Don't use Discord as your Q&A forum

I recently found a repo for an Xbox wireless controller kernel driver where the GitHub issues page was turned off and instead they used discord. I asked why they don’t have GitHub issues turned on and they said they “didn’t want it to become a support forum”. I couldn’t believe it. If there is a common issue, one person will ask about it on the issues page and then everyone else can benefit from that discussion. On discord, I had to log in and join their group to ask about an error message, only to find it’s a common issue and there’s a few troubleshooting steps. I could have figured that out instantly that others have encountered this problem and discussed the solution. Instead, this repo owner moved everything to discord where it was hard to discover and usually required direct human support for every new person.

One trouble w&#x2F; things like Discord and IRC for support or community building is that frequently you get somebody with nothing better to do who &quot;leans in&quot; and spends more time (all the time) logged in and ends up being the face of your forum for new users.<p>(Full disclosure, <i>I&#x27;ve been that guy</i>)

At least IRC is usually logged.<p>However, I&#x27;ve noticed a disturbing trend amongst web shops. It used to be common for a shop to have it&#x27;s return policy and form linked on the main page&#x2F;menu. Right along side its terms&amp;conditions, privacy policy etc. Now I noticed a couple of popular shops I interact with replaced it with &quot;chat with us&quot; things(IKEA in Poland, a bunch of very large clothing brands etc).<p>I hate it when I have to talk to crappy LLM for 5 minutes to convince it I need a human, then wait 15min because &quot;we&#x27;re having higher than usual support volume&quot; (at which point it becomes the norm?) to then have a human ask one question and give me a RMA number and order their courier to pick it up.<p>So much time wasted could be recovered by a simple RMA form. I hope this trend doesn&#x27;t spread everywhere.

Add this point too: you can’t just google the problem for example and find a similar post and the resolution, you never know if the problem was addressed or resolved, even back in the days with locked forums where you needed to register or even reply to the post to see the solution, you know there’s some sort of issue and how to solve it, with Discord, nothing.<p>So my rule of thumb, if that service or software that I’m trying to use list a discord as the mean of communication, I simply don’t use it, what’s next, holding meetings over Twitch and discussions over tiktok?

I don&#x27;t know, a lot of the people that interact with my projects _want_ discord. They don&#x27;t want a forum, they don&#x27;t want Matrix. It&#x27;s a matter of knowing your audience. I&#x27;ve been working on ways to better archive support&#x2F;question threads, and the discord search isn&#x27;t that terrible.

It&#x27;s kind of incredible that this even needs to be said.<p>Discord is a great piece of software for organizing ephemeral communications. Voice chat works well. That&#x27;s 99% of the value of Discord. It also absolute dogshit as a persistent store of information.<p>Stack Overflow-style Q&amp;A is the <i>definitive</i> good choice for Q&amp;A documentation.

Dlang did it right, a mailing list that act like a forum [1] with various instant messaging bots (IRC, Discord, Matrix)<p>I wish more projects would take inspiration from them, the software is open source [2]<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.dlang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.dlang.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CyberShadow&#x2F;DFeed&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;CyberShadow&#x2F;DFeed&#x2F;</a>

I think proscriptive statements about what to use or not use are opinions masked to be pretend facts.<p>You should use whatever works for you and your clients&#x2F;customers. All the channels come with plus and minus issues. It&#x27;s the support version of CAP theorem: You can be reachable, focussed and structured but probably not all three at once.<p>I also miss email. Mainly because the expectation of &quot;instant&quot; was muted through delivery delays.<p>When I need instant, I should possibly expect to have to pay for it.

It’s interesting to see folks preferred solutions. Obviously, I don’t know any of you, but I’m willing to bet that most people’s preferences correlate with the period they started using the internet and what was popular at the time: mailing lists, Usenet, web-based forums, IRC, Slack…<p>I wonder how long it’ll be before people are saying “I really wish we could just go back to Discord.”

