Would be nice if forums come back simply because of the searchability.

The problem is when they become inundated with users and have too much noise. Maybe it will be just another cycle which will lead back to Slack/Discord after some years and then back to forum after some more.

Discord search is horrendous. The chat and threads are nice, but finding previous messages can be difficult. I feel like there's a opportunity here for someone to make a similar platform with far better search.

What do you mean? Its search is zippy af and the filters you can apply help narrow messages down very well

It's the lack of verbatim search. I can't plonk an error message in quotes and have Discord return only comments with that. Instead I'm inundated with irrelevant comments.

This wouldn't be a problem if so many things didn't use Discord for support. It's being overloaded as a knowledge base, support forum, and community when it doesn't handle any of these functions well.

It is called Discourse and it is far better.

I rather like Discord search and found it to be fast and reliable to use.

Discord search is pretty standard, you can do much worse. Especially at their scale.

Standard in what way? It can't even do partial matches or words with close spelling. It's pretty much exact whole words only or nothing.

Which, is pretty standard..

On what platform? Every single social media app I use has some form of partial matching in the search boxes.

But there already is one. It's called a forum :)

I’m afraid SPAM will ruin that effort. Running a pretty decent forum on Google Groups, we’ve been hit by spam recently and you have to restrict posts seriously to combat the attack.

Google Groups isn't a forum by any modern standard. All the advances forums have seen in the last 22 years have passed it by because Google doesn't care about it.

to be honest I think the opposite issue happens, where various places have their own tiny forums and there's little in activity.

I think IRC's strategy of having networks and channels on those networks is nice because then most programming languages will be like "well let's just be on this one network". Reddit is this times 1000 given that it's all subreddits on the same platform.

Not perfect for many reasons, but having to sign up to random forums to try and interact with support for, like, Circle CI has always felt a bit silly for me.

Forums can definitely see some improvement. I want to subscribe to certain subforums and threads, and get all the updates in a single app (like with a RSS reader) without having to visit each forum. IRC got this right. Reddit was okay, but all your content is still beholden to a single platform.

Widespread use of "Log in with Apple/Google/FB/whatver" can somewhat alleviate the signup burden, but also introduces other issues like privacy. I for one don't care about signing up to random websites. Modern password managers make it almost a non-issue if I forget my credentials or one of them gets hacked.

Tapatalk was/is great to heighten the experience in that regard. But I’m not sure whether it is still supported with recent versions of forum software. Also many admins didn’t like it as people using Tapatalk didn’t produce ad impressions.

Nowadays, forums should support ActivityPub so I can subscribe to threads from e.g. my Lemmy instance.

We could try using vector search to surface better matches, or LLMs to summarize large forum threads, etc.

I agree, I think forums and things like Slack/Discord/IRC is used for different kinds of communication. Forums are rather asynchronous, while the others are rather synchronous.

When a forum is used to help someone fix a problem, there is a communication thread that (as you say) can be searched and followed by other people. In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears". Even if you have seachable logs, I think these are a lot harder to search than a forum that is more "structured".

I do believe there is value in having both forums and Slack/Discord/IRC.

> In things like Slack/Discord/IRC, this kinda of thing "disappears"

This drives me nuts. I went from one company that used Workplace to a different one that uses Slack, and I can never find anything anymore. “Who was in that conversation back in November? What timeline for this project did we agree upon?” I spend half an hour adjusting search filters in Slack to try and find information like this.

Strongly recommend you use a knowledge engine like glean (or one of it's many competitors) at work - pulls together slack, google docs/sheets, confluence, github - single place to filter by date, document type, who it's from, etc....

That’s just bandaid. Using chat to manage projects is just a bad idea a lot of people now got used to….

I recently had problems finding an old message, I learned that having “streamer mode” enabled prevents a lot of search features and filters

I had no idea why streamer mode was active so worth checking it this also apply to you

Discord will automatically switch to streamer mode if you paunch a recording/streaming app like OBS, so that could be it.

good move, i certainly seem to get better responses when i post my hog on a forum compared to slack

I've heard that Slack becomes gigantically costly once you hit certain thresholds. Another big community is moving away from it after spending nearly $0.5M a year just on Slack.

