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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
(drewdevault.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Discord is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. I'm so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
Why should different chat programs be used for different purposes?
The whole idea is to... chat.
I guess you're the kind of guy who has multiple phones when 1 would work perfectly well.
Yes, discord is for chatting, that's correct. It's not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.
I think discord is great for the technical support side of things. It gives you a chance to talk through a problem in real time with someone more knowledgeable and ask follow up questions without waiting hours for a reply lile frequently happens in support forums. That being said it should absolutely not be the repository for documentation.
The problem with using it for real time tech support is that when someone else comes along with the same problem, they have to search chat logs and hope they can find the thread where the issue was mentioned/fixed. Forums are much better at making past information accessible, but you're right, a chat client like discord is better for quick response times. It's a trade-off I suppose
I would argue that is the point of having an FAQ/Examples in your documentation. Ideally someone would stop their first before asking clarification questions in the discord. Admittedly a lot of people are just going to go straight to asking questions but personally that's not really been something I've ever really minded. Some people just learn better that way and it's unusual for one of these discord channels to be so busy that repeat questions are drowning others out.