Sorry but if you think large-scale companies are going to use a platform designed for gaming as their main support channel - no.<p>We&#x27;ve had one &quot;Enterprise&quot; supplier move from Slack to Discord. Their community manager in this case did not understand my argument of why this is a bad thing and kept pushing it. For example when I said there is no SSO, they said there is (of course not realising WE have to pick up the bill to set that up - also puts the work on CISOs to investigate the tool for larger use).<p>Now they are on Discord and I will not share any NDA-related material there - nor would our Security and Data Privacy team like us to.<p>At least they agreed to keep the Slack Connect in this case.

If you don’t run a discord, one of your users will “helpfully” start one anyway and the community will go there. You’ve then lost control of your Q&amp;A forum.

New World, an MMORPG game by Amazon Game Studios, have recently shut down their forums and migrated completely to Discord. It has been a complete disaster, including all the forum posts that show up in Google search are now just 404. Reporting bugs is a crap shoot into the void.

I agree that the discord centralization for Q&amp;A is becoming problematic, it makes it less discoverable and searchable (Had this problem a lot with Svelte).<p>That said, I have had success so far using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.answeroverflow.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.answeroverflow.com&#x2F;</a> to search discord for questions. It sucks we have to use such tools, but given the current situation, it&#x27;s also better to adapt.

I wrote about this a while ago for Slack&#x2F;forums: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mooreds.com&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;archives&#x2F;3451" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mooreds.com&#x2F;wordpress&#x2F;archives&#x2F;3451</a> but the points still hold.<p>HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29154216">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29154216</a><p>I&#x27;m a big fan of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodebb.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodebb.org&#x2F;</a> Full featured OSS forum you can self-host or let them host for you (for $).<p>Big fan of letting people use the search interface they want, which is almost always Google.

This is just wishful thinking.<p>All the alternatives have proven that they barely work too.<p>1. Dedicated forums - have you seen cesspools that are community.microsoft.com or apple support forums? Or few surviving audio forums, with those long taglines? Also searchability of those forums leaves to be desired too, as they rarely get to first page of google.<p>2. Stackoverflow quality has degraded severely in recent years. Both from perspectives of someone who wants to ask a question and someone who wants to answer it. Niche stackoverflows are still fine, but general programming ones are just shit, full of obsolete&#x2F;old accepted answers that nobody cares to update to current year status<p>3. Get it done. It is obviously to be better healthy and rich than sick and poor<p>I grown into contrary view. Discords are fine. Based on my personal experience, at least the ones where I tried to find some help (QMK, Bambulab, bunch of gaming ones). The fact that same question is being asked again and again is fine. Somebody will answer it. Or not, and then the search for an answer will continue.<p>They significantly reduce friction to answer for somebody who is open to help. See example about stackoverflow above. I just left it, as I don&#x27;t want to deal with mods there.

I agree with not using Discord as a forum but suggested alternative number one is Discourse which starts at USD50&#x2F;month[1]. A bit of an ask for my &quot;failed side projects&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discourse.org&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.discourse.org&#x2F;pricing</a>

People forget that there is a fashion and demographic element in these choices that can overwhelm rational argumemts about functionality et al.<p>Discord had certain features that struck a chord with a generation of gaming communities, thats more or less all there is to it. Now people will pick it just to be trendy and in tune with the times.<p>Personally I find its manipulative, over-emojed UI distasteful and it is hopeless for knowledge management.

I think there is a culture shift. When I was young all events would be on Facebook. For better or worse that created a source of truth (worse being that obviously we were forcing guests onto a platform that we shouldn&#x27;t be forcing them on) and a whole structure that kept track of things for you.<p>Now a days, I see events being a post across a few chat groups, with no source of truth for time and place (and those often left out!)<p>I have an impression that there is a whole new generation of people who _don&#x27;t_ want to post on or interact with a forum&#x2F;bulletin board style of interface, but want to be part of a &quot;living&quot; and instant group.<p>I&#x27;m not part of any chat group where this is really working, but every meetup I go to, people are asking &quot;which chat group should I join?&quot; or &quot;why don&#x27;t I create a whatsapp&#x2F;discord for this meetup?&quot;

For years, it still has this issue: Discord notifies with sound, but when I open the app, I don&#x27;t know where the notification is from.<p>What a product management...

