Comment by usrbinbash
3 years ago
The age old question between convenience and safety.
Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.
Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
But the ones who need to "gorge on it" can't, because there is no good way to extract, catalogue, organize, archive, or search it.
Yes documentation isn't sexy. It's boring, it's tedious, and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to do it. And it's also key to a projects long term viability. If the only documentation for a project is "the discord", I won't use it, even if an alternative is a less optima technical fit.
Because if I have to come back to fix an issue 2 years later, and I need the documentation, I'd rather read a badly maintained, badly formatted 90s style HTML-ony page, than stare in frustration at an info telling me the discord channel no longer exists.