why anyone ever thought hyperactive gamer chat was the right way to offer community and support to their tech product is beyond me
I also don't want it in Slack - Slack is office chat for my job, I don't want to be adding random other stuff in there
Please just use a forum. Discourse seems to be the good/popular one.
Honestly it's a shame that forums aren't a big thing anymore.
I especially loved the look and feel of systems like phpBB or SMF forum software. Just really nice readability and usability, good organization of everything and pretty limited hardware requirements. I'd argue that even better in some ways than Discourse, despite its more modern look.
The only problem was that due to how they were deployed (and how many of the PHP codebases were structured), it was challenging to deal with updates and/or plugins.
Discourse is so horrible people would rather use Discord or Reddit - that's how horrible it is.
I think I recognise the Discourse forum software across several sites I've used (correct me if I'm wrong about any of these these someone!):
- https://forum.rescript-lang.org/
- https://discuss.huggingface.co/
- https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/
- https://discuss.pytorch.org/
- https://forum.strapi.io/ (maybe)
I don't know if it's a pain to run for maintainers or something, but as a user I have found the experience on these sites infinitely preferable to Discord
Thank god someone else like Linen is trying their shot at it, before Discourse kills forums by being terrible.
Genuinely don’t know how you prefer it to anything, the only thing it has over Discord is being searchable, the rest is obnoxious. The giant avatar bubbles, the random large numbers thrown everywhere, hiding easy to navigate features from forums in favor of endless scrolling, list goes on.