Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

On a related note, I’ve found myself actively seeking alternatives (edit: to the project itself, not just to chat) when an OSS project only has a chat-based community as opposed to forums or mailing-lists, for two (edit: three) reasons:

- it’s impossible to search chats meaningfully, whereas forums/DLs let you quickly figure out if you’re facing a common issue (and finding resolutions easily)

- asking about something in chat and tracking replies a day or two later (because you will quite likely not get a quick reply to complex issues) is also quite hard unless you just happen to be awake at the same time as a core dev and can actually spend the time together (although that usually devolves into “file an issue with more details and tag me”).

- I don’t want to sign up for a dozen different services or private forums to even access that info.

Not to mention that (depending on community) you might just get a lot of irrelevant chatter thrown in, or just plain “this is the wrong channel” replies because there are no signposts.

Going to play the devil's advocate for a minute here.

I've found discord's search feature to be quite powerful, specially if servers are well partitioned into channels based on topic, and are searched(and therefore indexed) semi-frequently. It's not as good as a search engine, but throwing some keywords in there does often get me the answer I'm looking for.

Also regarding irrelevant chatter, discord's gotten a lot better with that since the recent introduction of the threads feature, allowing each discussion to branch off into its own thread instead of getting intermingled.

Discord's search cannot look across multiple "servers". If I remember saying something to one of three groups of friends, but cannot remember which one it was, I need to repeat the search once for each "server".

It is still much worse than searching a forum, at least in my experience. Or just using Google.

> it’s impossible to search chats meaningfully, whereas forums/DLs let you quickly figure out if you’re facing a common issue (and finding resolutions easily)

From a user's perspective, that's a more important aspect than the underlying platform being FOSS. Also as a maintainer, I would neither want to answer the same questions again and again nor would I like to create the impression of answering in real time, as chat clients usually do.

I don't care if it's Gitter, GitHub discussions, or a mailing list, but please make it easy for search engines to index the messages instead of placing them behind a proprietary wall like on discord.

I've never arrived at a gitter chat log from a Google search result where the search result was in the page.

I don't like mailing lists, it feels a bit dated to me, and you either get a lot of noise in your inbox or hope that people don't forget to CC you when replying. Forums are OK, but do you really need one for most projects when there's GitHub issues and even discussions now?

I personally like it when there's a chat (Discord, Telegram, whatever), it shouldn't be a replacement for an issue tracker but there can be things that aren't clear-cut issues, and I feel less embarrassed to ask in a chat if some behavior is intentional rather than opening an issue.

Mailing-lists are the most effective way to keep track of things long-term and “catch up”, and they are trivial to filter into a folder IMHO.

I disagree, mailing lists suffer from many issues. Editing or deleting messages is impossible, which means moderation is also impossible unless you force pre-approval for every post. There is no reasonable way to categorize discussions after the fact, only creating separate lists and hoping people post in the correct place. Trying to share code is the worst, you have a few options here:

* Attach it and hope everyone's clients handle attachments properly (especially the online archive will likely not include them).

* Include it inline and hope people aren't using a proportional font and it's formatted correctly in the archive. (I've recently had the displeasure of the python-ideas mailing list archive "helpfully" formatting >>> [which is the Python REPL prompt, so you'd think they would have thought of this] into a 3 levels deep blockquote. Thank god we're using such ancient technology in 2021 which makes it impossible to edit the message to correct it!)

* Post it on a pastebin, and hope the link isn't dead in a few years when someone is trying to find a solution to their problem in the mailing list archives a few years later.

None of those are real problems, IMHO, and Discord or chat certainly don't solve them either.

Then again, I've used mailing lists since UUCP and VMS, so maybe I'm just exp^Wold.

Editing messages and sharing code isn't a real problem? Seriously? And how does Discord not solve them, when it's one button to edit and three backticks to share code?

Zulip is threaded by default, with mandatory topic keywords as title, so pretty much a hybrid chat/forum solution. Maybe you want to take a look at for example https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/ to see how it works.

It still requires me to sign up for another service instead of just browsing and searching.

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