One of the stupidest trends of all time.

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.

Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.

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.

If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn't count.

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.

It's actually quite worrisome, many projects exclusively have their troubleshooting or support on Discord now what's going to happen years down the road when all those Discord servers have closed or no longer active and the invite links expire this is going to be a vast knowledge base that's just lost to the world

Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.

What the fuck happened to README.md.

Or man pages.

Or readme.txt.

Or a goddamn wiki.

Opened a discord link for info the other day...looked like a fucking Las Vegas casino. The.fuck.

How to install:

Step 1: git clone website

Step 2: run dependency install script

Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don't have it? Well, I'm sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!

Step 3: Run " program name" and .... "insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens"

Step 3 again: When you run it, get error "k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can't fix this"

Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it's 12 dependency hadn't been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.

If it's not search indexable it can go eat dirt

Never clicked on one of those Discord links, never will.

There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it's really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.

Maybe it's a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.

I have been lucky and haven’t seen this. What a horrible thing to do.

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?