Late to discussion but we are building around this due to same pain points: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.den-hq.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.den-hq.com&#x2F;</a><p>It has not been long that we started working on this. More than half of the time we spend goes with potential customer interactions. Here are our insights so far: - Companies are well aware of the information clutterness that Discord bears - Companies value the activity level of the server more relative to the usefulness of the community - Developer communities are an outlier here - People who join a community platform when outside Discord are more valued vs the ones that are on Discord<p>I am looking to talk to more people around this so we can build a first version as informed as possible as to what the best version would look like. Feel free to sign up in our waitlist and I will make sure to reach out.

Roll your own, like early and industrious folks in the 2000s did with PhpBB or Invision, or vBulletin if you had the money to fork out for VB.

If you ever need to extract important information buried somewhere in a Discord server, I am having luck with Discord History Tracker [1] (browser-only version). It lets you download all messages in a json file, which then you can read with [2] (works offline too).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dht.chylex.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dht.chylex.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dht.chylex.com&#x2F;browser-only&#x2F;build&#x2F;viewer.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dht.chylex.com&#x2F;browser-only&#x2F;build&#x2F;viewer.htm</a>

The most important reason: Forcing your customers to use a significantly privacy-invading service just to get support is a total dick move.

I think Zulip is much better at topic threading, which makes it easy to search and organize historical conversations (though Zulip&#x27;s search function itself leaves much to be desired).<p>hosted zulipchat.com is free for open source, and Zulip is free to self-host.<p>self-hosting is not as easy as discord though, for sure

Yeah, you should probably use ponder <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;we.phorge.it&#x2F;ponder&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;we.phorge.it&#x2F;ponder&#x2F;</a>

Discord is a <i>trade-off</i>. Don&#x27;t apply on the wrong problem.<p>Some pros, I&#x27;ll pick three. (1) I think the appeal for something like Discord becomes more obvious when documentation feels like a moving target. For example, as a long time back-end developer, I have never disliked StackOveflow more than when I decided to learn front-end JavaScript. Every answer seemed attached to an expiration date. Anything older than 2 years and I&#x27;d wonder <i>is this still in effect?</i> I actually wished that JS would have its own special SO where answers can be sorted by &quot;number of votes <i>this year</i>&quot; or a &quot;deprecated&quot; flag. (2) The immediacy of chat, you ask and don&#x27;t have to wait half a day for someone to notice. (3) No search. It could just be an impression, but my search experience seems to just increasingly suck. Engines seem to struggle to find relevant bits, particularly if the tech is fairly recent and results are flooded with meaningless articles, that just echo the same &quot;Hello, world&quot; from the official documentation. With Discord, I don&#x27;t have to sort through the junk.<p>Now the cons.<p>The chat format for support certainly has its highlights, but you don&#x27;t have to wear blinders about its downsides. If you allow for time to improve information, information accrues interest. Chat doesn&#x27;t allow for time. And Discord doesn&#x27;t particularly care about the quality of information. Discord cares about (authenticated) <i>users</i> showing up on the platform now, now, now. The problems highlighted with the chat format (as it&#x27;s implemented on Discord), are very focused (though they have ramifications): archiving and searching capabilities are subpar. You show up on some chat channel and ask a question. You get the benefit of immediate advice, by the most authoritative voice that happens to be present. It may be good advice or it may be moot. You just have to take it at face value. On StackOverflow that advice would go unchallenged for a few months, but allow for <i>time</i> and you allow for scrutiny. Eventually, if there&#x27;s contention, there will be a discussion. Answers are commented upon, improved, deprecated. You can simply show up years later and <i>benefit</i> from the maturation of the different perspectives that contributed to crystallize our current best understanding of the issue.<p>Obviously, YMMV. Still, don&#x27;t apply on the wrong problem.

I&#x27;ve noticed this trend with younger developers.<p>I can&#x27;t help but feel it&#x27;s related to hustle culture and attempting to foster a community that they can then monetize.

