News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ziml77 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:58AM (#28550566)
I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability but also because it's difficult to have multiple identities with Discord. It's frustrating to be looking for help with using some library and seeing in the readme a link to join their Discord server. I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming Discord servers so I usually just give up at that point.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:56AM (#28551843)
> I don't want to join those with the same identity I use in gaming

xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by screye on Thursday September 16, 2021 @01:20PM (#28554496)
I agree with seneca. HN os one of the last places on the internet to have serious civil discussions. The absence of low effort meme jokes is one of the ways it soft discourages people from opening the gates to memeery.

I'd rather rather compromise on a couple of laughs than see HN become a generic reddit like forum / social network.

Just may 2 cents

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by TulliusCicero on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:19PM (#28556046)
Dunno what you're getting at here, GP was making a real point in a tongue-in-cheek way, it's not a "low effort meme joke".
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sillysaurusx on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:09PM (#28557642)
If they're making a point, I don't understand it. They seem to be ridiculing someone for trying to protect their identity. Any famous person will be acutely aware of how problematic it can be to "just join a server as your real identity."

I've had similar problems. I fully agree with the other commenter: if you have a point, just say it minus the cheek.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ravi-delia on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:36PM (#28559190)
It was a point agreeing with the person they were replying too. The social rules of technical communities and informal gaming communities are very different, and the commenter highlighted that. I wouldn't want the same name in a technical and gaming community for basically that reason.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:28AM (#28563085)
> They seem to be ridiculing someone for trying to protect their identity.

As mentioned in another comment: Quite the opposite.

Discord should easily allow to have completely separate identities with no connection to each other at all.

If that's not possible and there's the risk of mixing up my private life and whatnot with my work life, Discord should not be the place/service to use.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by stjohnswarts on Friday September 17, 2021 @03:16AM (#28562239)
You did miss the point then, they were not ridiculing the person they were pointing out how such a thing happens on discord.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by iratewizard on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:31PM (#28559152)
HN has not been a serious place for civil discussions in a long time. Users are now actively hostile towards opinions that don't score well on reddit. A larger percentage of posts contribute little to the discussion. Many of the early members who helped shape the community have left. The "interesting" posts that are supposed to make up the front page have steadily gone down in quality.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:31AM (#28563109)
Sounds like a generic "it was better in the older times" comment, which is highly subjective to your perception.

I don't see how this contributtes to the civil discussion we are trying to have here on an interesting post.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by iratewizard on Friday September 17, 2021 @12:28PM (#28567423)
3 posts up and you're making a pussy destroyer joke. I invite you to go back and look at posts from 2013. Tally the redditor-style lame jokes and unsolicited opinion posts against the paragraphs of industry experience.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by screye on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:51PM (#28560278)
I have expressed a good few heterodox opinions on HN that are accepted without vitriol. So, I am not sure I agree.

HN expects you to be civil, and abide by the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence " paradigm. I find them to be reasonable requirements.

If you'd like to express more heterodox views then there are a few rationalist-adjacent splinter groups around the internet with excellent discourse over a wide range of opinions. Each splinter group has different overton windows, but they're all of a really high quality.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Bjartr on Thursday September 16, 2021 @02:07PM (#28555053)
Not a complete solution, but for those who might not know, Discord allows you to choose a name per-server.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by penagwin on Thursday September 16, 2021 @02:13PM (#28555125)
The user id though will burn you though. People who use something like BetterDiscord will be able to easily spot it (as well as your join date).

I'd recommend just using the browser to make an alt.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by bgro on Saturday September 18, 2021 @09:31PM (#28580921)
Some servers I'm in has notifications when you join, and then if you ever leave it also has a passive aggressive notification like "OK BYE I guess!!"

Mods in smaller communities frequently greet everyone. If you pop in to check something then leave, you might as well @everyone that they're not good enough for you so you're out.

