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Comment by nulbyte | Hacker News Reader

> I can't help but feel compelled to pause my current tasks and contribute wholeheartedly to this.

That is interesting to me, because I had the complete opposite take after less than a minute on the website. I actively avoid QuickBooks because I despise Intuit.

But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord.

Competing with QuickBooks means competing for business clients, yet I can't imagine a business forgoing real documentation for Discord.

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> 'support' link is a link to Discord

For a FOSS project targeting people who are comfortable using FOSS this seems entirely fine...desirable even. "We don't have money for phone staff who would put you on hold and only be reading off scripted responses anyway, but you can come chat directly with the leaders and maintainers of the software by chat".

Discord (and other non-indexable chats like Slack) is where conversations go to die and be hidden forever. FOSS and other "open" projects should be using something like Zulip, or even anything else, that can actually be indexed by Google and other search engines.

I'm a part of a few Discords, and questions are repeated over and over again, forever. People who answer the questions, get tired of answering the same thing and eventually stops helping people. In contrast, using Stack Overflow or anything else, people can search Google for answers and actually find it.

Personally I like Discourse. Similar to an old-school forum like phpbb, but with a neat and modern UI.

I know some of the guys that work there too, really cool people.

~~~Well, besides the whole thing about my previous comment that everything you write in Discord stays in Discord and is basically not findable unless you're already a part of the Discord. While phpbb (or any public forum really) is by default readable by anyone, so searching for questions let you find answers without having to sign in and join the forum.~~~

Edit: Misheard parent...

Discord and Discourse are two separate things.

Damn, of course, misread that... Thank you for catching my silly mistake :)

Discord really isn't acceptable as long as they require a phone number to sign in.

(not arguing that discord should be used for these kinds of projects, just an aside)

to my knowledge, this is is only an optional moderation feature on some servers, not a global policy - you can still use discord without an email address if the server rules are loose enough

People who are comfortable with Discord as a platform for support don't make purchasing decisions for accounting software.

Why don't they use IRC with public logs? Or a stack exchange style support wiki, so that it becomes documentation over time.

The last time I looked for quickbooks documentation, I just found some YouTube videos.

Support has been useless too.

As much as I don’t use discord at all, having a 50% chance of getting someone that understands internet banking to help troubleshoot internet banking would be compelling.

I support QuickBooks for smaller companies by calling tech support for them, YMMV.

Wait, you simply are a middleman? What percentage of the support can you provide without having to call Intuit yourself? Is this lucrative?

It can be a decent side business for an IT support contractor. Quickly you learn the biggest issues, and only really need to spend time on special scenarios.

This is like 90% of Enterprise IT work. Install some box, follow their directions, make sure the port is open on your firewall... call the vendor when it breaks. IT is so often just being the middle man.

Yet this is the middle man that brings in the business aspects, the context etc. Installing a product in a bank and at a soft ware vendor's can be dramatically different.

That's pretty standard for a lot of companies. IT log the calls with the supplier.

I think just having someone who acts as a gatherer of info, so Intuit aren't being sent junk tickets, means service is resumed much quicker. And that's worth paying for.

If the company is serious enough about competing with Quickbooks and solving a real customer problem, Discord is not going to cut it.

I'm curious. Is this a criticism of their support. Real time chat in general or just specifically discord?

Real time chat in general and discord in particular. Discord cannot be self-hosted, so any support message history will be completely reliant on the goodwill of discord. Another problem with using a chat channel for support (slack has the same problem) is searching for things you know are there but are impossible to find again.

so you want them to roll-out a discord like platform themselves?

And an ISP to host it on. As we know, if you don't self-host your ISP then you're beholden to the goodwill of a large corporation who could shut you down at any time.

what about the deep sea cables that run the internet, those can still be blocked by governments right?

No, I want knowledge-base style documentation and faqs. Something slightly better than this single question:

https://docs.bigcapital.ly/docs/faq

I see these as complimentary, knowledge base for search and self support. Email for well documented transactions or low priority questions. Slack/Discord to avoid making phone calls when looking for real people responses quickly. Phone for emergencies.

Presumably this would follow the pattern other big open source projects take, where other companies (who are experts on the software) host and/or support the software for a cost.

Seems like a brilliant way to choose your customers, actually. A great way to avoid Pareto rule type problems that suck away too much time. I could easily imagine that e.g. 200 "smart customers who need very little help" could be more profitable than 1000 who do, after a time v. money calculation.

Makes me think who's the customer here. Is this the engg team that's going to host it or the finance team who's the primary user of the product.

If the final user is finance, should the support be targeted towards them?