It's possible to negotiate bulk pricing. The billing is also based on the number of active days per user: https://slack.com/help/articles/218915077-Slacks-Fair-Billin..., so a 5000 member community doesn't necessarily mean they'll have to pay $7.25*5000 every month. But agreed Slack is generally a poor choice to host any non-profit-making organizations due to having to choose between either gated knowledge or allocating a hefty expense.

Discord is the better alternative for now due to the lack of content gating in the free tier but that might change when they become desperate enough with their profitability push.

The free version of slack has no user limits. The paid version is about 8 or 12 dollars a month per active user. You get more features and unlimited history with paid.

> Another big community

Who?

OnDeck is also moving away from it

That's right - OnDeck was spending $500k/month on it.

Typo - a year

Pieter Levels' Nomad List was one, I recall. They moved to Telegram recently.

Sorry for the lack of replies to the comments. Yes, On Deck and it seems to be spending it each month (not yearly, my mistake). I was looking for a public info of their announcement but could not find it.

I hope this is the beginning of a trend. Depending on some third party to manage my communications with a second party feels dirty and also forces me to clutter up my (in this case) Slack setup. Discord is even more insane in this regard.

Matrix is the obvious option for chat style communication without being beholden to a for profit company

IRC

Are old IRC chats discoverable over Google? I don't see any in my results. This was a stated aim of the forum

With IRC it is/was common that people run loggers and publish them. In the past IRC conversations, especially in tech/support channels, were easily found. Today you don't find many on Google, but that problem was already solved way better than it is today.

It's usually done by publishing IRC logs on a webpage.

Examples: - https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/latest/%23ubuntu.html - http://irc.yoctoproject.org/irc/%23yocto.2024-01-05.log.html

How discoverable it is on Google depends only on Google and on how those logs are stored.

Not true; it’s usually simply not done at all.

Forum threads inherently have better searchability, because conversations are split into separate pages, with a clear subject/title, and usually a description of what the thread is about at the beginning of the page.

In theory IRC logs could be organized appropriately. But that would require some kind of curation, either manual or via AI, that doesn't really happen in practice, even when irc logs are published.

It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

Yes there’s irccloud to do it for you but you need to pay for that.

Those days are gone. It was great for its time, but the reality is there’s soo many better services for this need today (incl Matrix).

It’s also not searchable on Google either (yes you can run a bot but you could do that on discord/matrix or any other service too).

Its just running a quassel Docker container somewhere

Nobody is just setting up a 24/7 server with docker to talk to tech support

Normal people don't even know what Docker is

It's not that bad either. You can use Ergo as an IRC server, and The Lounge as a client to provide a pleasant experience for small teams without the setup hassle.

> people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online

As an avid IRC user, Nor am I. My favorite thing about IRC is that there's no expectation you "keep up" on conversations that happen when you're not there.

Hell, my client barely even keeps track of notifications. The tab for a channel will color red if someone mentions my name, but that goes away as soon as you open the tab. No need to scroll up to where you got mentioned if you don't want to.

The ephemeral nature of IRC makes it a surprisingly relaxed experience.

IRC simply a different use case than a forum. I think both are useful and I don’t see a reason why a company couldn’t have IRC and a forum, there’s no contradiction and the overlap is small.

Forum are very useful for example for use cases where the topic is extremely specific and you throw out a post “who else does this and have this issue?” and hope someone will find your post through internet search and the more people find the thread the higher the likeliness to find a solution.

IRC is nice for quick back-and-forth type conversation for topics which are more “common”, where the requirements to participate in teh conversation are lower. For example, a discussion on a potential feature request.

Oh no IRC and a forum are near perfect complements. Discord and friends try to integrate the two functionalities, but I've yet to see that work even remotely well.

> IRC simply a different use case than a forum.

Except that newer products like Slack and email providers with their conversation view are conflating the two use cases.

Slack tries to implement features of a forum by allowing threaded conversations. Conversation view email removes the nested threads and makes the email thread look more like a chat as opposed to a forum discussion with multiple threads.

> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.

You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].

[0] https://thelounge.chat/

Or a usenet newsgroup.

I’d take discord over slack. Aside from the lack of being able to use multiple email addresses…

Between publicizing my joined servers to other users, lack of fine grained notification control, constant captchas/email verification, and lack of alternative clients, discord teeters right on the fulcrum of convenience balanced by user-unfriendliness.

