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Comment by r_hoods_ghost | Hacker News Reader

Yep, doing documentation and support through a chat service designed for gamers with terrible search that means the same question is going to be asked over and over again and where most users behave as if they were 15 year olds because that is the prevailing social norm means I'm going to pass.

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I'm stuck with an open source project on Discord for a mix of developers, artists and casual users across a wide range of age groups. I'd love to migrate off but I honestly can't think of the right platform.

1. Lots of people like realtime chat. It's worth having something that fills that niche (the old "mailing list + IRC" combo used to work well)

2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX.

3. A "Stack Overflow" style site requires a lot of moderation and either annoys users for being too messy or annoys users for being too strict

4. I actually still have some fondness for Google Groups but Google's brand is too tainted for most people.

5. Nobody under 30 seems to use email any more so mailing lists are out but something that syncs with email is a must (reply notifications etc)

I am also hoping for something free but very easy to install. (SaaS with a free tier, one-click docker or similar). And easy on resources ideally (I guess $10/month for hosting is about our limit at the moment)

Yeah. I'm asking for a lot.

> 2. Forum software is usually fairly awful. I don't want to install some 15 year old pile of PHP with bad UX.

Isn't Discourse an answer to that?

Yes, can use Discourse for async, long-term communication. Or Flarum if you want something more modern feeling (but with a lot less features).

And then Matrix for real-time chat. Bridge it to IRC if you want. Search is not great in Matrix but sufficient for simple keyword searches.

I just checked out Flarum the other day, why is it more modern? I actually found Discourse is still much better. Flarum does not even have nested reply threads as far as I can tell, it's all flat and hard to read for any thread of replies.

I far prefer Discourse myself, and it is superior in useful features. "More modern" is mostly what I heard others saying in response to me recommending Discourse. Suppose it is a look&feel thing mostly, and personal preference. That said, you can customize Discourse quite extensibly.

i think element (matrix) could work for you. it can't do email notifications, but if you have the mobile client on your phone you can get push notifications.

Did you look at zulip? https://zulip.com/

I'm not convinced it's better than irc+proper mailing lists - but given that real users are stuck in awful mail clients (like web/Gmail or outlook) - mailing lists isn't a great option any more.

Main thing I miss from zulip is a proper weechat plug-in (like wee-slack) - although the official cli client isn't terrible - it's just not irc-like.

Why is something like Gmail an awful client and what does a great client have (or has not) that it doesn't (or does)?

Mutt/pine (or newer clients like sup/notmuch) are faster, handles quoting/threading better, allows decent keyboard operation and is workable with high-volume of email.

My biggest issue with Gmail (as someone who interacts with users of Gmail) - is that it generally breaks quoting and hides this from Gmail users with its magic conversation view.

Outlook(web) does atrocious top-quoting rendering it useless for mailing lists.

In general the web interfaces doesn't work well with hundreds/thousands of mails IMNHO.

They also tend to needlessly lean on html formatting rather than plain text - with things like "my replies in blue" - rather than just proper quoting.

Ed: in general I've just given up the idea that the average user has any hope of interacting well with email lists - which means such lists aren't useful for general discussion (but can still work for specialist groups like Linux kernel etc).

The conclusion being that one will need "something else" for a general audience.

Zulip might be a reasonable compromise.

>Outlook(web) does atrocious top-quoting rendering it useless for mailing lists.

The weirdly aggressive way people talk about top vs bottom quoting is probably one of the things turning new users away from mailing lists.

Maybe. I think the bigger problem is that there's no easy fix/recommendation to give new users; "stop using your propiatary group-ware that your company/organization pays for" isn't a great recommendation.

Gmail can't do basics properly like replying in the middle of a quoted text, etc. It shows you something relatively sensible, but sends completely garbled mess to the recipient.

Yeah, I don't quite get it. The problem with mailing lists is their fundamental design, not the clients for them.

Mailing lists aren't great, and neither is nntp. But mailing lists (and nntp) work fine with proper clients and some discipline/netiquette.

Sadly I don't think there is a reasonable way to introduce new users at this point - I'm not aware of any great gui clients that do the right thing; and AFAIK neither Gmail or o365/exchange work in a reasonable way with open standards (allow checking for when others are free; accepting/changing appointments etc) - so users are herded towards the semi-proprietary clients. (and interop across silos doesn't really work in a sensible way).

There are things like the d-lang forums that mix a decent web front-end and nntp (and mailman makes an effort for web+smtp) - but I'm not aware of anything that really works great, with a low barrier of entry and reasonably lets users participate across more than a handful of threads.

