally nothing big enough to have heard of unless you're looking into whatever niche it fills.
Only example that comes to mind is mechanical keyboard stuff. For some of the smaller / one-off designs there was a habit of "if you need troubleshooting, here's a discord link" instead of even minimal documentation. For "standard" stuff that used the same lil microcontrollers as everything else just a minor annoyance, but saw it with ones that used custom / no microcontroller too, where even a "you need X diodes, Y sprockets, etc" would've been nice.
Like OP tend to see it and move on and forget about it because it's not worth it. The few times I really wanted to get some service running on a raspberry pi or arduino or whatever and tried the discord was a handful of 'regulars' swapping memes that were annoyed I wasn't intimately aware of their codebase.
I've only got anecdotal stories but I have heard from my friends that ROM hack projects do this and I personally don't get it. If it’s to hide from the big N, Discord won’t back you there. Just teach your users how to use patch files instead.
TrueCharts (third party app repository for TrueNAS) does this and it drove me crazy until I eventually gave up and moved everything to Docker. Lack of serious documentation was just one of the many reasons.
Speaks to the fact that we apparently need better and new alternatives or make current tools easier to use.
Certain aspects of discord seem to resonate with people (unfortunately...).
Man pages are great as mentioned, but maybe not as accessible to some people. Are there tools to generate more convenient resources (e.g. wikis) from that? Similar to how generating technical documentations from (structured) code comments.
A discord server with absurd amounts of over emphasised text, making nothing stand out, filled with emojis and broken up into different messages and sections at the exactly worst places for legibility.
No messages are answered in any channel, and you get amazing sense of all of the technology we have to communicate but zero ability to use it.
This was/is my main gripe with Beyond All Reason (open source rts game) there is no wiki or forums - for an outsider it looks like 98% of all development talk is done in discord.
Though they do have a good basic knowledge base on their website about the game units and mechanics (but I would love dedicated wiki).
I once dm’d the maintainer of an open source project who got kind of upset at me for not posting an issue in GitHub. I got it, it made sense and the guy explained that it was all about visibility.
Any of the modern forum systems (Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB) is fine as long as it works. Previous-gen forum systems (SMF, phpBB, MyBB, Vanilla, etc) are fine too.
This is often done by people while the project is unstable. No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.
The first doc you write is the FAQ and let it handle the common requests -- no need to 'live' in discord. Locating that where more people can see it is normally obvious.
I don't think a proprietary forum that requires an email address to view information is equivalent to lemmy. It's publicly accessible, open source, and can be federated. Matrix still requires some kind of account to view information if I remember correctly.
Sure, but that’s not the only problem with discord as a documentation. I’d argue, from a practical standpoint that that’s not even really a big problem. The problem is that a stream of random conversation, sprinkled with memes and jokes, with multiple parties having a chat is the absolute possible worst way to find information (and it’s not even guaranteed to be there if someone hasn’t asked; or maybe someone asked, but never got answered)
While I think its a huge deal to require email addresses for publically accessible information, the rest is true. Although, upvotes and and different posts can help cut a lot of that crap. Also offers the ability to be indexed. I personally still throw the word reddit at the end of a search if I really can't find anything and one of the top comments usually has what I need. I agree though, not perfect or optimal for the task, just better than discord.
It's possible to view matrix rooms without an account, but it has to be supported by the server as it has to load the conversation history from other servers over federation before showing it. I'm not sure about how long this currently takes.
I think the key is whether it's indexable by search engines and can be archived by archive.org. Any chat service fails miserable at this and is thus not acceptable for documentation.
The problem is the fact that the documentation exists solely as a series of what are effectively chat messages, not what platform those chat messages are hosted on. Markdown files or bust.
you can't honestly be saying that there are no issues with hosting documentation/support for a project exclusively on discord as opposed to a classic forum or wiki.
even ignoring the issues that you are dismissing (and would not exist on a better suited platform), the people using the discord server do not own it. discord servers have no backup functionality. what happens when an admin goes rogue or gets hacked etc? what happens when people get tired of discord for the next chat app?
you shouldn't have to use a burner email to download a videogame mod or view documentation for an open source project.
