Comment by taink
3 years ago
This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking!
> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.
Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!
> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.
Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!
> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.
Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.
There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.
It's better, but it still doesn't solve the preservation of "lore" issue : only preserving curated "knowledge".
For instance the failure mode of a detail that might not make it from discussed lore to actually preserved knowledge, but might be critical years later.
To be fair in practice I can't think of a good methodology to automate this selection.
This is probably something that would be determined much later, on a case-by-case basis... which is ideally solved by manually curating such knowledge. You lose some in the process but I'd argue something "critical" should bring attention to the necessity of its archiving.
My point is that you don't know at the moment everything that is going to be subjectively critical for the specific issue at hand years later.
But thankfully it's not so much of an issue, storage is cheap enough these days that ALL (human generated) text can be stored. Just don't use closed platforms like Discord, and 3rd party crawlers will do it for you.
(It's a bit more complicated for multimedia : we're probably at the point that ALL pictures, except the most high-resolution ones can be stored for cheap too, not sure for audio, probably animations too (just not as gifs, for the love of God!)... it's more complicated for video, especially HD and higher, since that is very storage-intensive...)