That said, Threads seem like they could have some functionality in some technical discords.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by qualudeheart on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:31AM (#28561601)
Elsewhere in this thread I’ve claimed people should use the web app with a password manager. Sometimes you’ll get a “new login detected” thing and be asked to authenticate your current ip address via email. That can be a headache when switching accounts but you can easily just use an email client which supports multiple email addresses without having to manually log in and out again.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by PenguinCoder on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:53PM (#28557434)
Too much friction for some tasks. Forums and their features/flaws are better than Discord for some things.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by andrewzah on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:58PM (#28556670)
Only if the guild allows nicknames to be set manually. Not all do. And your actual username when @ mentioned still is the same.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Zababa on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:42PM (#28557287)
Please don't ridicule people that are trying to protect their identity.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:25AM (#28563069)
I don't, quite the opposite.

I think that's a very valid concern and I think it's a actually problem when Discord does not allow you to have different identities or switch easily between them without any connection at all.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Zababa on Friday September 17, 2021 @06:23AM (#28563520)
Sorry for misinterpreting your message then.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Friday September 17, 2021 @09:24AM (#28565188)
No problem at all!
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Cosmin_C on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:18AM (#28552131)
I think that's ~xXN0oBMa573r69Xx~ tho.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by seneca on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:04AM (#28551935)
> xXx~Pu55yDe5troy3r69~xXx, is this you? I saw you the other day on the StackOverflow Discord where you were helping me with my HTML-RegEx! Thanks again!

Please don't make posts like this here.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by martin_a on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:13AM (#28552068)
Yeah, sorry, that RegEx-topic is really not for those with a weak heart. I'll use an XML parser instead.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by lp0_on_fire on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:15AM (#28552105)
but have have you tried using rust??
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by cultofmetatron on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:54AM (#28552613)
a good portion of discord is using a combination of elixir and rust actually
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by cultofmetatron on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @01:42PM (#28619350)
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by indigodaddy on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:16AM (#28552111)
Good point
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by indigodaddy on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:41PM (#28559249)
Pls downvote me more for no good reason
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by trutannus on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:13AM (#28552063)
Not even that. I just don't want to have to join a chat group to get documentation or ask questions. If I don't know the sorts of people in the server, joining is not generally something I'd be super comfortable with.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ziml77 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:40AM (#28552422)
That's certainly another barrier. As someone very socially anxious, it can be difficult to muster the courage to join a real-time conversation. Making forum posts is a lot easier.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by neither_color on Thursday September 16, 2021 @01:39PM (#28554688)
I also resent that discord/slack are companies that own their platforms, whereas IRC/Usenet/phpBB/etc were all software anyone could own and operate their own instance of. Sure you can have your own discord server, but youre still subject to the whims of Discord Inc. While they may not have done anything notably bad yet(I think there was a mini controversy with wallstreetbets but I didnt follow that story closely), but it's still centralization where it wasnt there before. Would you be ok with X Corporation you dont like buying Discord for cash tomorrow, even if they promise not to change any rules? Or does it make you feel easy to think about what they could do ? The Microsoft offer certainly scared some people.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by extralobe on Thursday September 16, 2021 @07:56PM (#28559384)
You can't have your own Discord server. Discord servers are not servers, they're partitions on Discord's own server.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by TulliusCicero on Friday September 17, 2021 @03:45AM (#28562440)
That's also exactly why Discord was successful, though: because it's a centralized, owned thing. Open source doesn't always win.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by cblconfederate on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:03AM (#28550614)
and then you have the godawful bots. Try to join a server, get spammed by 5 different bots that want to verify your identity. And so many different rules when you just want to ask a question. Kafka would be proud
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Meekro on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:29AM (#28553059)
As someone who runs one of those Discord servers, let me say that the rules have a purpose. Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel). Or they'll @-message or PM every mod. Or their attitude will be nasty, treating volunteer helpers like a personal servant. There will be posted rules saying not to do these things, but they'll do them anyway.

