4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
Why compare Discord to web forums when it’s more like IRC? What’s the searchability and discoverability of that?
I didn’t advocate for IRC. I’m strongly on the side of forums. But in case you want to compare, IRC is still a better deal than Discord. IRC has loggers and searchable web archives where it matters. Discord on the other hand is holding the conversation hostage. Someday the closed nature of discord will come to bite. The honeymoon isn’t going to last forever.
I just think it’s a bad argument. Telling somebody to use web forums instead of Discord is ignorant of why people use Discord in the first place.
Recommending the use of a software for a purpose it wasn’t meant or designed for, is the real bad argument. There are a lot of projects that use forums for support questions just fine. Instead when you offer a chat room, people will try to get away with quick answers. But it rarely ends up like that and all the conversation that ensues also becomes buried.
Short lesson - use software for what it’s meant for. Don’t shoehorn a support forum’s job to a chat application simply because people already use it.