Comment by bovermyer
5 years ago
There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord group, though.
5 years ago
There are quite a few forum options out there. Maintaining them is much more time intensive than operating a Slack or Discord group, though.
Slack or Discord live in the current moment. It is hard to get back into discussion which started a week ago. Channels do not provide much historical value.
It's virtually impossible to do so in Slack, unless someone ponies up the cash, which is not viable for very large slacks.
It's very easy to do in Zulip, though, due to it being threaded-only and having great UX.
Not if you count the time needed to man the channel for it to be useful, though.
I agree with the fact that Slack/Discord are terrible for keeping track of things long-term, but I will say that once you've set Discord/Slack up and running, operating it is typically pretty smooth - you've already likely got Slack and Discord running, and you can check it every so often.
Granted, things can completely explode, and moderation is still a requirement, but that's true of forums as well.
(Although due to their async nature, things boil over much more slowly, and it's typically easier to just put the entire forum or a user into a timeout.)
We use Discourse's hosted solution and it's effectively zero maintenance
Why not use a facebook page? Super easy to maintain and some moderation
Not the person you are replying to, but I would think that in this day that the answer to that question for most people would be "because it's Facebook". Giving more data over to their walled garden is probably not palatable for most people, regardless of the network effect.
basic privacy, ethics
Setting up a Discourse seems pretty easy from what I can tell. Seems like it's as easy as setting up a cloud instance and running a docker container.
Discourse does need a server and it's resource-hungry, but I cant say there any problem in maintaining it at all. Yeah, once in a few months it's worth to check for spam notifications and click to upgrade.
But overall all you need to do is setup it properly once and configure some backups sync.
Again, you need to pay like $10-15 / month for server to host it and backups.