There are issues of course. I’m just of the view that answering questions and giving support to a project is perfectly fine on discord because of incredibly fast response times.
As a developer you really only have bandwidth for maybe one or two methods of communication until you get stretched far too thin. Discord combines threads and irc chats into one. That is incredibly productive from a support standpoint.
To me this is nothing different than asking someone to join an irc server for technical help. Most of the irc servers I followed no longer exist but the projects are still fine and they’ve managed. If anything it’s better because you actually have a search feature.
i can understand your point of technical support, but what the op is calling out is when the only source of docs/support are discord.
i've had multiple experiences firsthand where I needed basic information about a piece of software that really should have just been on a readme or a wiki or something. instead my only option was to repeatedly ask a discord tech support channel and wait for someone who cares/knows about my question to actually answer me.
unless the options are limited, i'd rather simply pick a different solution than be forced to ask a busy discord channel for tech support.
Assuming you used the search feature on discord and no results came up, then you would be the first person to have ever asked that specific question to the developer. What makes you think that would actually be on a readme?
that's a good point - i might be letting my dislike for discord-as-a-wiki color my argument. i will say that i've had mixed results using the search - sometimes there are no results and sometimes there are plenty of irrelevant results. that's just what you get when basically hitting ctrl+f on who-knows-how-long worth of conversations instead of a purpose-made knowledge base.
i still think that a dedicated wiki/forum/repo available on the web for anyone with the url is far better suited to this purpose than discord is. discord is (arguably) good at being a chat app and its features aren't well tailored to being an easily navigable knowledge base. it feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops to have to join a server on the app i use to share memes with my college roommates to get help troubleshooting some software, or worse, to get access to the only official release of the software.
One of the stupidest trends of all time.
There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.
All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they're all just as bad for it.
Forums are where you'll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.
IRC at least you have text logs, but I agree.
we just need IRCv2 which should add chat history
How do you replicate a conversation like this in a IRC format?
https://www.advrider.com/f/threads/yamaha-wr250r-threadfest.936588/
Where's lemmy in regards to this?
Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it's threaded chats.
The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There's only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don't have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.
Look on old school forums for more "boomer hobbies" and it's ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There's car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!
Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you're shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.
In regards to the advrider comment, I don't find those ridiculously long-running threads all that convenient even though they are very useful. In your example the WR250R thread could have multiple subtopics being discussed at once in the same thread which I find frustrating.
For example, one guy might ask about tires and while that's being discussed another guy shows up asking about a big bore kit to make more power. Now there are two discussions happening at the same time and all I can do is view the thread chronologically. Then someone else shows up asking what oil everyone uses. Then someone new joins and says "Hey it's not possible to go back and read through all 2300 pages in this thread, what GPS are you all using?"
Like sure it's great that all the information is in that one thread but navigating through it only in chronological order can be super frustrating.
ADVRider is more of a "motorcycles in general" community and they try to limit the number of "subcommunities" (the Wr250 thread is in the Thumpers subcommunity), but a WR250 specific forum would have the discussions you're talking about split up.
The real solution though would be for a "Reddit style forum" to exist, where people can create new subcommunities however they want but to have it work like a forum instead of having threaded discussions that don't get bumped.
It actually drives me a little nuts that the 500 EXC-F thread is under Thumpers and not under Orange Crush. I get that it's a Thumper, but it's also a KTM. Why have a subcommunity based on engine type when all of the other engine types are in manufacturer-specific subcommunities?
I have been playing with the idea of a documentation.org. Something publicly funded (mostly through corporate and individual donations) that hosts technical manuals, white papers, guides, links to video tutorials (likely YouTube), FAQs, and even links to Discord and/or forums if they exist. Documents are public, free to index (no login to view), version controlled and held in perpetuity.
Obviously there is much more to it, but I think we have reached a point where something like it is required.
Aren't you basically describing readthedocs.io?
In the most technical terms, yes. The idea is not new or bizarre, but I see the same missteps repeated. For starters, the venture HAS to be a nonprofit with zero need for monetization. It will also need an inviting and easy to navigate user interface, accessible to the most nontechnical of users. You need to have a massive document library from multiple large players from day one, so you need to have a lot of contacts.
