best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what's that? you're looking for a fix to an issue you're having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we've already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway
I think we fixed that for someone a few months ago, maybe you can scroll back and find it. I think the guys handle was user-something, might have been around May...
I've only got anecdotal stories but I have heard from my friends that ROM hack projects do this and I personally don't get it. If it’s to hide from the big N, Discord won’t back you there. Just teach your users how to use patch files instead.
Not exactly the same thing, but the xone (XBox One controller driver for Linux) project disabled Issues on Github and uses a Discord server instead. Which is stupid as heck, because I'm not going to join a Discord server just to check if someone has already encountered the same issue as me.
It's generally nothing big enough to have heard of unless you're looking into whatever niche it fills.
Only example that comes to mind is mechanical keyboard stuff. For some of the smaller / one-off designs there was a habit of "if you need troubleshooting, here's a discord link" instead of even minimal documentation. For "standard" stuff that used the same lil microcontrollers as everything else just a minor annoyance, but saw it with ones that used custom / no microcontroller too, where even a "you need X diodes, Y sprockets, etc" would've been nice.
Like OP tend to see it and move on and forget about it because it's not worth it. The few times I really wanted to get some service running on a raspberry pi or arduino or whatever and tried the discord was a handful of 'regulars' swapping memes that were annoyed I wasn't intimately aware of their codebase.
TrueCharts (third party app repository for TrueNAS) does this and it drove me crazy until I eventually gave up and moved everything to Docker. Lack of serious documentation was just one of the many reasons.
Speaks to the fact that we apparently need better and new alternatives or make current tools easier to use.
Certain aspects of discord seem to resonate with people (unfortunately...).
Man pages are great as mentioned, but maybe not as accessible to some people. Are there tools to generate more convenient resources (e.g. wikis) from that? Similar to how generating technical documentations from (structured) code comments.
Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.
Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.
Documentation is bad enough. But it's worse when that's the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.
I can't understand why someone would want to do that. Maybe it's my help desk and IT upbringing, but for the few software tools and things I've made, if you chat me without filing a bug/issue on GitHub, I'm not gonna help you.
To play devil's advocate here: sometimes there are genuine reasons to try and request support before making an issue. I'm not particularly smart, nor too techy. If something isn't working, I'm just going to assume I'm an idiot and I've messed something up. If I can't figure out how to make it work, my first post of call will be trying to find a community related to whatever isn't working, or on smaller projects I might try and reach out to the Dev. Opening an issue always feels like a "hey, your program isn't doing what it's meant to do, here's what's wrong with it, please fix it" and not "I think I've fucked something up, can you please help?"
I suppose it depends what you're developing though.
Yep, and if it becomes a frequent request, add clarification to the readme / wiki / documentation.
Also, if you push folks towards issues, then they become indexable by search engines! So even if you have a solved problem you can at least find that... Discord? It's a black hole.
And then get it insta-closed withing 20 minutes saying that "this is a problem with your setup, not the software" even when "my setup" was literally setting up their project using their documentation (docker compose files).
That is how developers treat people with questions that they deem "stupid."
It turns out their documentation was wrong and some environment variable that they said was optional, was not actually optional and the service would go into a reboot loop without it. I figured that out no thanks to the devs.
Update your issue with a pull request fixing the documentation. When you're doing things on github, 99.999% of your audience is the general public, not the maintainer, because they will find your issue and solution through search engines.
Agreed. I may not want to mix my discord identity with whatever project I'm looking at. I especially don't want to mix my personal online identity with my professional identity. I post too much politics for that.
This was/is my main gripe with Beyond All Reason (open source rts game) there is no wiki or forums - for an outsider it looks like 98% of all development talk is done in discord.
Though they do have a good basic knowledge base on their website about the game units and mechanics (but I would love dedicated wiki).
I once dm’d the maintainer of an open source project who got kind of upset at me for not posting an issue in GitHub. I got it, it made sense and the guy explained that it was all about visibility.
This is often done by people while the project is unstable. No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.
The first doc you write is the FAQ and let it handle the common requests -- no need to 'live' in discord. Locating that where more people can see it is normally obvious.
Imo this kind stuff probably because these "dev" having safe space on those discord servers rather than using something properly setup site/forum.
Heck you can make your own documentation using github/gitlab built in wiki or if you want something fancier, setup a site using JAMstack/static site generator, pick suitable theme then use gh page to host it.
I even more hate this stuff when the files is gated inside discord server, dude out of all possible file hosting services why the heck you would use discord?
How does everyone feel about the "isolation" of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.
I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.
No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows
Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.
