Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community | Hacker News Reader

Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community

mooreds.com

1,631 pointsgk1671 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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

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

It won't get better if we keep caving.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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 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.

Mailing lists!

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.

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...

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.

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?

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

vBulletin is still available, isn't it?

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!

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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

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

> 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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

>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...

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.

> 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?

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.

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

Gitter FTW. I don't know why Gitter missed for chat. It's crawlable by Google.

better idea, an easier way to convert certain conversations into forum post.

I built a zap to store off slack conversations to google sheets (for a slack I joined a few years ago, where I would also notify the user I was going to do this).

But yes, an automated solution would be great.

Still doesn't deal with question quality though. When I am writing a forum question, I spend more time making it a good post than when I just toss out a slack q.

Is there a way to transcribe Discord comunity chat into php forum talk?

Running a Discord "server" is a lot easier than running a forum.

Most paid forums suck (they try hard to not look like forums, which also makes them not usable like forums).

The alternatives are PHP (why are they all PHP?!) open-source dumps you get to install on an Apache node yourself. Or you can get a generic VPS and use tools like softaculous to set up the forum app. Most of these projects don't come with CAPTCHA out of the box, or proper GDPR compliance, or other things you'll want.

That all said, running a forum is DEFINITELY worth it, and your customers will thank you (if not in actual words, in traffic).

What about an issue-only GitHub public repo?

Xenforo is excellent forum software.

you could even write documentation for your product and publish it as either HTML or PDF files.

I just have to agree with this.

Does anyone remember phpBB?

The title makes me want to respond with "OK boomer". I'm glad I read it though.

This is a great write up about community building on asynchronous, public forums vs private, synchronous chat.

I notice IRC avoided a mention here though, but it suffers the same problems as discord (namely not being searchable)

Thanks for visiting

i think this is a valid use-case for web3. wallet addresses avoid the PII implications that I’ve seen a lot of people mention.

So what's everyone's favourite forum software? Which of the many packages out there would actually be suitable to replicate the usability of Slack/Discord, without making all of the messages disappear like in a black hole?

1) Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/

Looks pretty modern and also offers managed instances if you'd like, but i can't help but to feel that it's pretty JS heavy and there is perhaps too much whitespace, which makes navigating longer threads somewhat cumbersome. To me, it seems like a case of UI > UX, which is an upsetting trend that i've noticed ("make something pretty rather than something functional").

2) Flarum: https://flarum.org/

This one is perhaps a bit better in my eyes as far as the UX is concerned and seems to have actually been developed as a mobile first forum. It does have that modern look while at the same time being reasonably functional, and the idea of putting the forum structure tree in the sidebar actually works pretty well!

3) phpBB: https://www.phpbb.com/

Personally, this is my favourite from the "traditional" forum software, since it's really usable, it keeps a good information density, doesn't lose usability and isn't as JS heavy as any of the other alternatives. Also, there are plenty of plugins and even the default functionality provides you with most of the things that you'd like in a piece of forum software and the hardware requirements are pretty low.

As someone who runs a phpBB forum or two myself, the biggest pain is perhaps updating, since you run into the very same issue of never knowing whether an update will break something or not and you might have to manually alter some config files if things go sideways. Also, admittedly, the admin UX could be better, but i guess that's just the software showing its age.

That said, old is not necessarily always worse.

4) Simple Machines Forum: https://www.simplemachines.org/

To me, it looks like a slightly simpler alternative to phpBB, with similarly good readability, slightly lower information density, but overall a very similar look and feel to phpBB. Can't talk much about its features, but some people have recommended it in the past.

Also, in regards to the free plan memory limitations, has anyone here experimented with self-hosted IM solutions? Personally i'm running a Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/) instance which seems pretty nice and functional, for example, for a smaller software developer team, though others also have had good experiences with Mattermost (https://mattermost.com/) or other software.

Do yourself a favor and avoid SMF if possible. It "works", but has terrible code quality (prime example [1]) and the addon/module system operates by diffing the original PHP source file and then patching in the needed changes. As you can imagine, this quickly leads to a lot of issues when updating or using multiple addons.

[1] https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/blob/release-2.1/So...

Yes bring phpBB back.

ok boomer

After a long time spending my free time helping out in the C# discord before leaving due to extreme ego and staff cliques and then more recently the Vue discord and getting nothing but grief in return and zero thanks for the 4 years helping on the Vue discord after a couple of moderators unfortunately became jealous at my message count in comparison to them (yeah, immature as hell), I couldn't agree more.

What a waste of time that was. I, along with practically every other person helping out, would get little to no thanks.

A further frustration is the fact that the same poor questions get asked over and over and over it becomes totally demoralising. They don't google anything.

I would say the vast majority of "programming discord servers" are complete cringefests with people wildly incapable of helping others somehow with roles like "helper" and "moderator". It's exhausting. I think I prefer just talking to friends and spending time on smaller servers now. The above issues and people have worn down my good will and patience. It will take me a while to recharge.

When some 15 year old with a role like "Super Helper ++" starts trying to correct an experienced software developer, and then banning said software developer because they disagreed with them, something is very wrong. Unfortunately such scenarios are incredibly common, believe it or not.

The C# discord became a lot better after lloyd left due to his "extreme ego" lol.

"if it seems like it's everyone else, then it's probably you"

People say it's hard to create a forum, but for software projects there's one built right into Github - Github issues. Yet so many times I see Github issues answered with "We answered this in Discord. Go check there." Then there's other projects where they're super anal about opening any Github issue, yet are happy to answer the exact same question in Slack.

Github issues has really really great SEO. If you answer questions there, your users will find it.

Whats the best forum software out there?

We use nodebb and find it pretty good from a UX/functionality perspective.

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