When a mod confronts them over a violation, they'll say something like "Oh. Sorry. But now that I have your attention, can you help me with this quick thing?" Mods who deal with this stuff over and over will start getting tyrannical with their rule-enforcement, and I don't blame them.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by prepend on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:39PM (#28553979)
I feel for mods, having moderated digital stuff for decades.

But this seems like a problem of your own making.

If users keep doing the same thing over and over, then the problem probably isn’t the users but the forum.

I think this is because discord was designed for deep users and groups of friends who had lots of preexisting context as well as a desire to be part of something longstanding.

Support forums are for people with no context and don’t want to join anything, they just need help. So making someone join a server, with specific rules they don’t give a shit about results in these problems.

There needs to be a “read only” mode that lets me read a server and explore without joining. This is a strength of forums, mailing list archives, and even IRC.

Mods complaining about modding hard stuff because they set it up to be hard doesn’t warrant much empathy from me.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Meekro on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:53PM (#28554166)
I get what you mean, and I agree with you that Discord shouldn't be a company's primary support system. I also haven't heard of any companies that do this.

The issues I described come up when you have a community that occasionally offers help. For example, there might be a Discord devoted to a game mod. People can gather there to hang out with the mod developers or just talk about gaming. They sometimes answer newbie questions, too. If you come to take advantage of their generosity, you should do it with the right attitude and respect-- just like if you show up at a game shop in real life hoping someone will teach you how to play Dungeons & Dragons.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by prepend on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:19PM (#28559562)
Right, but this is not a problem for IRC which sort of does the same thing.

And IRC has solved this problem for like what 40 years. The issue, I think, is discord servers have variable and unintuitive rules that users fail to understand.

I think I like protocols that follow the robustness principle in being accepting of lots of different inputs.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by mnd999 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:40AM (#28553217)
This sounds like it could be easily solved using a forum instead of discord.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by WorldMaker on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:37PM (#28553941)
Forums had all the same rules and rule enforcements for moderation. (Agree to the community rules, agree to the community terms of service, verify your email account, for the first few hours/days of your account you see only a curated subsection of the forums, etc.) It's a lot of the complexity in forum software that accumulated over time because it wasn't handled by "third party bots" and instead had to be baked into the forum app itself, which lead in part to why forum software is so hard to build/run/host because for a good, well moderated forum you need all of those moderation tools and generally can't just bolt them on with a "Forum Bot" from someone who isn't the forum software's author.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by vikingerik on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:04PM (#28553514)
This has already happened. That forum is Reddit, for quite a large proportion of niche hobbies where someone would come in and ask a question.

And it has the same problems of one-way escalating moderator strictness.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by _jal on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:00PM (#28553457)
This is one reason why I always look at how support is handled when choosing software. If I run in to this, I'll go look at the next thing on my list.

I'm not trying to downplay the problems you run in to, I've seen all of this and worse. It just seems that you chose tooling that doesn't work well for actually managing support, so you have to beat your users into the right shape to fit your software.

Godspeed, I guess.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Meekro on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:42PM (#28554029)
If we're talking about formal support for a paid product, I agree with you. But I don't actually know any companies that use Discord as their primary support system, usually it'll be email or some sort of ticket system. Sometimes small internet companies will have a public Discord as well, and you might even be able to get questions answered there, but I can't think of any cases where they actually promote it as the primary support system.

I was referring to things like open source software, game mods, photography enthusiast communities, etc. These kinds of communities are often on Discord these days, and suffer from the problems I mentioned previously. These lead to heavy-handed moderation.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ajuc on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:34AM (#28553135)
> Lots of people will jump in and post their question in the first channel they happen to see without looking into which channel would be appropriate (or worse, post it in every channel)

That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by WorldMaker on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:43PM (#28554030)
People would do the same thing in forums: spam their question in the first or possibly every "board" whether it looked appropriate or not. The moderation needs don't change that much between chat and forum.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ajuc on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:11PM (#28555940)
Expectation in different media differ even if technically they can be used in the same way. Nobody uses search on discord chat. Google doesn't index discord chats. You cannot easily link to a discord message from 10 years ago nor quote it permanently. It's ephemeral for all intents and purposes.

