GitHub discussions closed in favor of discord

Trey2k commented 1 year ago

I have closed the GitHub discussions page on this project in favor of our Discord or Matrix.

JasonTable commented 9 months ago

Kinda disappointing that people are moving away from more public discussion areas into these walled garden information black holes.

michieal commented 9 months ago

Kinda disappointing that people are moving away from more public discussion areas into these walled garden information black holes.

The only difference between here and your "walled garden information black holes" is that the latter is not google searchable. But, on the positive side, you don't have to wait for a web page to notify you that the person that you are talking to has responded. Discord is an instant messenger, whereas github issues is a bulletin board. Personally, I'd rather just use the instant messenger format and be able to have a discussion than a hit or miss bulletin board system like Github's Discussions. (Or if you prefer, an outdated forum style, where you write a letter and wait for the other person to read it, and mail you back a letter. I'm more of a telephone guy than an electronic snail mail guy.) But, that's just my opinion... Tech is supposed to make life quicker, easier and with better access to the internet... not keep us in 1986 using BBSes.

Trey2k commented 9 months ago

Kinda disappointing that people are moving away from more public discussion areas into these walled garden information black holes.

I understand that it would be nice if Q&A was indexable by search engines and or just had a better method of search then what Discord provides.

GitHub Discussions was not closed to intentionally wall off information. The reason it was closed is it was not utilized, we would get 1 post every 4 or 5 months which would take awhile to get a response since not many people monitor it. Where as the Discord is fairly active. So it was closed to at least consolidate where information is.

This is tagged as wontfix but if there is enough drive behind it, discussions can be re-opened.

JasonTable commented 9 months ago

The primary issue is the lack of search engine support. And that it locks info away from those who do not want to use the service such as myself. Thats why its a walled garden information black hole. I can understand that instant satisfaction of having a "BLENERT" noise play when you get a reply instead of needing to hit refresh. A good compromise might be if there was a bot that archived the chat logs or something so that people could access them outside.

This is just my personal opinion but I feel like forum styles would reduce duplicate questions. Even if i did wanna use that walled garden chat, I would probably just ask the question rather than trying to see if someone else already did. If you don't mind duplicate questions then IRC is also pretty good because while it is an information black hole, its not a walled garden.

michieal commented 9 months ago

From experience, I will say this:

it's not the "blenert" sound, as that's annoying. It's that communication works better if you can "talk" rather than "mail" each other.
Forum style information areas do not reduce duplicate questions. People do not go through and search before asking. (Not that they don't quickly google search things.) But, a lot of things that I have personally searched for on, say, stackoverflow have had a high rate of "duplicate question" tags. And, having had to be one of the people answering issue tickets for an active OSS issue tracker I can definitely say that there's a reason that it has "Duplicate Question" label; one guy made 45 different duplicate questions in one day.

Also on the whole forum style communication for getting answers, things get lost. I've seen unanswered questions linger there for years unanswered. And, that is generally not the case with an Instant Message style communication format.

I do believe that there is a discord IRC bridge, and I know that there is a discord matrix bridge. They both require someone to maintain them, and maintain the associated services. In usage, I have seen people get confused by the BOT tag after the person's name that is on the opposite side of the bridge, and have had people tell real users to "get lost bot." Most people looking for answers are put off by being dismissed, and I think rightfully so. So, there is that.

If it helps any, there are open source discord clients.