Last time a gripe about discord being bad for documention was posted, someone linked Answer Overflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.answeroverflow.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.answeroverflow.com&#x2F;</a>) as a possible solution. Still requires people to use discords threaded feature and doesn&#x27;t capture chats, but helps with atleast having the questiond indexed in google and not sitting behind a walled garden

I went to Discord for a project one day, and they had started using some sort of forum thing in Discord itself, which is atrocious.<p>I can tolerate Discord when it&#x27;s real-time help, but this new forum-like feature is the worst of both worlds: You don&#x27;t get real-time, <i>and</i> you don&#x27;t get searchability&#x2F;Googleability&#x2F;the ability for people to get help without a login.<p>Just terrible. I really hope this doesn&#x27;t catch on.

another &quot;dark web&quot; I discovered few month ago is facebook. until then I was thinking that FB was just a social network for connecting people or companies but there are a crazy amount of forum-like groups with a lot of subscribers, and it&#x27;s almost as invisible and unarchivable than discord

Use Discord for nothing... Whenever I try Discord, I never return to any of the channels I&#x27;m in. It doesn&#x27;t feel like a community or anything I can refer back to. Normally, rooms are silent, and no one is chatting. The UI as a whole is a jumbled mess that feels bloated. I would take a forum message board any day.

Everyone is talking about forums in the comments but what I really miss are mailing lists. Those were, for me, a much better user experience than both discord and the old forums.

How come nobody is talking about Linen? [1]<p>&gt; Linen is a search-engine friendly community platform. We offer two way integrations with existing Slack&#x2F;Discord communities and make those conversations Google-searchable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linen.dev&#x2F;">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linen.dev&#x2F;</a>

This should be obvious - a chatroom is no substitute for a forum. It doesn&#x27;t help that IM services like Whatsapp&#x2F;Telegram are also trying to muscle into what should be a forum with their groups and communities features.

This depends entirely on volume IMO. We [1] use Discord for this, and its great, but we don&#x27;t have a large message volume. Discord seems way better than Slack for this use case as there&#x27;s a single login which is built around connecting to multiple servers, unlike Slack.<p>[1]. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flagsmith.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flagsmith.com&#x2F;</a>

Fully agree with this reasoning.<p>The problem though is that my community chose Discord, not me.<p>I tried to move them away, didn&#x27;t work.

Terrible post.<p>1. This is what the &quot;Ban&quot; feature is for.<p>2. Anecdotal. Not really an issue in my experience.<p>3. This is what the Discord API is for. There&#x27;s a really simple API to dump the chat history. Just make a cron job to dump every 10 min or so, and host that on a static site. Problem solved.<p>4. See 3.

A bit unrelated, but does someone use a forum at work? I think in times of remote work that could a better alternative to Teams discussions about features or bugs (especially from other teams&#x2F;departments) + the better search.

Discord is best suited for out-of-band, ephemeral, semi-synchronous discussions.<p>It&#x27;s more useful to have permanent, searchable forums so that answers can benefit more people. (1:N instead of 1:1.) Discourse is one possible solution.

So long as we don’t lose sight of its utility as a chat app. I like that projects have that sort of communication channel.

Agree on the downsides, although communities are a great way to exchange and discuss a project. Instead, why don‘t we just keep the benefits of discord and build tools around it to manage its knowledge? We can publish it, we can use it for AI assistant, basically anything is possible.<p>Disclaimer: I‘m the founder of awesomeqa.xyz

This article (and the comments here so far) don&#x27;t mention Discord Forum Channels which solves the two actual usability&#x2F;discoverability concerns listed<p>Forum Channels FAQ: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.discord.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6208479917079-Forum-Channels-FAQ" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.discord.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;6208479917079-...</a><p>Forum Channels are a type of channel that&#x27;s structured as a more traditional forum. It&#x27;s similar to channels that tried to enforce that everything is a thread, but much better.<p>* The top level shows posts only - no standalone messages<p>* Selecting a post opens the thread to the right - it&#x27;s very easy to browse posts and threads<p>* Posts are sorted by date or most recent activity<p>* There&#x27;s a tag system and you can quickly filter by tags<p>* There&#x27;s a combined new&#x2F;search field so you&#x27;re forced to see search results<p>* Your active post threads show up in the left nav section like other active threads, making it pretty easy to see new replies.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s the best forum system ever, but it&#x27;s pretty good and it&#x27;s right in Discord. And like another poster said, our users <i>want</i> Discord.