I signed up for discord once, was horrified by what I saw, gave up, and never looked back. Everything about identity and “servers” seemed to be the opposite of what I would want.

On the plus side when it inevitably shuts down I will be unaffected.

My favorite "wtf" moment is how Discord reveals to users when I have blocked them, because they can no longer apply emoji reactions to my messages. Good times.

I mean, they're going to find out anyways when you don't reply

Might not exactly fix the issue of publicizing joined servers to other users, but one item of note is that Discord allows you to set a per server identity.

This "identity" consists of a different display name, it has no effect whatsoever on people seeing shared servers or your actual username by clicking the profile.

I really don’t trust this behavior.

The difference between an account and an identity was so unclear when I signed up for Discord that I actually just closed the app and gave up on whatever led me there.

The identity and “server” concepts are complete non-starters for me.

Discord is in complete control of what information is shared with other users. There’s no mechanical prevention on them changing this behavior by accident or on purpose.

I much prefer being a lurker.

Only the username, the avatar is a paid feature.

> publicizing my joined servers to other users

You're making this sound a little more dramatic than it is. Discord only makes your membership in a server public to users who are also members of that server (and who could thus see you in its member list).

"Only". I'm not into Discord in a big way, but this is propping up my reasoning as to why I don't like it. Being forced to join a server to browse it and having that shared with others is as bad as being forced to login to Twitter/X. Not to mention that conversations on Discord don't get indexed on Google, so finding solutions for some problems is an exercise in frustration.

reminds me of that site 'experts-exchange.com' which was a pre-StackOverflow login-only forum that nonetheless used to top Google search results. HN would have hated it. I'm surprised Discord gets a pass here.

For now. But you of course have no way to know that. And there’s no architectural reason for this to remain true, if it even is.

The client also now sort of supports multiple accounts, but one issue is that the whole point of the discord client is to spy on your activity. If anyone thinks they're just collecting data about game application use, I have a bridge to sell you.

There's also a Chinese firm that owns a decent stake - tencent, I think.

What about the constant, flashy popups of GET DISCORD NITRO MEGA PLUS FOR 10% OFF, FOR 5 ANIMATED GIFS AND COLORED BACKGROUNDS?

It does really not help that the target audience for Discord is 14 year old gamers.

Psst, there's a free gift! Surprise, another feature you don't care about!

I paid for decent audio quality, got advertisements too

Discord represents the same problem

Discord is much harder to manage, has many security risks, kids raiding your server, exposes emails from every user easily, and has a very shady business model.

I would never use it for something professional/business related.

You clearly know nothing about the platform.

Discord has a lot of faults but its permissions are beyond extensive, there's a huge bot scene, nobody can "raid" private servers without an invite link, and those can be time-limited as well as revoked at any time.

I have no idea what you're talking about with "exposes emails from every user easily." There are thousands of high-profile streamers using it perfectly safely.

This is correct. Why is this comment gray?

No doubt because it crossed into personal attack, an obvious violation of HN's rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

You're right that Discord as a platform provides a thousand ways to make the server more pleasant. But it's not happening by default. The spam/bot control could be extremely improved on their side so that people don't have to use third party solutions by default.

Fair enough it was a couple of years ago when I last evaluated it.

But in our case the server would be public, so yes anyone can raid it because there are no barriers for entry. Not saying this is not possible with Slack but it never happened and I have been part of multiple discord communities where it did happen.

Due to our community being public email addresses are exposed, at least last time I checked I could easily get a list of all the emails from registered users. This is in theory also possible with Slack but not as easily automated. Maybe discord improved this since.

The permission system is extensive but also complex - I have no time to learn the system and configure it correctly.

Discord is great for streamers and gaming communities - IMO it’s not a good fit for companies to build their communities on.

Of course everyone has different priorities. What might be right for us, might not be for your case.

I still stand by my comment that the Discord business model is shady - how can you provide voice chat, CDN for files, and everything else for free? I don’t think that their premium services can pay for that.

