I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
I really miss the old school PHPBB forums which were "slower" and that was good for support from the vendor's point of view. Very few cases require real time staff chatting and available all the time. It seems to invite more trouble than its worth.
On the other hand for just browsing around I don't need to sign up at all, and I can stumble across interesting things through either a web search or perchance a link from elsewhere. With Discord neither is possible, because it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
Personally there are only a few forums I'm really actively participating in, but there are quite a few more I'm just happy to occasionally browse through, and quite a few more I just randomly stumble across while searching for information on whatever subject currently occupies me.
While having to sign up separately for every forum might be considered somewhat more of a hassle, personally I don't find it that annoying and in any case it's only every now and than that I actually feel the urge to actively contribute something.
The way Discourse (or Facebook groups for that matter) works on the other hand means that all the serendipity stuff of randomly stumbling across some interesting forum thread on a subject I'm interested in or a problem I'm having can't even happen in the first place because like I said it's all inaccessibly hidden behind a login wall.
So I'll gladly trade the "inconvenience" of separately run forums and even slightly annoying sign up procedures for being able to just casually browse through and being able to find them at all in the first place.
i found that discussions were more civil, trolls were quickly purged and it was difficult for them to rejoin due to this admin wall.
it created a nice garden effect against shill/ratioing where there is little to no barrier to creating mass number of accounts to impact opinions.
But the point of your complaint is that many communities have moved away from phpbb or similar type forums.