As I said it's not fully cooked, but I have spoken to a few people that could help me make it happen and they seemed open to it.
First thing that comes to mind is https://devdocs.io/about
Please consider a Patreon for doc review. I don't mean reviewing the doc against the project for fitness, as that's the job of each project to maintain and review their own docs; I mean by a technical writer who can de-localize (you only think I mean 'internationalize') the document and make it syntactically and logically correct against a generic, classic style guide.
The rising popularity of really bad errors is definitely turning me off from videos or documentation from a few sources with a lot of churn. It ruins the flow and it robs the assumption of authority which I'd argue is an important part of any documentation.
That is a good idea. I am fairly certain I could get funding and/or loaned resource time for English, Spanish, French and German, but crowd funding incentivized localization for other regions is brilliant.
Also I'd rather just have these things in the repository.
That's not the point. The point is that pointing to Discord means that there simply is no documentation.
I meant it more as a communication platform, not nescessarily for hosting documentation. Either way, using a forum is still pretty good alternative
I only want the documentation if you have to fax it to me
Whatever, Mr. Stallman.
The very fact that you have to ask and wait for an answer is an inconvenience.
one time, I asked and got a reply that it has been answered already, followed by a rant of why the hell people were asking the same question over and over again. IDK man, maybe you could update the installation instructions in your readme, then people wouldn't be flodding discord with the same question over and over again.
(it was regarding the project being incompatible with the newest version of a library and you had to manually install an older version to get it to work)
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
Documentation is bad enough. But it's worse when that's the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.
I can't understand why someone would want to do that. Maybe it's my help desk and IT upbringing, but for the few software tools and things I've made, if you chat me without filing a bug/issue on GitHub, I'm not gonna help you.
You can open an issue and say exactly that
Yep, and if it becomes a frequent request, add clarification to the readme / wiki / documentation.
Also, if you push folks towards issues, then they become indexable by search engines! So even if you have a solved problem you can at least find that... Discord? It's a black hole.
And then get it insta-closed withing 20 minutes saying that "this is a problem with your setup, not the software" even when "my setup" was literally setting up their project using their documentation (docker compose files).
That is how developers treat people with questions that they deem "stupid."
It turns out their documentation was wrong and some environment variable that they said was optional, was not actually optional and the service would go into a reboot loop without it. I figured that out no thanks to the devs.
Update your issue with a pull request fixing the documentation. When you're doing things on github, 99.999% of your audience is the general public, not the maintainer, because they will find your issue and solution through search engines.
Agreed. I may not want to mix my discord identity with whatever project I'm looking at. I especially don't want to mix my personal online identity with my professional identity. I post too much politics for that.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It's still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I'll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord
Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once
At least mods help mask all the other missing features
I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.
Discord is easily the better options among those choices.
I also can't think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you're just looking for a different thing. And that's okay.
Discord didn't, and still doesn't, require a download. Easier for people to pick up and easier to use on locked down computers.
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for "free", will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It's been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it's doing to indexable information and it's only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight...
I'm unfamiliar with Directional Chat outside of things like VRchat, how that work if you're not manipulating your position in space relative to other users?
Still manipulating space
In Axon you had a 2d plane with a picture you could drag around for where you were compared to everyone else
Images https://dolby-axon.en.lo4d.com/screenshots
Oh damn, thats cool! Never heard about that before.
RIP ventrilo and iirc 8(
My office has official chat (teams) and unofficial chat (Mattermost).
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a more casual discussion platform at work, which is what Mattermost had become.
At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.
Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was "calls" and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.
I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it's over complicated and feature creeped electron shite
Poor ventrillo. Not even a mention.
About as remembered these days as xfire
I feel ashamed. Good call out
tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn't be used for documentation in place of forums though.
Yea, I don't get the documentation stuff. It's like saying you'll use Google Chat history as your documentation.
Also good for organizing D&D.
well that is a multiplayer game and can be played online
Also good for casual socializing
I'm glad doujinstyle realized their mistakes and revived the website after some time as discord only.
You can create a discord server instantly with a handful of clicks for free. That's why.
Also, plenty of people use it for chat.
IRC > Discord
Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I'm not so sure about documentation though.