Meanwhile people mostly arrive at forums from google searches and link to posts without thinking about it.

It's the difference between writing a book and giving a speech. Imagine if we started burning books because people can just talk over a phone. That's what replacing forums with discord is.

Moving from forums to discord is another step in destroying everything that made open web great. It's sad that people don't even understand what they are losing.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by WorldMaker on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:26PM (#28557079)
Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors.

For what it is worth, Discord does have permalinks to old messages. You definitely aren't going to find a 10 year old link today in large part because Discord hasn't been around 10 years yet, but I've copy and pasted Discord permalinks before to get points across and I have friends that use it for answering FAQs (have notes full of Discord links to copy/paste to answer common questions).

For what it is worth, there are users that use search on Discord (including the sorts that copy/paste the permalinks to answer FAQs). Maybe "nobody" thinks to "search first" is a truism, but even then I've seen plenty of forums full of the exact same users that never think to search first when they enter a forum and go directly to asking a question previously answered many times before. (Even when they arrive in a forum from a google search on that very question, people like/prefer the immediacy/power/relationship of folks responding directly to them than a canned answer.)

I'm not saying Discord is particularly great at some of these use cases or even the right answer, but they are very comparable and it's definitely nothing like burning books to chat over a phone. (That's a really broken analogy for several reasons.)

(ETA: If there is something to criticize Discord here for, it's much more the centralizing force problem that old forums used to be distributed across every style of web host in the old web, but Discord is a single for-profit point of failure for so many eggs to be put in one basket.)

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by baud147258 on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:03AM (#28562935)
> Google doesn't index most moderated forums either. They've always been walled gardens to avoid bad behaviors.

forums don't necessarily need to block search engine crawlers to prevent bad behavior, that would most likely be done with restrictions on account registration or limitation on what new users can post (one forum I am on hides posts from new account until they've been reviewed by a mod)

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by cblconfederate on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:35PM (#28556286)
for all of those reasons you're better off with a forum. plus the lack of expectation for instant replies will discourage those users from spamming all threads
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by xwdv on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:38AM (#28553176)
You know why volunteer helpers get treated like servants? Because people are looking for answers, now. And there’s so many pointless barriers in the way, it’s maddening. Imagine if instead of Google being a search engine the way it is now where you get results damn near instantly, you instead had to jump into some big Google chat room and ask someone a question and wait some undefined amount of time to get a response, and often a useless one.

People are in a hurry, if you’re not giving them what they want, then just get the fuck out of the way.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by LocalH on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:59PM (#28554241)
This viewpoint is entitled as fuck, communities do not exist to serve you
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by xwdv on Thursday September 16, 2021 @02:32PM (#28555354)
Believe me, I have zero desire to interact with “communities” when I am just trying to passively look up some quick information.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by price on Thursday September 16, 2021 @02:48PM (#28555602)
Then don't.

If you aren't willing to interact with people as humans, that doesn't give you the right to treat them as tools. The people who are interested in talking about some game mod don't owe you the ability to quickly look up information about it.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by xwdv on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:26PM (#28556164)
Why would they delete a forum and force people to go to a discord if they aren’t willing to serve?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by chowells on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:51PM (#28557404)
Running a forum sucks. Why would you do that when your community is better served by other tools?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by LocalH on Friday September 17, 2021 @12:57PM (#28567791)
Running a Discord of any size sucks too, to be fair. I run a small (<1000) Discord related to hacking of a video game engine, and even the amount of drama that my server has encountered is sometimes quite unnerving. I plan on expanding it with a forum and/or a wiki in the coming months, because Discord is unsuitable for long term preservation of content. I consider Discord a more modern version of IRC, in a practical sense. Great for real-time communication, bad for long-form content and long-term preservation.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by xwdv on Friday September 17, 2021 @05:33AM (#28563126)
Sucks for admins but great for users. I guess they just want to pass on the suckage to the end user.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by nkotov on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:29AM (#28551515)
100% in the same boat. I don't want my gaming identity to be related to my day-to-day work. If I see a product/tool has a community Slack, I'd be more open to joining that.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by bluetidepro on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:14AM (#28550750)
> I hate that everyone is using Discord not just because of searchability...

