If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn’t count.
Friendly reminder that open source projects don’t just need coders contributing to them.
Technical writers are very appreciated.
I’m trying to get my feet wet in FOSS by making small doc PRs since I’m way too scared to actually touch code. It’s not fun, but it is satisfying.
One of the stupidest trends of all time.
The very fact that you have to ask and wait for an answer is an inconvenience.
one time, I asked and got a reply that it has been answered already, followed by a rant of why the hell people were asking the same question over and over again. IDK man, maybe you could update the installation instructions in your readme, then people wouldn’t be flodding discord with the same question over and over again.
(it was regarding the project being incompatible with the newest version of a library and you had to manually install an older version to get it to work)
There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.
All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they’re all just as bad for it.
Forums are where you’ll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.
That’s not the point. The point is that pointing to Discord means that there simply is no documentation.
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.
Hosting documentation on Discord is like hosting it on IRC.
While a useful tool in its own right, it’s entirely the wrong choice for this job.
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.
Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.
tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn’t be used for documentation in place of forums though.
Yea, I don’t get the documentation stuff. It’s like saying you’ll use Google Chat history as your documentation.
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.
My office has official chat (teams) and unofficial chat (Mattermost).
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a more casual discussion platform at work, which is what Mattermost had become.
You don’t see its incredible simplicity as an advantage? That’s crazy
Simplicity? What fucking simplicity?
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.
Skill issue
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.
Having used both, if you can somehow navigate a phbb board then you can easily navigate discord. The only thing stopping you is you.
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.