Of course an IRC chat won't be used for documentation, I meant for general chatting and support. Also I didn't know that, hopefully I'll be able to replace the absolutely proprietary discord with it.
Because it was easier to create a server in discord than ts3
Discord is better than IRC in any way except available clients, while also doing voice/video chat rooms so it replaced Teamspeak/Mumble. With the additional (at first) paid streamers and being free it took off especially with younger audiences. I remember how terrible Skype was and Discord just worked.
You don’t see its incredible simplicity as an advantage? That’s crazy
Simplicity? What fucking simplicity?
Seriously. My only interactions with discord are in ways that its replaced a simple web forum or IRC channel.
Well if that's your only exposure to it, then yeah I could see why you think it's not good.
But if you just want to hang out with a regular group of friends async and in voice chat, it's pretty damn good.
Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don't want all their stuff centralized to Discord's servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.
I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they're going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they'll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that's where everyone is.
That's absolutely not to say that it's a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.
Skill issue
Notepad is simple
Doesn't mean it's the best thing for documentation.
Actually... a readme file is probably better for documentation if you're really going for simple.
Sometimes a readme is all a project needs
I may be getting old, but I think D*scord (I'm all for cencoring it like a slur) isn't any more simple than a phpBB or something similar was. Quite the opposite actually, at least for any user trying to navigate the the darn thing.
Having used both, if you can somehow navigate a phbb board then you can easily navigate discord. The only thing stopping you is you.
Maybe navigating is the wrong term. It's just impossible to find stuff relevant to me on discord. On any given larger server, there may be a few channels I could be interested in - but they are just a single chat log, often with lots of off-topic spam, and many different people having almost separate discussions at the same time. On any given larger phpBB, stuff is mostly separated into different threads with all the off-topic posts being delegated to a single thread. It's better searchable and better organized.
What even is "relevancy"? Their search is just a search by matching keywords. There isn't a magic algorithm discord uses. Every time I had an issue with some sort of bug or function I just search for specific keywords and 9/10 times I find something. On the odd-chance I don't then I'll behave like a human being and ask. I just don't get what's wrong with that? You can already limit those keyword searches with specific constraints so you don't get much noise.
Counterpoint
Counter-counterpoint: He did eat something off his foot in front of an audience.
Would not have minded going the whole year without thinking about that.
I don't think "simplicity" is in a FOSS evangelist's vocabulary.
Using Discord to support code is like trying to teach sculpture over the telephone.
you don't see a tool being too simple for the problem at hand to be a problem in tool selection? that's also crazy.
simplicity is a double edged sword. convinence is nice, but the internet feels a lot more homogenous these days than in the past
If Discord is simple, why does the Discord app have 149 MB?
Of all the counterpoints you can give me against discord not being simple, you choose file size. Lmao. I’m not even gonna start
What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.
If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it's open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.
Open Element iOS
Start stopwatch
Syncing completes
Stop stopwatch
I have eight rooms added to the Matrix client! And Lemmings tell me it’s not Element, things are just slow.
Hoping they were wrong and I’m doing something wrong or this is totally atypical (e.g. connected to a really slow server).
FOSS is worth tradeoffs. Unindexable corporate software is regressive. But! Need some more speed over here! Individual chats/rooms are slow/buggy too.
try element x, on android it opens almost instantly. still in beta though
Ohh thought you misread and didn’t realize it’s available on iOS until someone else commented. Success, thanks!
That's the "historic matrix / element"
Use newer ones with sliding sync capabilities
Element X for iOS, all right! Seemed to sync in ~5 Mississippi (~seconds) just now after setting it up when you first commented. Still some issues but seemingly better. Thanks!
Is GitHub wiki still garbage or did they make it easy for anyone to contribute to?
It's a git repo you can make PRs into
wait since when?
Not sure, always has been since I've used them
https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-project-with-wikis/adding-or-editing-wiki-pages#adding-or-editing-wiki-pages-locally
still garbage
Correct me if Im wrong but only contributors can edit the wiki. If I remember correctly you cant just do a PR to the wiki. Which is sad.
It's possible to allow anyone to edit a Github wiki. But I'm not sure whether edit permission can be set per page or wiki wide.
