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.
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.
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.
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.
And it has the same problems of one-way escalating moderator strictness.
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.
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.
That's a big reason why forums are better for Q&A.
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.
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.)
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)
People are in a hurry, if you’re not giving them what they want, then just get the fuck out of the way.
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.