Voice chat is fairly easy, it's not actually a huge use of bandwidth (in principle it can be basically none and peer-to-peer but that has privacy implications and discord now routes it all through a proxy). The CDN is probably the largest cost, and they have made moves towards cracking down on using it as an image host. But they do have a good income from selling Nitro features, much as many people don't see any value in them. They aren't quite profitable yet, but they're far from burning cash either.

I tried to use Discord once, but they demanded my phone number to use it, so I deleted it and never looked back. Absolute cancer of a platform.

In a professional context I would avoid both. I don’t want to join chat servers for various SaaS I pay for where I just want a simple support question answered. At least with a forum, the questions and answers are indexed so I might find exactly what I want without having to reach out to support.

I’m not a community member, I’m a paying customer.

'Community' members tend to evangelize the product on social media, so you can understand why a lot of apps beg you to join the Discord.

We did I this before at my company but running, maintaining and keeping the forum up to date turned into a lot of work over time - so we switched it off and went back to Slack.

Sure messages disappear on the free plan, but there are ways around that.

1. What forum did you use that turned into a lot of work?

2. What is the way around the free plan message limit?

3. What do you use Slack for?

1. Discourse. Might be different for others but I had 0 time to manage the deployment, and upgrades took a lot of time.

2. I used https://www.linen.dev/ but I think there are others. It turn Slack conversations in a searchable static site.

3. Developer community for an open source software product.

You can run discourse in a container and the only real hassle is publishing your own version of the discourse app so you can get push notifications without having to pay them.

Zulip is also available as a container.

Not in my experience. We spent a nontrivial amount of time on running and maintaining our discourse instance - dev time that is very costly as a small company. Might be different at Posthog level of investment of course. That was about three years ago, so maybe running discourse is much easier now.

100%. At least use GitHub Discussions.

Github is not good place for this ever since their forced two factor authentication. If you want discussions, you cant demand that everyone gives their phone to a company.

Do they force 2FA only or phones as well? If its just 2FA there is an option to use a TOTP application (e.g. andOTP for Android)

I don't have my phone number attached to my GitHub account, if that's any indication

You don't need a phone to do 2FA. You can use a TOTP desktop app or a Yubikey.

I do not want desktop app nor Yubikey either. I do not want to risk loosing account when I loose the stupid key or whatever secret. My use case, which would be participating in low key low risk projects, discussions, bug reports, feature requests or searching through source code does not need any of that.

As would be most people case. So, having discussions in place that requires it is just wrong choice. I do suspect github did that intentionally so that they dont act like free storage place for unpaid projects, so going elsewhere is not even hurting them.

Discord is also an especially bad choice, at least for two reasons: it is not searchable, and everything might be gone at any point for any reason, when discord or its automated algorithms feel like it.

I haven’t tried it yet but the somewhat new Discord Forum Channels feature would seem to solve some of your concerns.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

Not entirely. 3rd-party search engines still can't reach these, thus reducing discoverability.

As far as I understand, none of the real time chats are searchable, I don’t know why Discord keeps getting singled out in this area.

It's the real time chat all the things people want to search are moving to.

Minecraft mod? "Find us on Discord!"

Hot new indie game? "Find us on Discord!"

Interesting little open source project? "Find us on Discord!"

30 year old forum shutting down? "Find us on Discord!"

How is it less searchable than slack?

The assumption is that forum is viewable by guests (including Google) and Slack is not, so to search the Slack history you need to log in to Slack and use the Slack search (which might be broken / paid in the future, etc)

As someone who participates in relatively high information density Discord servers (mostly ML related), search is rarely a problem for me. Yes, you need to do keyword search, but it's not the end of the world-- whenever I've needed to find a message 1-3 years back, I've found it successfully. Even in servers that I'm relatively new to.

I believe they meant "not searchable from an external search engine", which is a serious issue in many people's view (including mine). I would also suggest that it's a problem that chats are not browsable, because if you're new to a particular problem, you may not know what keywords you need to search for. With a forum, there are categories you can browse and usually discover the keywords you need much easier.

It can be searchable from a search engine.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

That ain't google

It's indexed by Google...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aansweroverflow.com+c%...

Discord is, or at least can be indexed and searchable. Same as IRC chats become indexed and searchable.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

I hope it's a trend too, but for a different reason. All these services keep info locked away behind a login wall, and it's making it incredibly difficult for newcomers to find the info they need online due to its inaccessibility to search engines.