I've tried to use matrix... Is there a good matrix client? Like, one with admin commands? Maybe I just didn't "get" it, but it seemed not even yet half baked.
I will never understand "forums are best". I've tried, but they are worse in just about every aspect compared to any other communication system I've seen.
People just like what they like, I guess.
The good thing about forums is that, once a problem is addressed, the solution remains there and is indexed by search engines for everyone to see. You can say anything about forums, but I doubt you never fixed some issue by looking at some old forum thread, without even having to bother anyone.
I have definitely solved the odd issue from forums... but only because forums were the only thing available. Reading through them is still a chore and a half. Especially when 90% of the posts are "has anyone found a solution for this yet" ad nauseum that you still have to scroll through to eventually (maybe) find the page with the post you actually need.
I may just be bad at forums, but that's been my experience with them for the last 20+ years.
Definitely use case specific.
If you want to learn from a number of car enthusiasts how to address one specific error code with one specific model of car, is there anything better than finding a five page long forum thread and reading a few dozen posts about it from the last few years?
So like... "Forums are a good communication technology for modern use" and "have you ever found a solution in a forum" are different things.
As a counterexample, I've had more luck finding weird ass computer hardware issue solutions by appending 'reddit' to a search string than just about anything else. On the other hand I've wasted hours and hours on forum threads that go nowhere, with a million dead ends, and terminates in "see this other thread for the actual answer" and then that thread is archived or otherwise inaccessible.
If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn't count.
Friendly reminder that open source projects don’t just need coders contributing to them.
Technical writers are very appreciated.
I'm trying to get my feet wet in FOSS by making small doc PRs since I'm way too scared to actually touch code. It's not fun, but it is satisfying.
How does everyone feel about the "isolation" of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.
Hosting documentation on Discord is like hosting it on IRC.
While a useful tool in its own right, it's entirely the wrong choice for this job.
I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.
No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows
Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.
It's a good thing discord saves all your data. Thanks discord
Well, we left reddit for beginning to plant a walled garden, so...
I'd say we left to plant a community garden. Anyone can see it, Anyone can join or start their own.
If it’s indexable it’s not a walled garden
We left because the previous garden is getting walled and this one isn't.
Yeah... That's what I said...
Not clear if you talk about here or there I think
Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.
Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.
Search engines can not index discord.
archive can not archive discord.
Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.
Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.
This. There are so many OSS projects that are over-reliant on Discord and it will bite them in the ass in a few years.
and so many people are already searching for solutions to problems and cant find them, because they are locked away on discord.
I fucking hate it.
and its only gonna get worse with the years to come, as more data is centralized in discord and locked forever away from search engines, or worse, lost with the discord gets deleted or if the company goes under.
and no ones saying to not have a discord. Just use it for what its meant to be used as. Social interaction. And stop using it for what it very obviously isnt, which is a information repository.
as annoying as havin all the answers on reddit was, at least they popped up in a search engine so you could find an answer to what your problems were.
Exactly. The problem is admins encourage it to be used for technical discussion as there are channels dedicated to that. And Discord has picked up on the need for structured discourse and have reinvented forums, just shittier and more closed.
The way to prevent all this information going into a black hole is for admins to stop encouraging Discord for this kind of usage, in addition to users moving to more open alternatives. Godot for example is moving in the right direction. It has recently opened a shiny new Discourse instance, now the only thing that's left is to burn the Discord forum with fire.
I can't wait until Discord have to start charging for features that are currently free (since they have to be profitable eventually), projects using it freak out about it, and end up switching to a different closed-source hosted system that'll do the same thing years later. It already happened with OSS projects using Slack that migrated to Discord. People just don't learn from the past.
It's actually quite worrisome, many projects exclusively have their troubleshooting or support on Discord now what's going to happen years down the road when all those Discord servers have closed or no longer active and the invite links expire this is going to be a vast knowledge base that's just lost to the world
This is why going back to the moon is so hard, when msn groups closed back in the early 1970s we lost alot of very precious knowledge.
Is this a joke?
No, there was MSN in the 70s but communication was made through a machine called Microtron. They are largely lost to the world due to being made from degradable PCB plates.
Yes, obviously.
Everyone knows the moon isn't even real.
