Comment by eschaton
3 years ago
Forums have the same problem of locking up knowledge, and they also keep out anyone who doesn’t want to constantly visit a web site.
Mailing lists and newsgroups are the proper mechanisms for this. And you should be able to use them with a browser forum-style too.
While some forums do lock information behind registration-barriers, it's rare, whereas every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier. It's far, far worse for anyone who doesn't want to be part of your community or install an app just to be able to read the docs or download a patch or ask a question.
>every discord is locked behind a email+cell phone barrier
Unless it's changed recently users can enter Discord communities without an email via an invite link*, just choosing a username. It's what made onboarding so easy and similar to just joining an IRC server with a nick.
What's been ironic is since Freenode had their spam issues years back there was a push among many channels on that network to allow only registered users (ie: email tied to nicks) to post, which has continued over in the migration to the Libera network and I find really unfortunate for such channels of those networks as low friction and less permanence in ties to identity have been a distinguishing feature of IRC. (Obviously this doesn't affect IRC broadly but those are among the largest networks for tech communities).
* Eg: https://discord.gg/blender
I just tried doing this and was immediately met by a "you must verify your account by phone" screen.
2 replies →
I have joined 2 discords in the last week (as lots of 'community support' seems to be moving there these days). I set a username but I haven't had to supply any other info - I can't post anything and there's a banner saying I need to claim the account to avoid losing access but it's definitely not every discord which requires a verified account.
Doesn't help with the issues around searching for data from outside of discord.
Discord randomly (e.g. when a black box ML algorithm scores you naughty or if you just happen to log in from an ip that someone "bad" used) requires you to provide a valid mobile phone number before you can access anything.
That depends on the forum. Most forums could be searched and posts found via your search engine of choice. Well, the current crop of forums (discourse) prevents that with being JS based, but I would not count it as a good forum anyway.
I have no idea why so many choose to run a forum using discourse. It's the worst forum software I have seen.