Must we beat this dead horse, AGAIN!?

I don&#x27;t have much of a choice, it&#x27;s what users want and it gives me the biggest footprint. It&#x27;s about being pragmatic rather than being religious for me.

If only discord had threaded conversations

MS Teams compared to Discord has imho a far superior implementation of the write once search forever paradigm.

there is a neat tool that makes it easier to find stuff on discord <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36383773">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36383773</a>

DISCORD IS A PLAYSKOOL PLATFORM FOR CHILDREN.

I think you should say the same about slack tbh.

I can just see people spamming emojis

Or use both? Why decide so early what works? Launch a discord server and create a dedicated forum and see which one gets most traction.

The offered alternatives do not meet the need that discord provides for a community.

I&#x27;m surprised he didn&#x27;t mention wikis - especially easy since they come with git(hub|lab).

This article looks like it was written by ChatGPT tbh. The arguments are kinda weak, borderline nonsensical.<p>&gt; Chaos Discord can be a whirlwind of madness. Important stuff you post can vanish into the ether within seconds, drowned by a never-ending stream of messages.<p>Already it looks like ChatGPT made a formatting mistake, what is &quot;Chaos Discord&quot;? Pretty sure it should says &quot;Chaos - Discord...&quot;<p>It also concedes that they made threads a thing, so the point is moot. This is followed up with<p>&gt; TERRIBLE Search and Discovery Trying to find past discussions or solutions in Discord is like trying to locate a needle in a haystack blindfolded and drunk.<p>Again there is no separation between the title and the content. And actually Discord search in my experience is really good. They can filter by media, link, text, user, and more. And this INCLUDES in threads. In comparison, have you tried searching through FAQs using Algolia or BBPost forum search in general? Those are truly awful.<p>&gt; The Discord Odyssey Picture this: You encounter a problem with a project that exclusively relies on Discord for support and questions.<p>Notice the continued formatting failure, a failure of copy-pasting from ChatGPT and not separating the title from the content!<p>This point is about all the restrictions and actions needed, but fails to address that users are already logged in and often have Discord open, and instead comes with some ? nonsensical example of installing a js library?<p>And finally<p>&gt; Waaaay too ephemeral Here’s a curveball for you: what if Discord decides to pull the plug?<p>This is interesting but, how you can really tell it&#x27;s ChatGPT is that the examples it provides as solutions below ALSO suffer this problem. Here are the options provided in the article.<p>&gt; Dedicated Community Forums - Check out platforms like Discourse.<p>Again I&#x27;m pretty sure the search is worse, and it literally doesn&#x27;t solve any of the other problems.<p>&gt; Lean on the Pros - Websites like Stack Overflow or communities on Reddit<p>Yeah I&#x27;m not sure how you&#x27;re going to use Stack Overflow as a Q&amp;A for your own product. And again, WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?<p>&gt; Git It Done - If you’re dealing with code issues, rely on GitHub, Gitlab, Gitea, or any other Git-based issue tracking system<p>Actually not a bad idea if your audience is technical, but again WHAT IF THEY DECIDE TO PULL THE PLUG?<p>Finally, nothing is more obvious than when ChatGPT says its signature &quot;REMEMBER, BLAHBLAHBLAH&quot;, and lo and behold:<p>&gt; Remember, Discord is great &amp; all but as a Q&amp;A forum ...<p>Personally, I&#x27;m 90% sure this is a ChatGPT generated low quality article. Even though it sparked some discussion here, I&#x27;m flagging this article, and I did not enjoy the article for the content.

I&#x27;m building (with a fellow HNer) a publicly accessible Matrix server with forum-like features. Hoping to make it a decent foss alternative to discord and other closed-off community apps. [0]<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shpong.com&#x2F;shpong" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shpong.com&#x2F;shpong</a>

Maybe not, but uh... forums are not the easiest things to maintain without a lot of moderation tools at your disposal. Not when they get to a certain size. Unless you want half of your day job to be implementing forum features, I suggest purchasing a license to one that already exists for your own sanity&#x27;s sake. And if it runs PHP and has the ability to use Akismet, learn to configure it.