That's why FOSS ends up forking and forking
Imagine "stealing" a project just because you can write sensible documentation.
Another way to think about this is that those projects that have a more structured approach to documentation have a better chance at lasting longer, attracting more contributors, and making more lasting impacts
Is it stealing if it's been dead for 30 years? Or is it modernizing it?
What? We are talking about discord documented software.
If it's open source and the license allows it, I wouldn't consider that stealing. If a fork gets more popular than the original, then it either addresses a major missing feature of the original or is simply more active. If this displeases the original dev, they can hopefully work it out with the maintainers of the fork. This is a feature of FOSS, not a bug.
I see your point, but couldn't you say the same thing about any forum?
"What happens when the forum shuts down? All threads discussing issues gone forever"
If you host a forum, you can easily access the database to move threads into some kind of archive if you no longer want to host it. It could also be moved to another server. Stuff like that.
Using a proprietary service instead is just a bad idea.
The web is on archive at least
Nope - cached/archived versions will continue to exist
What the fuck happened to README.md.
Or man pages.
Or readme.txt.
Or a goddamn wiki.
best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what's that? you're looking for a fix to an issue you're having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we've already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
I think we fixed that for someone a few months ago, maybe you can scroll back and find it. I think the guys handle was user-something, might have been around May...
Reading this made me feel a bit of anxiety
Opened a discord link for info the other day...looked like a fucking Las Vegas casino. The.fuck.
How to install:
Step 1: git clone website
Step 2: run dependency install script
Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don't have it? Well, I'm sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!
Step 3: Run " program name" and .... "insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens"
Step 3 again: When you run it, get error "k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can't fix this"
Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it's 12 dependency hadn't been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.
This is why I like Docker. It's basically "works on my machine" as a service.
Similarly, I'm starting to really like dev containers. They're Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.
I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.
Well now I need to learn all about this.
YUP that's so relatable especially with ai-related projects because theyre all on python
If it's not search indexable it can go eat dirt
Never clicked on one of those Discord links, never will.
There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it's really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.
Maybe it's a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.
LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there's things like myst markdown.
Both are powerful tools, though with different strengths as you describe. I was thinking more with automation in mind. But regardless, anything is better than a discord server. Even .txt documentation!
I personally don't like LaTeX for documentation because it doesn't benefit much from advanced features of LaTeX, while being more difficult to read/write than Markdown.
Discord is great for building a community because it's the defacto chat service for communities. It replaced IRC and does that quite well. Having a place to casually chat with people more invested in the project has its advantages.
Now I really dislike it if they think discord can replace a wiki. Iirc discord added a wiki-like feature a while ago and it's terrible because it's not indexable by search engines.
I think you give Discord too much credit even with that. They're closed source and have very little openness with their data. We have no clue how they store and archive our data and conversations, or what they do with it. I don't think the open source community should trust Discord an inch.
I'm really hoping an open source alternative starts gaining traction.
A agree with everything you just wrote. Discord is the platform of choice for many projects because most people are already there, so it increases engagement (and often enough some people actually ask for an official discord).
I personally prefer projects to use matrix, despite all it's faults. Some already do.
I've not heard of matrix before. Looking it up, it looks pretty cool. Kind of a terrible name tbh.
It's not really about the tools, we have plenty of tools, plain text, markdown, latex, web pages. Putting content to readable format is the easy part.
The hard part is knowing what to put down and how to organize it, and making sure that your documented explanations are actually understandable.
Particularly when you want to get traction going you might really want conversations to help you understand where the project needs fixing versus how documentation needs fixing and get a sense for what documentation might be helpful.
LaTeX produces PDFs, which are hard to read on small devices. Just write a website.
LaTeX can produce .html with links. It can litterally generate an entire documentation website.
Imo this kind stuff probably because these "dev" having safe space on those discord servers rather than using something properly setup site/forum.
Heck you can make your own documentation using github/gitlab built in wiki or if you want something fancier, setup a site using JAMstack/static site generator, pick suitable theme then use gh page to host it.
I even more hate this stuff when the files is gated inside discord server, dude out of all possible file hosting services why the heck you would use discord?
Gates turn with money. That is the why.
I have been lucky and haven’t seen this. What a horrible thing to do.