I personally have found the search on Discord to be very robust and good, actually. I'm curious to see why you are saying it's not searchable?

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Denvercoder9 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:19AM (#28550790)
It's searchable if you've already found the Discord server and are in it. You won't find any of it if you're doing a web search.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by loa_in_ on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:22AM (#28550808)
You can search across unjoined servers from within Discord.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by joconde on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:57AM (#28551125)
It's still out of reach of traditional search engines like Google, right? Stack Overflow and other forums have the huge advantage of being indexable by outside services.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by hachari on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:03AM (#28551182)
Really? I’ve never found a good single source for discovering servers, only ever find expired links buried on old posts online
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by loa_in_ on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:48PM (#28554108)
Yes. Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final entry is "Discover"
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by hu3 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:41AM (#28550975)
That's neat. How do I proceed to do that?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by loa_in_ on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:44PM (#28554055)
Scroll all the way down on your server list and the final entry is "Discover"
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by amelius on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:05AM (#28551203)
This sounds like something Google would want to fix ASAP. Are they talking to Discord about the issue?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by 5560675260 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:42AM (#28552445)
Many, probably most, Discord servers operate under assumption that discussions are private and are limited to invited users. Making all of these discussions public would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by lghh on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:24AM (#28551451)
But then you run into the problem of having one username across Discord "servers". I don't want what I say on servers with my friends to be easily cross-searchable from what I say on a "server" for some software development library.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ziml77 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:16AM (#28552119)
I've thought before about how Discord could deal with this. Ideally we would be able to set up aliases, and when joining a server get to select which alias is used. They would have to look externally in every way like they were distinct accounts including when friending or DMing people.

Alternatively, in the UI they could let you sign in to multiple accounts and then provide another layer of tabs to let you switch between those. That would help keep things organized but also can make navigation more difficult by adding another level to the navigation tree.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by somnic on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:50AM (#28553339)
Easy account switching is the sort of thing that browser extensions would have been developed to cover in the past, something like like RES for Reddit or XKit for Tumblr.

That's obviously less relevant when a majority of users are using desktop or mobile apps rather than browsers, but a plugin interface even for closed-source commercial desktop software used to be far more common than it is now, leaving users dependent on the development team to add features and usability.

I assume this decline is due to security concerns, wanting to be able to develop faster internally rather than needing to continue supporting old APIs for external developers, and marketplaces like Google Play and the App Store not wanting to enable competing marketplaces within the apps they distribute. It's a tradeoff to be sure, and I'm not sure moving past plugin functionality is a bad thing, but I find it a bit sad.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by meheleventyone on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:07AM (#28551983)
You can set your username and avatar per server and people can only see your mutual communities AFAIK.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by formerly_proven on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:28AM (#28552275)
Discord accounts have hidden (until someone uses a bunch of hacking tools known as "dev tools") IDs which uniquely identify an account and never change. The username#1234 stuff is pure fluff. The per-server thing is also just an alias on the server, it still shows the foo#1234 name if you click on a profile.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by elliekelly on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:10AM (#28551268)
I hope not. I can’t think of anything that would make me leave Discord faster.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by loxias on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:20AM (#28551404)
Sounds like it's time to write a Discord crawler...
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by slightwinder on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:13AM (#28552060)
That won't work. Discord is pretty eager in protecting their data. They even kill legit bot-abilities to prevent people from harming their space. But to be fair, discord-space is also very toxic and borderline in some content, with phising and other attacks are being quite common. So it's justified that they protect their customers.

