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.
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?
What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.
If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it's open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.
I've tried to use matrix... Is there a good matrix client? Like, one with admin commands? Maybe I just didn't "get" it, but it seemed not even yet half baked.
I will never understand "forums are best". I've tried, but they are worse in just about every aspect compared to any other communication system I've seen.
If you want to learn from a number of car enthusiasts how to address one specific error code with one specific model of car, is there anything better than finding a five page long forum thread and reading a few dozen posts about it from the last few years?
So like... "Forums are a good communication technology for modern use" and "have you ever found a solution in a forum" are different things.
As a counterexample, I've had more luck finding weird ass computer hardware issue solutions by appending 'reddit' to a search string than just about anything else. On the other hand I've wasted hours and hours on forum threads that go nowhere, with a million dead ends, and terminates in "see this other thread for the actual answer" and then that thread is archived or otherwise inaccessible.
The good thing about forums is that, once a problem is addressed, the solution remains there and is indexed by search engines for everyone to see. You can say anything about forums, but I doubt you never fixed some issue by looking at some old forum thread, without even having to bother anyone.
I have definitely solved the odd issue from forums... but only because forums were the only thing available. Reading through them is still a chore and a half. Especially when 90% of the posts are "has anyone found a solution for this yet" ad nauseum that you still have to scroll through to eventually (maybe) find the page with the post you actually need.
I may just be bad at forums, but that's been my experience with them for the last 20+ years.
Element X for iOS, all right! Seemed to sync in ~5 Mississippi (~seconds) just now after setting it up when you first commented. Still some issues but seemingly better. Thanks!
you can't honestly be saying that there are no issues with hosting documentation/support for a project exclusively on discord as opposed to a classic forum or wiki.
even ignoring the issues that you are dismissing (and would not exist on a better suited platform), the people using the discord server do not own it. discord servers have no backup functionality. what happens when an admin goes rogue or gets hacked etc? what happens when people get tired of discord for the next chat app?
you shouldn't have to use a burner email to download a videogame mod or view documentation for an open source project.
There are issues of course. I’m just of the view that answering questions and giving support to a project is perfectly fine on discord because of incredibly fast response times.
As a developer you really only have bandwidth for maybe one or two methods of communication until you get stretched far too thin. Discord combines threads and irc chats into one. That is incredibly productive from a support standpoint.
To me this is nothing different than asking someone to join an irc server for technical help. Most of the irc servers I followed no longer exist but the projects are still fine and they’ve managed. If anything it’s better because you actually have a search feature.
i can understand your point of technical support, but what the op is calling out is when the only source of docs/support are discord.
i've had multiple experiences firsthand where I needed basic information about a piece of software that really should have just been on a readme or a wiki or something. instead my only option was to repeatedly ask a discord tech support channel and wait for someone who cares/knows about my question to actually answer me.
unless the options are limited, i'd rather simply pick a different solution than be forced to ask a busy discord channel for tech support.
Assuming you used the search feature on discord and no results came up, then you would be the first person to have ever asked that specific question to the developer. What makes you think that would actually be on a readme?
that's a good point - i might be letting my dislike for discord-as-a-wiki color my argument. i will say that i've had mixed results using the search - sometimes there are no results and sometimes there are plenty of irrelevant results. that's just what you get when basically hitting ctrl+f on who-knows-how-long worth of conversations instead of a purpose-made knowledge base.
i still think that a dedicated wiki/forum/repo available on the web for anyone with the url is far better suited to this purpose than discord is. discord is (arguably) good at being a chat app and its features aren't well tailored to being an easily navigable knowledge base. it feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops to have to join a server on the app i use to share memes with my college roommates to get help troubleshooting some software, or worse, to get access to the only official release of the software.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
I may be getting old, but I think D*scord (I'm all for cencoring it like a slur) isn't any more simple than a phpBB or something similar was. Quite the opposite actually, at least for any user trying to navigate the the darn thing.
Maybe navigating is the wrong term. It's just impossible to find stuff relevant to me on discord. On any given larger server, there may be a few channels I could be interested in - but they are just a single chat log, often with lots of off-topic spam, and many different people having almost separate discussions at the same time. On any given larger phpBB, stuff is mostly separated into different threads with all the off-topic posts being delegated to a single thread. It's better searchable and better organized.
What even is "relevancy"? Their search is just a search by matching keywords. There isn't a magic algorithm discord uses. Every time I had an issue with some sort of bug or function I just search for specific keywords and 9/10 times I find something. On the odd-chance I don't then I'll behave like a human being and ask. I just don't get what's wrong with that? You can already limit those keyword searches with specific constraints so you don't get much noise.
Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don't want all their stuff centralized to Discord's servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.
I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they're going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they'll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that's where everyone is.
That's absolutely not to say that it's a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.
tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn't be used for documentation in place of forums though.
It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It's still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I'll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.
I'm unfamiliar with Directional Chat outside of things like VRchat, how that work if you're not manipulating your position in space relative to other users?
This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for "free", will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.
It's been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it's doing to indexable information and it's only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight...
Modern web IRC clients like The Lounge or Convos can now display images, play mp3 and mp4 formats, and they have upload options. It can still be excellent for real time support, but I'm not so sure about documentation though.
Of course an IRC chat won't be used for documentation, I meant for general chatting and support. Also I didn't know that, hopefully I'll be able to replace the absolutely proprietary discord with it.
Discord is better than IRC in any way except available clients, while also doing voice/video chat rooms so it replaced Teamspeak/Mumble. With the additional (at first) paid streamers and being free it took off especially with younger audiences. I remember how terrible Skype was and Discord just worked.
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.