I haven't seen this either. OP, you got a link? I'd love to see what kind of software is doing this.
Not exactly the same thing, but the xone (XBox One controller driver for Linux) project disabled Issues on Github and uses a Discord server instead. Which is stupid as heck, because I'm not going to join a Discord server just to check if someone has already encountered the same issue as me.
It's generally nothing big enough to have heard of unless you're looking into whatever niche it fills.
Only example that comes to mind is mechanical keyboard stuff. For some of the smaller / one-off designs there was a habit of "if you need troubleshooting, here's a discord link" instead of even minimal documentation. For "standard" stuff that used the same lil microcontrollers as everything else just a minor annoyance, but saw it with ones that used custom / no microcontroller too, where even a "you need X diodes, Y sprockets, etc" would've been nice.
Like OP tend to see it and move on and forget about it because it's not worth it. The few times I really wanted to get some service running on a raspberry pi or arduino or whatever and tried the discord was a handful of 'regulars' swapping memes that were annoyed I wasn't intimately aware of their codebase.
Troubleshooting I could see being in discord. But it shouldn't be the only option.
I got the feeling this is mostly niche stuff or very new developers that don't have GitHub experience.
You can integrate GitHub issues with discord. I imagine similar integrations exist with gitlab
I've only got anecdotal stories but I have heard from my friends that ROM hack projects do this and I personally don't get it. If it’s to hide from the big N, Discord won’t back you there. Just teach your users how to use patch files instead.
TrueCharts (third party app repository for TrueNAS) does this and it drove me crazy until I eventually gave up and moved everything to Docker. Lack of serious documentation was just one of the many reasons.
using discord for documentation is like using excel for a database
It's way worse. At least Excel lets you do database-like stuff. Discord is unusable for long-form posts or any info you want to keep long term.
still worse They own everything you write on discord
Speaks to the fact that we apparently need better and new alternatives or make current tools easier to use.
Certain aspects of discord seem to resonate with people (unfortunately...).
Man pages are great as mentioned, but maybe not as accessible to some people. Are there tools to generate more convenient resources (e.g. wikis) from that? Similar to how generating technical documentations from (structured) code comments.
I mean, tldr exists but not for troubleshooting.
I agree with the point you make, we definitely need a more unified and better place for this.
A discord server with absurd amounts of over emphasised text, making nothing stand out, filled with emojis and broken up into different messages and sections at the exactly worst places for legibility.
No messages are answered in any channel, and you get amazing sense of all of the technology we have to communicate but zero ability to use it.
Not sure if everyone here knows the difference between documentation and discussion.
Name and shame!
This was/is my main gripe with Beyond All Reason (open source rts game) there is no wiki or forums - for an outsider it looks like 98% of all development talk is done in discord.
Though they do have a good basic knowledge base on their website about the game units and mechanics (but I would love dedicated wiki).
I once dm’d the maintainer of an open source project who got kind of upset at me for not posting an issue in GitHub. I got it, it made sense and the guy explained that it was all about visibility.
Except if they did, they would be complained at for "harassment"
It's not my favorite option. But at least use Discourse.
Any of the modern forum systems (Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB) is fine as long as it works. Previous-gen forum systems (SMF, phpBB, MyBB, Vanilla, etc) are fine too.
Fork it, clean it up, post it in their discord.
There seems to be some projects that allow indexing of discord. This should be encouraged more https://nextjs-forum.com/ is open sourced on GitHub.
Also stumbled on this the other day https://www.answeroverflow.com/
That’s only microsopically better than just discord. A (shitty, but somehow popular) chat service is not documentation, even if it’s indexed.
This is often done by people while the project is unstable. No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.
It shouldn't be done at all. If you're updating discord, you're writing something. That something should be, at the bare minimum, in a README file.
If you can't be bothered with Markdown, just do text.
I've never encountered this in the wild so I can't say for certain why a FOSS project would choose to do this.
Maybe they are trying to get more people on their server?
Discord uses a subset of Markdown for message formatting, so they'll be writing it regardless
And when the project is stable, they don't care to document it, either.
The first doc you write is the FAQ and let it handle the common requests -- no need to 'live' in discord. Locating that where more people can see it is normally obvious.