> But there is no way I would take a project like this seriously when the 'support' link is a link to Discord

I always felt that projects used discord-only as a way to signal that they don't want to deal with users.

Having interacted with Stripe's chat and email support, I have a similar feeling - their goal is to get me to go away instead of actually helping with my problem.

My first and only choice is their discord support, when that doesnt help I rather work around the problem than get stuck in their email limbo.

Your take doesn't make sense at all to me.

It's an open source project - their customers are going to be small businesses with small teams of technical people to maintain it. I don't think they're competing with QuickBooks at all. Why is Discord not a viable method of communication for these users?

This sort of armchair quarterbacking is why many people won’t open source things.

Instead of shitting on someone’s work, get involved and make changes. It’s easier and keeps people involved.

Maybe people don't because getting involved means dealing with a bunch of thin-skinned people who can't take a legit criticism, like "accounting software can't have support on Discord."

Do you want people to use it or to like you?

For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now, having an active server where the core contributors participate is the sign of a healthy project. Honestly looks better than a public Slack imho and it's where they'll get the most engagement from devs.

Discord is a serious thing now, I've seen enterprise products add support for Discord before Slack.

Free Slack tiers don’t allow searching beyond 10,000 messages so no one’s going to pick that over a free Discord server without such limitations.

Even this is no longer true - current free tier of Slack (as of a couple of months ago IIRC) is 90 days of retention, which for low-volume groups of users is even worse.

I think they retain it but you can't access it. One Slack I'm in activated the trial and everything was there and searchable.

There used to be a workaround where you can still access the full archive as an exported JSON document

Seems to be still available for "Workspace Owners/Admins and Org Owners/Admins" https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...

Gonna have to disagree with you. Most projects I interact act with are either on IRC or Matrix, or solely communicate through some type of git web instance.

Discord is actively hostile to users by randomly banning and/or phone-walling users, especially any browser or connection that cannot be fingerprinted well enough, and giving them no recourse at all, just saying "yep our automated system is working, bye". There's so many more awful things they do, just search this site to find lots more.

Hostile to users as you're describing it is just "dealing with spam at scale." I find it hard to fault a service for doing sucky things that every other large service eventually succumbs to out of necessity. I can't be on some high horse and demand this company somehow magically solve problems no one else has.

Anyone who figures out how to have pseudoanonymous identities that can't be endlessly minted to evade bans that doesn't involve aggressive fingerprinting will be the internet's favorite child overnight.

What about requiring a proof-of-work solution for every important request? This could make bots prohibitively expensive.

> For better or worse OSS communities organize on Discord now

OSS communities, yes. More and more FOSS communities are on Matrix, either using matrix.org or connecting their own instance to the network. FOSS projects using FOSS tools, and decentralized for that matter too.

It seems to be a one man show project, which I don't think is their fulltime gig since the contact me is discord.

Someone could fork the project and build on top of it to build a commercial project though.

For me, this is actually a common problem with lots of open source projects. They're hobby projects with no commercial support behind them.

It's a super good hobby project tho. If they invested in docs I think it would be onto a winner.

I did some integration work with QuickBooks online, and oh the horror! Simple things like reconciling transactions against a bank account couldn't be done via the supported API. There was basically no way to automate clicking on every single customer payment aside from scraping the website.

Bonus: the website screws up when you have thousands of transactions that need to be reconciled. I couldn't come up with a good test case as it seems to be some weird internal race condition.

In other words: I wholeheartedly welcome an open source project my business can build on.

You'd rather talk to a salesman than chat with the developers? Stripe at the beginning had a chatroom for support

No, I'd rather read the documentation than wait for a response to a question that should be addressed in the nonexistent documentation.

Interesting. I didn't realize they're behind the Argo project. Having second thoughts now.

What would support be instead, a phone hotline?

I think if you’re targeting developers, then Discord is fine.

If you’re targeting businesses, then you’d want a contact-us form at the bare minimum.

I'm a developer, and I find Discord to be a disorganized mess. I prefer a traditional support forum to Discord, and that's a pretty weak option.

And if you want to preach the virtues of FOSS of your product, you’d offer FOSS real-time communications as at least an option. Slap in IRC, an XMPP MUC, Matrix Space. You could bridge to (not from) Discord as a second-class option if it was deemed valuable, but shouldn’t be the primary host.

A phone is worse, but almost anything else is better: email, forms, old-school forums, discourse, github issues or discussions, etc...

Anything that isn't a walled garden.

A forum, hell even a subreddit would be better, at least it wouldn't require an account to view and is indexable.

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