What about GitHub Discussions ? (https://github.com/features/discussions)

I am not seeing a lot of projects adopting it and I wonder why because it seems quite good to me

It's locked behind a proprietary service/account owned by a publicly-traded corporation, Microsoft, with shareholder value obligations. The other options listed in siblings can be self-hosted, are all open source, and some don't require a an account or at least support a form of decentralized identity.

I think NNTP+IRC is good, and you can have bridging to other services if desired (which is probably a good idea too). You should also make logs of the IRC; the IRC channel for my project has public logs.

Discourse and Flarum are even worse, in my experience.

However, having chat services does not substitute for having documentation; you should also have good documentation, too; you should not expect someone to only ask questions.

Mattermost? And all your chats are in Postgres so you can build all kinds of fun magic on top.

How about GitHub discussions? One open source library I depend on uses it to good effect. You could keep the Discord for realtime chat for stuff that should be realtime. Of course, you’d probably have to make effort to push support questions to GitHub. People would probably still ask questions there.

Have you tried Outverse?[1] It's a new startup aiming to solve this problem, with support for forum spaces, threads and more. I've been using it for some time now and would definitely recommend it! Makes it easier to save threads, common questions, etc and has a super intuitive interface overall. I'm looking forward to using it for my open source project, and it solves a lot of the problems I've had with current platforms.

[1] https://www.outverse.com/

Matrix? Assuming you don't want to host your own homeserver you can make a room/space on matrix.org

Would Reddit fit your bill?

In terms of functionality - in many ways: yes - but it's weird to throw users who don't use Reddit into that crazy jungle just to get support.

Nobody’s saying don’t use Discord. But that shouldn’t be the home of the documentation.

Well - I am kinda saying "don't use Discord" - at least except for specific cases where it's ephemeral nature isn't a liability. I personally wish I wasn't so tied to it.

Discourse

Discords text search is incredible though, It's still not a good platform for support but not because search is bad

> Discord's text search is incredible

Really? There's no way to do verbatim searches and it's "very" generous in deciding what it thinks you meant to search for. It's almost useless for searching technical posts (or anything when you need to disambiguate similar words)

The primary use case that we’re talking about is that someone has a common error, in which case they can put that error message into Discord search and read conversation about previous errors. Discord search is perfectly adequate for that use case.

The primary use case is actually googling the error, in which discord falls flat on it's face.

Every external chat room logs service I've seen has also had bad SEO, buggy, bad UI/UX, etc..

That's fairly close to my use case for which Discord fails miserably.

But let's not get stuck on this point. There's a dozen other reasons why Discord shouldn't be used for technical forums

I don’t love that projects use discord now, but I don’t hate it either. Beyond the crappy search, what other reasons make discord a bad fit for technical forums? What’s your preferred solution?

My question was driven by the fact I don't have a preferred solution that would suit both technical and non-technical users.

But as for why Discord is a bad fit - it's completely opaque to search engines, it requires an invite, it has a fairly complex UI and it's basically "unstructured chat". Threads are an afterthought and don't come close to giving any proper structure.

I want chat for people that, you know, want to chat - but structured posts with topics and categories are needed for any sane, long term knowledge-base.

People on chat (this goes for IRC as well) will continually ask the same questions and you will continually have to answer them again because there's no structure.

It’s far better than Slack’s search, which limits you to the last 10,000 messages unless you pay them a fee per member in your community.

This might change in the future as Discord tries to recoup their VCs' investment. See GitLab for a recent example.

GitLab is charging for metered compute minutes, which is hardly an unreasonable bargain for users who have been them for free for two years. Slack's feature-gating is disconnected from any unit economics - indeed, they actually do _store_ the messages prior to the most recent 10,000, but they just refuse to index them. The cost of that indexing is relatively minimal and does not scale linearly with number of users.

Doesn't matter what the technical justification is, it's a business move, not a tech move. It's about the customer's willingness to pay, and it looks like for Slack, companies are very willing to pay.

> But according to Butterfield, Slack is actually an acronym. It stands for: "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."

https://www.businessinsider.com/where-did-slack-get-its-name...

Being better than Slack’s search doesn’t make it good.

I actually don’t mind projects that use discord as their primary online community, but goddamn, discord’s text search is NOT amazing. Yes, it searches text and is likely fine for gaming / casual online communities. But man, it provides none of the utility I would expect a modern chat app’s search feature to have. Boolean operators, date ranges, wildcard matches, fuzzy matching, scoped searches (beyond just being able to specify a channel, like searching for a string in a user’s posts in a specific channel), etc. The subpar search functionally is a huge weakness, especially for communities like OSS where being able to meaningfully surface past comments / threads / solutions provides enormous value.

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