Vote/Suggest for Open Discussion Platform

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Disclaimer:

We get way too many posts here that aren't issues and are just general discussions or issue comments that branch off unrelated all too often… Please refer to the new Issues Usage on our wiki.

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That said, on to the real purpose of this post as I'm only going to do this open [but very focused] discussion once here in the Issues: an open vote (or suggest as comment) for a platform to use for open discussions, general questions, announcements and any other community engagement.

Vote/Suggest for Open-Discussion Community Platform:

1. Please use this thread's comments only for suggestions, so we can keep this organized. Add pros and cons and such but please keep it simple, edit your post if you need to come back with these instead of cluttering the comments suggestions.
2. Please use only the 👍 or 👎 emojis on the suggestions to vote.

I'll kick this off with a couple…

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Discord (Slack for Gamers, essentially)

It's actually used by a lot of devs too [especially, but not limited to, indie and game devs], and heavily by kickstarter project devs because of the nature of open development on those and the need to get feedback and community engagement easily.

• Pros:
  • Instant Invite: Easy to join with public link (unlike Slack).
  • Public and Private Channels, Direct Messages…
  • Robust Permissions (allows us to set up read-only channels for announcements and such)
  • Free (which is always good) including Video Chat and Screen Sharing (unlike Slack)
  • Audio Channels (slack doesn't do these, and we can make public and private ones same as rich text channels)
  • good design, intuitive, dark mode default
  • Many gamers already have Discord installed, so that's a plus…
  • Bonus: Could move collaborators from Slack to Discord with channels separate from the open/public ones, but in one single app for everyone.
  • Update: Webhook support to receive push updates from other sources
  • …like GitHub updates with this
• Cons:
  • No up/downvoting? (in the Reddit sense) …but does have emoji comments.
  • ~No plugins/apps like Slack/Stride (…but not a total deal breaker)~ (see Update above)
  • …like what we use to push GitHub updates to #github channel
  • …or like I'm using to push Trello updates to #uiuxdiscussion

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Reddit/Subreddit

Info: What is a subreddit?

• Pros:
  • Up/Downvoting: sifts issues, feature, topics, and FAQ answers with most community interest or relevance to top for cherry picking.
  • Bonus: as 'frontpage of the internet' should help drive new traffic to us.
• Cons:
  • No slack-style/modern/rich-text chat communication.. lame.
  • Can't migrate and merge dev team communication tools into one, so just another thing to check up on…
  • No audio/video/sceensharing…

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Stride (Slack clone by Atlassian who make Jira, acquired Trello)

• Pros:
  • Some built in project management features that are simple and useful.
  • Public and Private Channels, Direct Messages, etc..
  • Has growing plugin/integrations library (like Trello and Slack's), including:
  • GitHub plugin
  • Trello plugin, which is better than Slack's…
• Cons:
  • Seems to be no public link join method (as Discord does) …unless there is a plugin for it
  • Will come back to this (not sure 100% free or free and full featured for our purposes, but might be…

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Slack (Team Communication, of course…)

We all use it for work and such.. Just throwing this in there for comparison sake, since we are currently using (for just developer focused conversations) and since it shares similar feature sets with the majority, but it's not preferred as the cons will show…

• Pros:
  • Familiar. We are already using this (for dev)…
  • Public and Private Channels, Direct Messages, Group Chats, etc…
  • A lot of cross platform plugins… (GitHub, Trello, tons more)
• Cons:
  • Invite only! this is a deal breaker in my opinion to get community engagement. Even with a public channel this is a management pain.
  • Not free video chat / screen sharing, etc… (paid accounts only) (we jumped to Discord for this recently, kinda need this to make things easier on dev side, sure users wouldn't mind it either).

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Other Forums? (Various) [Specific option(s): TBD]

Not sure about this, but I suppose it's an option…There are so many of these old bb types like phPBB, Vanilla, but they just feel antiquated anymore—even with modern ones like Discourse, Muut or lightweight discussion tools like Disqus—and most don't tend to have the ease of the modernized IRC revivals that Slack seemed to popularize… If there is interest I'll do some more research against this topic, or am open to suggestions.

(will update later with specific option or multiples, and some general pros/cons)

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Discourse (Open-Source Modern BB Forum)

Pulling this one out from the above suggestion… Out of the admittedly light research I've done against traditional forum/bb-types (see above), this one stood out as being a bit more modern and… less hideous than most of the others out there… This would likely be an addition to Provenance site, self-hosted.

• Pros:
  • Familiar BB stuff
  • will add feature details later…
  • Open-Source, on GitHub
  • Free, if you go open-source and self-hosted
  • Clean design, modern, has dark mode and themes…
• Cons:
  • No live Slack-like chat or channels…
  • No audio/video chat/channels, no screen-sharing
  • Not sure there is up/downvoting (in the Reddit sense)
  • Can't contain everyone in one app (like Discord), another thing to check.

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Muut (Modern BB Forum+Chat?)

…might pull muut out of the forum various above, seems similar to Discourse, but i think it may have more chat capability, but can't determine if there is a free option in there, they also are on GitHub as well.

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⚠️ Update!

We have chosen to take our community and our dev ops to Discord. Please join us here: :arrow_forward: https://discord.gg/4TK7PU5

We still might implement some additional community tools listed above, but our primary hub will be on Discord.