Either https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter or https://www.answeroverflow.com/about (I develop the second one)
192 karma · joined June 22, 2022
If you have any other feedback, please send it to me on Discord so I make sure I see it - thanks!
> Do name your application with something unique. Including one of the terms, "Stack" or "Exchange" or "Overflow" in your product name is generally okay.
It's a different enough product that I feel comfortable with it - Stack Overflow is only for programming while Answer Overflow is for all topics. Along with that Overflow is a pretty generic word and if you wanted to get super technical with it, the context I'm using the word in is "I have so many answers they're overflowing" while theirs is a reference to a programming term.
We'll see and I'm not a lawyer but given that their trademark guidelines allow it, I feel comfortable
https://discord.com/developers/docs/policies-and-agreements/...
> Subject to your compliance with the Terms, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-sublicensable, non-transferable, non-assignable, revocable license to access and use the APIs and Documentation we make available to you solely as necessary to integrate with, develop, and operate your Application
When you post on Discord, you grant them a transferable license to your content and that's one of the ways they use it
Disclaimer that it's probably more complicated than that and I'm a software engineer not a lawyer
- The API grants you essentially a sublicense to the data, since Answer Overflow is a bot going through the official API and following the ToS properly, that should cover it for any potential issues - Answer Overflow gets consent from users to use their messages https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...
For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well for indexing content so now the focus is “what else can we do to improve community support as a whole?”
As for self hosting, if you submit a PR for supporting it I’d be happy to get that merged but it’s not really a priority at the moment. The codebase is setup to be pretty easy to make a self hosted version though.
There's lots that have support channels though for programming libraries, for games, etc and having all of that content locked away can be really damaging.
One of the interesting things I've noticed is when a community for a more niche game / programming library joins Answer Overflow, they often shoot up to being top performers on the site which is great to see.
Along with that, not all channels are indexed, mainly just help channels. What's nice with this is it keeps that cozy feeling of a private place to talk, while helping more people find a community they will enjoy and keeping information accessible.
Long term, I'd like to implement forms of anti-abuse tools for communities to use so they can understand what the types of people who join their server from Answer Overflow are like. For example, if it turns out that 90% of the people who join are abusive, then it'd make sense for them to turn off indexing.
You could possibly make the argument that for the long term health of some communities, having indexed content helps to keep the community active
Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.
Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.
Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.
- Answer Overflow works on a consent basis for displaying messages (https://docs.answeroverflow.com/user-settings/displaying-mes...), while Linen does all the messages in a community. The consent system Answer Overflow has helps a lot with respecting user privacy while also getting content indexed.
- Linen appears to be building out a competitor to Slack & Discord while Answer Overflow is focused on building on top of those platforms, so we've got very different roadmaps. From what I can gather from the Linen roadmap, they're implementing things like voice chat, private channels, etc. Whereas with Answer Overflow some of the things I'm focused on is answer automation, tracking outdated answers, analytics for where to improve your docs etc
- Answer Overflow is pretty much only focused on Discord servers, it wouldn't be too hard to support both Slack and Discord but what's nice about focusing on Discord for now is it helps with our goal of being the best indexing tool specifically for Discord
- Global search (https://www.answeroverflow.com/search), you can search all Answer Overflow communities at the same time
The team at Linen have built out a great product though and it's cool watching them succeed with it!
For the weekly changefreq on Discord server url, are you arguing that's too frequent or too infrequent? On the server page, it has recently indexed questions so part of the reasoning behind that being weekly is to capture those recently indexed questions https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352
Archived threads get a change freq of monthly since they don't change that often and active threads have a changfreq of daily as there is lots of activity going on in them
For open source, there's the free tier that those communities are able to use
Still figuring out pricing on enterprise tier, that's going to be figured out from waitlist sign ups etc
It’s an open source project https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow designed to index the content of your Discord community into Google
Some example pages you can check out:
An indexed question: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1055246179887230986
The C# community page: https://www.answeroverflow.com/c/143867839282020352
It's already gone through some review at Discord as the bot got incorrectly quarantined when it was in its first server, so I had to explain what it was and how it worked in my support ticket. They didn't raise any concerns and unquarantined it
Compliance with the ToS is also expanded upon more at https://www.answeroverflow.com/faq
Doing this indexing work is a bit different on Discord as their privacy policy doesn't let you publicly share users messages without them consenting first - so this project has got a lot built out for driving user consent to allow for those messages to be displayed publicly.
For users who haven't explicitly said they want their messages to be public, those messages can still be shown on the site they just have to be behind a sign in that checks if the users are in the same server
A big focus of this project is building out tools to improve help channels on Discord and then using what gets built out to drive user consent, for example one feature of it is being able to mark questions as solved which also prompts users to contribute their messages