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Black Holes of Information

duerrenberger.dev

59 pointsingve14 comments

This has frustrated me about Discord already.

Discussion that used to be "Googlable" in forums is now often locked way in semi private Discord channels, buried in long real-time conversation threads. And Discord's native search is barebones and awful.

That was an issue in IRC too, but I don't think people posted important announcements/info dumps in IRC like they do in discord. If they did, it would at least be quoted on a forum.

I have no problem with Github though. Its trivial to back up, open to search, has a good native search, and they have surprisngly resisted many bad incentives.

We have the same problem in business. I was in a meeting recently where someone suggested that instead of requirements decisions being required to be recorded in the relevant tickets, or in the internal wiki, that "such-and-such slack channel" be designated as the source of truth. I just about laughed my way out of the Zoom call. Yes, for every ticket someone picks up, they should just scroll forever or try to tease out with search whether literally anyone had ever opined about the topic, and whether that opinion was accepted as correct.

> This has frustrated me about Discord already.

The little kludges that various Discord communities implement to best try to address this is an interesting and frustrating little ecosystem of its own.

You have a gamut of solutions from "use search next time or you're banned" to "check the FAQ channel where moderators pin pertinent comments" to bots that look for keywords and automatically reply with the fix for a given issue (often a link to the pinned comment)

Is there an equivalent of irclog for Discord or Slack, or would using one violate their TOS? I remember seeing daily digests of IRC channel activity which was collected by a bot.

Not sure what you mean since Discord loads all chat history, and there are bots that copy statements from specific user groups and such.

Static HTML pages discoverable by search engines, each holding messages written over the course of one day, without having to use the client.

I hate to see this get so little attention. We need to keep working on searchability and persistence of information online.

> If you know any modern forum software (which isn’t Discourse), please let me know!

What's wrong with Discourse?

It's completely broken if you don't have JavaScript enabled, for starters.

https://i.ibb.co/Lpxzz2V/%20.gif

It takes up a lot of vertical screen space and the scrolling behavior is really annoying. I know, I know, pagination is old and crusty and no one uses it or whatever, but I do and it helps me navigate threads (especially long ones) a lot easier. It's the same problem as reading a long book on an ebook reader. Sure, if you're reading for pleasure, then an ebook reader is fine, but for reading something more technical, being able to go back to specific "checkpoints" is really important.

Comparatively, crusty old phpBB can display 4 posts in the same space that Discourse uses to display 1 and it has pagination. Yes, you can change the theme on Discourse to fix the overuse of vertical space, but the theme it ships with is going to influence how people theme their Discourse instance.

Try scrolling with their widget instead of the browser scroll bar.

You can bookmark or link to any point in the thread. Add /postnumber to the thread URL if you don’t want to manually grab it.

And there are some excellent condensed themes, CSS styles and user styles out there if you want that.

Not saying you have to like it, but there are easy solutions for those specific preferences, and overall, Discourse has been good for participation on old forums.

Author here. I mostly just dislike the feel of it, so it's much more a personal preference. I like the more old-school structuring of content, instead of the tag based approach. Not a big fan of the default theme, but that's something one can adjust. If you visit the official website, I can't really, even with a longer glance, see, that it can be self-hosted, which means that at some point the decision was made to push hosting options over the "100% open source discussion platform" as it's described on GitHub. And finally, I find it quite resource intensive and a bit cumbersome to host; you need Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and Redis, which might be okay for "maximum" scaling, but for the couple of hundred or thousand users per month, it's slightly overkill.

I think Discourse can be a great option, I just want to hear about other forum software.

Thanks for replying! I work on Rails applications so "forum software" sounded like something in my wheelhouse, hence the question. Admittedly, my mind went to a similar setup as Discourse so this helps me understand what a host might dislike about their software. I've used many phpBB forums in the past and I often find myself wondering why that UI seems to have fallen out of fashion so it interests me to consider building something myself.

It's not likely you'll see anything from me anytime soon (maybe eventually but that's a fuckton of work and I have a day job) but I have ideas of leveraging server-side rendering per the "don't make js required" comment and progressive enhancement in general. If I do build something like this my target browser would likely be Lynx[0]. Just consider it a pipe dream until you see my "Show HN" post.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

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