Sounds like a project I don't want to use until it finishes baking.
Not the dascord!!
Not the Dwildcardscord!!!
What if it is linked to foss social media like Lemmy and matrix ?
that's also pretty problematic, the very same way as discord, no difference just because it's ✨matrix✨ or ✨lemmy✨
edit: words
I don't think a proprietary forum that requires an email address to view information is equivalent to lemmy. It's publicly accessible, open source, and can be federated. Matrix still requires some kind of account to view information if I remember correctly.
Sure, but that’s not the only problem with discord as a documentation. I’d argue, from a practical standpoint that that’s not even really a big problem. The problem is that a stream of random conversation, sprinkled with memes and jokes, with multiple parties having a chat is the absolute possible worst way to find information (and it’s not even guaranteed to be there if someone hasn’t asked; or maybe someone asked, but never got answered)
While I think its a huge deal to require email addresses for publically accessible information, the rest is true. Although, upvotes and and different posts can help cut a lot of that crap. Also offers the ability to be indexed. I personally still throw the word reddit at the end of a search if I really can't find anything and one of the top comments usually has what I need. I agree though, not perfect or optimal for the task, just better than discord.
It's possible to view matrix rooms without an account, but it has to be supported by the server as it has to load the conversation history from other servers over federation before showing it. I'm not sure about how long this currently takes.
I think the key is whether it's indexable by search engines and can be archived by archive.org. Any chat service fails miserable at this and is thus not acceptable for documentation.
Can Lemmy be searched effectively?
The problem is the fact that the documentation exists solely as a series of what are effectively chat messages, not what platform those chat messages are hosted on. Markdown files or bust.
Anyone who does this should be blacklisted entirely
Is this related to Egalu?
Ah yes first world problems. The issue here is checks notes refusal to create a discord account on a burner email and use a search bar. Omg so scary
Discord is trash for reading just about anything
you can't honestly be saying that there are no issues with hosting documentation/support for a project exclusively on discord as opposed to a classic forum or wiki.
even ignoring the issues that you are dismissing (and would not exist on a better suited platform), the people using the discord server do not own it. discord servers have no backup functionality. what happens when an admin goes rogue or gets hacked etc? what happens when people get tired of discord for the next chat app?
you shouldn't have to use a burner email to download a videogame mod or view documentation for an open source project.
There are issues of course. I’m just of the view that answering questions and giving support to a project is perfectly fine on discord because of incredibly fast response times.
As a developer you really only have bandwidth for maybe one or two methods of communication until you get stretched far too thin. Discord combines threads and irc chats into one. That is incredibly productive from a support standpoint.
To me this is nothing different than asking someone to join an irc server for technical help. Most of the irc servers I followed no longer exist but the projects are still fine and they’ve managed. If anything it’s better because you actually have a search feature.
i can understand your point of technical support, but what the op is calling out is when the only source of docs/support are discord.
i've had multiple experiences firsthand where I needed basic information about a piece of software that really should have just been on a readme or a wiki or something. instead my only option was to repeatedly ask a discord tech support channel and wait for someone who cares/knows about my question to actually answer me.
unless the options are limited, i'd rather simply pick a different solution than be forced to ask a busy discord channel for tech support.
Assuming you used the search feature on discord and no results came up, then you would be the first person to have ever asked that specific question to the developer. What makes you think that would actually be on a readme?
that's a good point - i might be letting my dislike for discord-as-a-wiki color my argument. i will say that i've had mixed results using the search - sometimes there are no results and sometimes there are plenty of irrelevant results. that's just what you get when basically hitting ctrl+f on who-knows-how-long worth of conversations instead of a purpose-made knowledge base.
i still think that a dedicated wiki/forum/repo available on the web for anyone with the url is far better suited to this purpose than discord is. discord is (arguably) good at being a chat app and its features aren't well tailored to being an easily navigable knowledge base. it feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops to have to join a server on the app i use to share memes with my college roommates to get help troubleshooting some software, or worse, to get access to the only official release of the software.
Well that was a trash take.
If Discord suspects that you’re using a temporary e-mail, they will demand your phone number.
Never happened to me once but I understand if you don’t want to use it for that reason