I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.
I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).
Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability.<p>The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.
Laravel does this with their Laracasts forum and it's great. It's the first place I seek answers for it, before ChatGPT and before StackOverflow.<p>You simply can't beat well moderated public forums when it comes to historic search.
For me, Reddit is basically my forum of choice (yes, the "old" version is in fact a forum).<p>You can concat several subreddits together that recreate the forum experience of yesteryear. For instance one of the many I follow daily:<p><a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+msp+sysadmin+sysadminjobs/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+m...</a><p>Not the greatest but it gets the job done (mostly)
Hoping someone was going to show a phpbb or vbulletin theme that makes it look like slack if you are logged in, and look like pinterst / instagram / tiktok - when logged out.<p>Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to move a lot of people back into forums - they just expect the threads and thumbs to look different on mobile.
I've been part of an open source project for well over 2 years now. We use Slack for community management (3k users). It's pretty clear to me that Slack was never really meant to replace forums:<p>- Lots of the previously answered questions are lost<p>- Search is not great and is limited to Slack. We have many non-slack users searching through Google.<p>- It's noisy with random chatter<p>- It's harder for us to keep track of questions to answer.<p>I think Slack is great for really small communities or for new products that need quick feedback but not for large community management.
From the article:<p>> Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS.<p>Wanted to leave a link here for the impatient
<a href="https://strapi.io/" rel="nofollow">https://strapi.io/</a>
> useful solutions aren't searchable on our site or via Google.<p>And since their forum does not render without Javascript, it is still not archived on archive.org, and probably not searchable with Bing or Duckduckgo
It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum.<p>Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?
Slack is reviewing and canceling long-standing discounts these days, so there’s going to be many more instances where companies are no longer willing to pay $$ per user per month instead of hosting a forum.
Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.
I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them.<p>Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to.<p>I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they use Discourse[0]. It could work like a normal forum for users who don't participate in the Fediverse, but for those who do you could post from your existing Mastodon/Lemmy/etc ActivityPub account.<p>[0]: <a href="https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-activitypub-over-atproto/3707" rel="nofollow">https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-a...</a>
I've heard that Slack becomes gigantically costly once you hit certain thresholds. Another big community is moving away from it after spending nearly $0.5M a year just on Slack.
Wondering why they do not use GitHub discussions. Found it quite great to use. Also costs less to maintain raw money-wise.<p>Any negative opinions around GitHub discussions?
I think this is a good move (leaving Slack) but without knowing more internal info I think it could equally be a bad one.<p>The issue I see is they are building their own in-house solution. That’s a project in itself - and time not focusing on the core products.<p>It could have been mitigated if they used on off-the-shelf solution as a foundation, but instead they are re-inventing or rebuilding login/regi, user management, moderation, threads, etc from scratch - with the bugs that come with it. They at least considered it and would be interested to know their rationale.<p>That’s a lot of internal resources. Time will tell if it’s worth it.
Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source.<p><a href="https://www.answeroverflow.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.answeroverflow.com/</a>
The only chat community I enjoyed was stackoverflow chat. The early days, 2010-2015 I think. The UI was simple, no fancy stuffs. Very fast on mobile browser, no push notifications, no fancy avatars, reminds me of IRC.
Both forums and discord are really bad for finding quick answers. You enter a 40 page thread with post on post of speculation and "try this" - if you have more than 100 active users you need a voting system like Reddit or Stack Overflow. Otherwise the best content gets drowned out by the bad content.
Seriously, a critical issue when deciding to use a forum software is security. Once a software is popular (or insecure by default) you are required inviting hackes while you are sleeping.<p>Security is very expensive and few companies have the budget and the attitude to be continuously awake and proactive.
If someone wanna build an XMPP modern open source UI, we could could cooperate with building the missing features on the server side with MongooseIM.<p>The open source clients are currently pretty outdated. Matrix protocol has nice UI clients though, but not XMPP.
Awesome trend!<p>> Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS.<p>So, they did no research on actual modern forum software. Got it.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen a chat interface on top of the Discourse, or other, forum.<p>Discord introduced subject-based chats, but they seem secondary to the fire hose of the topic channels and not used much where I participate.
Duplication and painful search and information access seems so intentional in tools like Slack and Discord. And these feed each other in a vicious cycle.
XMPP would have been a nice substitute.
Will all the history record in plain text and grep'ability without having to write slack webhooks handlers to perform basic automation is a serious time saver and force multiplier.<p>I think the most troblesome aspect of Slack is the "highlighting" individuals.<p>Usually the most productive command during a typical work day is ... `killall slack` :)
A useful LLM-based product would be something that can scan discord discussions for "useful" information and replicate it in a forum format, for posterity, but ignore the mundane/trivial.
I've been using <a href="https://aihackers.ai" rel="nofollow">https://aihackers.ai</a> as my forum for the past few months for my own community (built on HN clone tool) - works very well for me.