this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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There are issues of course. I’m just of the view that answering questions and giving support to a project is perfectly fine on discord because of incredibly fast response times.
As a developer you really only have bandwidth for maybe one or two methods of communication until you get stretched far too thin. Discord combines threads and irc chats into one. That is incredibly productive from a support standpoint.
To me this is nothing different than asking someone to join an irc server for technical help. Most of the irc servers I followed no longer exist but the projects are still fine and they’ve managed. If anything it’s better because you actually have a search feature.
i can understand your point of technical support, but what the op is calling out is when the only source of docs/support are discord.
i've had multiple experiences firsthand where I needed basic information about a piece of software that really should have just been on a readme or a wiki or something. instead my only option was to repeatedly ask a discord tech support channel and wait for someone who cares/knows about my question to actually answer me.
unless the options are limited, i'd rather simply pick a different solution than be forced to ask a busy discord channel for tech support.
Assuming you used the search feature on discord and no results came up, then you would be the first person to have ever asked that specific question to the developer. What makes you think that would actually be on a readme?
that's a good point - i might be letting my dislike for discord-as-a-wiki color my argument. i will say that i've had mixed results using the search - sometimes there are no results and sometimes there are plenty of irrelevant results. that's just what you get when basically hitting ctrl+f on who-knows-how-long worth of conversations instead of a purpose-made knowledge base.
i still think that a dedicated wiki/forum/repo available on the web for anyone with the url is far better suited to this purpose than discord is. discord is (arguably) good at being a chat app and its features aren't well tailored to being an easily navigable knowledge base. it feels like jumping through unnecessary hoops to have to join a server on the app i use to share memes with my college roommates to get help troubleshooting some software, or worse, to get access to the only official release of the software.