I guess if a big name like Google would ask them and ensures that privacy is preserved, they might cooperate to some degree.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by benatkin on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:37AM (#28553168)
Search engines are a big deal, so much so that I could see crawling with a browser extension or browser automation. However, Discord also discourages use of the web app.

How about if when the app's data is fully locked down, people start recording their screens and OCRing them? Incentivize it somehow. That way at least content that the participating users viewed would be indexed. Then you get back to trying to block people from recording their own screen with software, and after that hardware[1]. Never ending cat and mouse game.

1: https://pallycon.com/blog/choose-your-weapon-to-fight-screen... (see "Screen recording using camera")

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by slightwinder on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:26PM (#28553779)
Of course, will it be always possible to catch data some way. But it's a difference whether you actively work against the company and must invest money and time into it, or not.

And outside the technical level, discord also has the legal way. They can try to shut down your service, remove your code from public space and make you sink more time and money in an uphill-battle.

This is the same battle people are fighting against all walled gardens. And so far the gardens usually win. So someone taking on that fight, should be aware of this.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ziml77 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:23AM (#28550815)
Because the only way to find info on a Discord server is to join the Discord server. That means the info is hidden from standard search engines and that even just to see the info I need to reveal myself to the Discord server.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by raxxorrax on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:08AM (#28551987)
You will never find content from Discord in any system outside of it. It is an isolated island.

New users will have difficulties finding any discussion.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by tpxl on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:01AM (#28552693)
The search straight up doesn't work. You have to search for an exact word or it wont find it, ie 'hell' wont find the word 'hello'.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ntauthority on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:19AM (#28551381)
There's no global search across all your DMs and guilds you are in either.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by mithusingh32 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:25AM (#28552228)
Or group servers for a search query. This simple feature would be a game changer.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by anticensor on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:01PM (#28557540)
How would that work, in terms of retrieval? Each guild is operated by a particular instance of the guilds server in a many-to-one fashion.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by baud147258 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:19AM (#28550788)
are discord servers indexed by search engines the same way regular forums are?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ganzuul on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:54AM (#28553384)
> searchability

Forum representation is search results on Google in particular is abysmal. The way Google misrepresents the information mankind has created is actively making us less intelligent.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by topspin on Thursday September 16, 2021 @04:47PM (#28557347)
At least there IS a representation. Once some clue is found one need only go from there to the primary source and its native representation. What's so horrible about that?

Stuff squirreled away in some discord server effectively doesn't exist outside of Discord's gamer chat platform. I'll take a poor representation that doesn't involve logging in and searching multiple platforms over essentially anything. What good are forums that don't appear in common search engines?

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by heinrich5991 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:07AM (#28551227)
You can open Discord in a private window in you browser to get another identity. On Linux, I can also recommend firejail with the --private= flag which allows you to have unlimited instances (well, limited by your RAM).
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sascha_sl on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:16AM (#28551352)
Please do not use firejail. The code used to have, and probably still has, very amateurish security flaws (like trusting the USER env var) and should definitely not have SUID, especially now that linux is getting unprivileged namespacing.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ayushnix on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:22AM (#28551425)
I frankly don't understand what to trust when it comes to sandboxing in Linux.

On the one hand, there are SUID binaries like Firejail and on the other, we have bubblewrap which uses unprivileged user namespaces, also used by Podman and Docker rootless containers. However, linux-hardened disables unprivileged user namespaces by default and the Arch Wiki has warnings plastered all over the Podman page about potential security risks of using unpriv user namespaces.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sascha_sl on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:32AM (#28551552)
I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend firejail), considering the audience of RedHat (particularly some government agencies)
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by maccolgan on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:44AM (#28551688)
Security by authority must be one of the worst things in 2021, perhaps they are optimizing for DevEx (or whatever) rather than security.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by formerly_proven on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:26AM (#28552242)
Well yeah, and Microsoft is the world's most experienced software company and a superscaler who really knows how to secure infrastructure well, you really can't hope to compete with their security teams, right up to the part where their images come with a garbage port of their WMI garbage containing uncountably infinite LPEs and RCEs running with uid=0.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ayushnix on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:54PM (#28558197)
> I personally trust RedHat more with setting good defaults than random ArchLinux users (that also recommend firejail)

You speak as if these "random Arch Linux users" have written their opinions on the wiki rather than reasonable conclusions based on how unprivileged user namespaces have been a source security vulnerabilities in the past and is still seen as a security risk.

