Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum

Discord represents the same problem

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model.

I would never use it for something professional/business related.

I tried to use Discord once, but they demanded my phone number to use it, so I deleted it and never looked back. Absolute cancer of a platform.

In a professional context I would avoid both. I don’t want to join chat servers for various SaaS I pay for where I just want a simple support question answered. At least with a forum, the questions and answers are indexed so I might find exactly what I want without having to reach out to support.

I’m not a community member, I’m a paying customer.

You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them.

Zulip is also available as a container.

1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work?

2. What is the way around the free plan message limit?

3. What do you use Slack for?

IRC

Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.

How is it less searchable than slack?

I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.

As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.

Discord is, or at least can be indexed and searchable. Same as IRC chats become indexed and searchable.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

The general problem with forums is that once they get good SEO placement they then become targets of the army of spammers, real and human, trying to use the highly ranking forum for their unscrupulous SEO spam, and now the maintaining team has to do heavy loads of spam management.

It’s not going to happen. You can’t put ads on them anymore. Means someone has to just run a loss-running enterprise for you. Few will do that.

The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!

At the very least discord doesn't make threads which get lost in the channel like slack. But both suffer without tools like telegram which automatically catalogs all links, files, images, etc into tabs. But at the end of the day a chat system isn't meant to be documentation. It's meant to be chat. If you and me talk in the hallway, we wouldn't then tell a colleague oh yeah we figured it out in the hallway don't worry. We would try and document it somehow so that it's useful later.

Glad to hear I’m not the only one. It makes me irrationally angry when I see Discord being the support channel for a product.

What next.js does is pretty neat. They have discord but they have a bot that mirrors all the help threads onto a public website so that it can be indexed by search engines

It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exists somewhere in Discord/Slack, it's often harder to find, harder to link to, provides less context, requires login and access to a specific community, isn't indexed by search engines, etc.

I have. Sometimes it does its job.

The problem with their search is that it’s only their search — no other engine can index it.

And then the medium tends to make discussion a ripple in a pond rather than a running discussion.

Come on. Discord or slack is like a forum where you have every post ever made on a topic in a single thread, 92,000 pages long. Sure, you can use search, but the nature of chat means that once you find one message (say, where a question was asked) you have to then skim through other discussions also going on at the time — often many of them — wondering if anyone answered the question, or if the discussion might continue after each interruption.

It’s okay for some applications I guess, but it’s the worst replacement for a forum, wiki, or knowledge base I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never succeeded with slack chat. Basically I just have to remember when a conversation happened and go to that time and scroll until I see it. Even if I remember most of the words of a message I’m searching for.

Outlook is the reigning champion of terrible search, but don’t Slack is the runner up.

> Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

I have. Discord, in particular, has the worst search function I've ever seen in my life, or close to it.

My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.

I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.

Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?

I rather like Discord search and found it to be fast and reliable to use.

It is called Discourse and it is far better.

What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well

Discord search is pretty standard, you can do much worse. Especially at their scale.

But there already is one. It's called a forum :)

Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform.

Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.

Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.

> In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears"

This drives me nuts. I went from one company that used Workplace to a different one that uses Slack, and I can never find anything anymore. “Who was in that conversation back in November? What timeline for this project did we agree upon?” I spend half an hour adjusting search filters in Slack to try and find information like this.

Discord will automatically switch to streamer mode if you paunch a recording/streaming app like OBS, so that could be it.

Agreed.

Also, Strapi has one of those odd licenses where everything is MIT expect what’s in /ee directory

https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE

> forum software is a solved platform

It was never solved. Forum software just stagnated with its poor backend and frontend solutions that everyone tolerated until the social media platforms we know today took off.

Now that even the most unsophisticated user has become intolerant of the noise on there, forums are coming back.

But, you can't expect people to go back to the same problems they left behind over a decade ago. Just about any modern CMS is a dramatic improvement over the crappy database schemas, dead languages, ugly, inflexible, and slow server-side rendered HTML, etc. Just about any frontend a college student whips up would have modern features people actually want to use and be far easier to maintain. What was "solved" is the realization that forums are just another CRUD app. The specific implementation is irrelevant as long as it is architected as such.

Most forums aren't in my programming language, and probably I'd like the experience to have a properunity with the product, both for the user and the developer, but also no mysterious/ unwanted features lurking about.

My bad, it wasn't visible until I disabled uBlock, requests seem to be caught by the "uBlock filters – Privacy" list. Does the IA actually run the JS and archive the fetched JSON on its own, or does it depend on someone visiting the archive page with their browser to trigger archival of this JSON data?

It's ridiculous we've had forums for decades and people still feel the need to re-invent the wheel (at the huge engineering time and cost involved).

Because simply put, thinking that a forum is a weekend project is the issue.

I thought that once... it's just a couple of tables in a database and a nice frontend, right?

I've been at this (building forum software) for a decade now, and I'm still innovating. Good luck!

It could make sense, at the time, if your support staff were on Slack, and you had high hopes for community engagement, and Slack offered discounts to get you hooked.

That's a bad sign since it implies they know what their own name means rather than it being some kind of weird coincidence.

What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?

Discourse can do that…

It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.

I'm assuming you mean sending a one time passcode to the AP account? I think that would be a great idea. But it's also highly phishable. And full AP integration allows users to own their data if they want.

Pieter Levels' Nomad List was one, I recall. They moved to Telegram recently.

OnDeck is also moving away from it

I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s.

I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it.

A real contender for "new forum software" would have to address the fact that Discord is its competitor, not other forum software, and it would have to have a very compelling answer for "why this instead of Discord".

vBulletin is commercial, as is Invision Community, its primary competitor.

phpBB is pretty badly dated. It still works but it's clunky and development has been very slow. (The last major release was four years ago; everything since then has been minor maintenance.)

Well for vBulletin specifically it's that the software was bought out by a company called Internet Brands, who got rid of the original team and screwed up the last three versions of it.

vBulletin 4 is okay, but 5 and 6 are poorly coded, extremely inefficient and full of bugs even today.

Some of the original team went off to create XenForo, which has basically replaced vBulletin for most large forums now, though that itself has its own issues.

How is Discourse's customization tooling? phpBB's ability to let ~anyone go in and add random stuff as plugins was really powerful back in the day IMO