Maybe try not to let your bias get in the way?

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by raxxorrax on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:00AM (#28551886)
Systems that have implemented stricter sandboxing are in general far less trustworthy and I think the security discussion went out of scope here.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by loxias on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:20AM (#28551398)
Thanks for the heads up! Is there anything (packaged easily for Debian) you'd recommend instead?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sascha_sl on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:27AM (#28551485)
Your sibling comment has a few good ones.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by i_am_proteus on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:53AM (#28551798)
Firefox Multi-Account Containers work for this too.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sleibrock on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:21AM (#28552174)
Agreed. I used to use Firefox Profiles like above comments may mention, but multi-account containers are great and far easier to use than re-launching Firefox instances. Simply click "Re-open this tab in..." while being on the Discord page to open up another account.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by snassar on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:49AM (#28551756)
Does one really need a jailed or chrooted instance when you can just create profiles?

firefox -P <profilename>

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Izkata on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:53AM (#28551789)
For that matter, Firefox has "open in new private window" as a built-in option on its right-click context menu for links.

Also I have a "work" container I use for this type of thing, so that's also an option in my context menu.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by chupasaurus on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:54PM (#28556612)
The profiles have a separate history, password store, settings and extensions as a bonus.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Asraelite on Thursday September 16, 2021 @08:05AM (#28550633)
This is true of a few other services too like Instagram and Twitter. Firefox containers are useful here, but it's a bit harder with native clients and mobile.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by floatingatoll on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:53PM (#28554162)
That is a feature to forum admins, because it means no longer having to deal with sock puppets, or at worst reporting them to Discord who then takes action to protect the platform.

We've had twenty years of pseudonymous identities on the Internet and we've put the social fabric of humanity at risk. The needle is swinging towards "you get one identity, use it wisely" and I think that has absolutely been earned by those who abused pseudonymity to hurt others. No doubt the needle will swing back someday, and I will look forward to that once I've had a few years' break from the tragedy of today.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by true_religion on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:10AM (#28551253)
Why can’t you have multiple accounts? I have three: open source, gaming, personal.

It’s not like social media where you are required to have only one account and link it to your real name.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by devwastaken on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:22AM (#28552973)
It's against TOS, and some servers use "alt finding" bots, which search all the servers you're in. and totally won't spy on you /s
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by sco1 on Friday September 17, 2021 @09:41PM (#28572808)
> It's against TOS

Is it? I can see this being the case for malicious conduct, but they have stated [1] that it's not a violation to have multiple accounts (granted, this was 4 years ago).

1. https://twitter.com/discord/status/845734517004488705

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by elurg on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:30AM (#28551525)
Doesn't it require a phone number for validation?
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by raxxorrax on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:14AM (#28552081)
There are services for virtual phone numbers that still work. I expect many users to use them because you won't tie your ID to your account, even if many users have been groomed to share that by now.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by jayshua on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:43AM (#28551678)
Last I tried you could reuse the same phone number to verify multiple accounts. There's just a cooldown period after each verification before the same number can be used again.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Red_Leaves_Flyy on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:16AM (#28552113)
So your accounts will be retroactively and publicly correlated for time immemorial when discord’s database gets dumped?

Using phone numbers for human verification is lazy and needlessly intrusive.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by true_religion on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:28AM (#28552264)
I don’t thinks so… it’s relatively difficult to get different phone numbers so it’s a good way to limit spam.

Plus in the real world, it’s also a way of separating your identities. I have a work number and personal number, and only attach the work number to business services. Sure, it won’t prevent Google from banning all your accounts but for everyone else it’s a hard barrier to correlating that you are the same person. Added to the fact that my work laptop uses VPN, and I’m pretty sure that sites like GitHub have no idea I have multiple accounts.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by ziml77 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:20AM (#28552166)
Does Discord store the number alongside your account? The smart way to prevent issues with associating accounts by phone number is to only store the link up until the account is verified. After that, they don't need the number linked to the account. The number just has to be stored in a list alongside the last time it successfully validated an account, and then only stay in there until the cooldown period expires.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by mindslight on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:53AM (#28552597)
Given that the smart way is to not ask for phone numbers in the first place, I wouldn't assume anything.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by anticensor on Thursday September 16, 2021 @05:03PM (#28557564)
It does.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by mlok on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:27AM (#28553016)
Firefox Multi-Accounts Containers might help a lot in this case : https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multi-account-co...
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by denimnerd42 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:31AM (#28553089)
seemed that a great idea but in reality it's a hassle :/
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Stevvo on Thursday September 16, 2021 @02:24PM (#28555251)
It's a native feature in Chrome.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by tristan957 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @03:35PM (#28556291)
Firfox containers are not the same thing as separate Chrome accounts.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by uyt on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:03AM (#28552709)
I think they also force phone verification if you make multiple accounts connecting from the same ip. I don't want to run VPN just for a throwaway discord account and I don't know how to get burner phone numbers.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by qualudeheart on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:35AM (#28561631)
Burner phones: you just ask privacy focused communities wether someone has successfully used a given VOIP service to sign up for something.

You can also just buy a burner sim card. Either way it’ll only cost you a few dollars.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by evandale on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:20AM (#28552947)
I set up multiple chrome profiles and use different Discord users that way.

On Android you can use an app such as App Cloner to create a new Discord app and even give the icon a custom colour.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by haliskerbas on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:34AM (#28553127)
I completely agree with this. For a while I’d have a second device for different discord identities. I really hope they add this support natively because I use discord in so many different contexts with real people and online strangers.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by chakkepolja on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:14AM (#28552086)
At worst case can you use something like cookie containers or separate user profiles of chrome?

I have more reasons to dislike discord (too bloated for my network, android app not good), by the way.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by Qub3d on Thursday September 16, 2021 @11:40AM (#28553199)
If Discord could implement a "workspace" (or game-space or whatever) similar to slack, that would make me a lot more comfortable joining various servers.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by wodenokoto on Friday September 17, 2021 @02:48AM (#28562068)
Discord works quite well on the web, so I have beeing toying with the idea of managing discord IDs using firefox container tabs.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by lucasverra on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:59AM (#28552663)
>Discord not just because of searchability

is it like slack that limit to < 10K messages on free spaces? Or Search is limitless?

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by clay10 on Thursday September 16, 2021 @12:08PM (#28553562)
Its limitless but not very good.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by qualudeheart on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:29AM (#28561576)
Just use the web app on desktop with a password manager.

Unlimited identities switchable with a few mouse clicks.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by danaris on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:25AM (#28551464)
Apparently someone on Discord is paying attention, because I just now updated my copy, and a popup came up drawing attention to their new feature: different nicknames per server!

Edit: Ignore me; see reply.

Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by rjbwork on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:30AM (#28551520)
This has been a feature as long as I remember (I've been using it since late 2015). The nickname is still tied to your name#dddd account identifier. And if someone checks your profile, they can still see mutual servers and friends. GP is asking for multiple accounts, not nicknames.
Re:Please stop closing forums and moving people to Discord by danaris on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:37AM (#28551598)
*blinks*

You're right. Apparently the new part of the feature must be the ability for those with Nitro (the paid tier) to change their avatar per server. (At least, I'm guessing so; I've never had Nitro so I don't know if that was already available.)

This is what I get for posting too early in the morning.