If forums become the norm again, and people are logical enough to keep them viewable to guests, that issue goes away and we'll be able to actually find useful information online again.

The general problem with forums is that once they get good SEO placement they then become targets of the army of spammers, real and human, trying to use the highly ranking forum for their unscrupulous SEO spam, and now the maintaining team has to do heavy loads of spam management.

Then only allow paid/subscribed users to post.

That’s not very Old Internet.

With the sea of SEO and AI spam, we aren't living anymore in the age of the old internet. Communities need to adapt.

It’s not going to happen. You can’t put ads on them anymore. Means someone has to just run a loss-running enterprise for you. Few will do that.

Discord is the one I struggle with. I have 30+ slack workspaces, but with the new design I can hide all of them except for the in context one. It's an improvement over the old UI.

Discord still doesn't have this, I belong to 100+ discord servers, and the notifications are a pure nightmare, impossible to find the server you want.

The new Slack UI is atrocious, especially with many workspaces. It's a screen for screen copy of Microsoft's Teams and I wish I was exaggerating!

The list of things I hate about it is longer than the list of things I like about it. Certainly the workspace selector is miles better. Almost everything else is worse.

I wish they would just leave the UI alone. Who asked them to change it ? None of their users for sure. They can pay the UI cool kids to make a "Slack Hipsters" edition that can have all the jazzy shit for folks who like to waste their time while corporate and power users can stick to what works.

Product team needs to add value

Careful, you’re digging at the great HN conflict. Everyone making these pointless and disruptive UX changes logs off at the end of the day, jumps on HN, and complains about other products’ pointless and disruptive UX changes.

I've had trouble w/ the same thing and I'm glad to see I'm not the only one.

I'm actually about to release an app that can automatically convert slack threads into knowledge base articles.

Would love to share it w/ anyone who's interested to get some feedback.

From the article:

> Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS.

Wanted to leave a link here for the impatient https://strapi.io/

Why would they create their own? That just feels like wasted resources, given that forum software is a solved platform.

Agreed.

Also, Strapi has one of those odd licenses where everything is MIT expect what’s in /ee directory

https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/develop/LICENSE

"Open Core Model"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-core_model

Enterprise edition features require a license file, so that directory would be empty and is not needed to use the community edition.

Most people do not need the enterprise edition and despite what some think, a CMS is fairly trivial to write from scratch anyway. That's why there are so many out there. It's a lazy business model. The general idea is more valuable than the actual code. People who pay for a CMS or start out with an open-core product will eventually have to shift priorities towards protecting what they've built otherwise when they scale up. Cheaper to migrate to your own thing than pay a license in the long term. It's more of a business decision than a technical one to do the cost-benefit analysis. The data, community, brand, etc. are so much more valuable than the platform making vendor lock-in almost impossible unless you're stacked to the ceiling with idiots who can't code at all. That's their customer: entities who want a website or app and don't need to think about the long-term cost yet or ever.

> forum software is a solved platform

It was never solved. Forum software just stagnated with its poor backend and frontend solutions that everyone tolerated until the social media platforms we know today took off.

Now that even the most unsophisticated user has become intolerant of the noise on there, forums are coming back.

But, you can't expect people to go back to the same problems they left behind over a decade ago. Just about any modern CMS is a dramatic improvement over the crappy database schemas, dead languages, ugly, inflexible, and slow server-side rendered HTML, etc. Just about any frontend a college student whips up would have modern features people actually want to use and be far easier to maintain. What was "solved" is the realization that forums are just another CRUD app. The specific implementation is irrelevant as long as it is architected as such.

Most forums aren't in my programming language, and probably I'd like the experience to have a properunity with the product, both for the user and the developer, but also no mysterious/ unwanted features lurking about.

Would be awesome if they open sourced the forum they built - we need alternatives to vBulletin and phpBB!

There's dozens of forum apps available, both classical and endlessly scrolling. Discourse is well-known but suffers from extreme feature creep. Flarum, myBB, NodeBB, Vanilla, …

And then there's also closed-source apps.

How is Discourse's customization tooling? phpBB's ability to let ~anyone go in and add random stuff as plugins was really powerful back in the day IMO

There are many plugins, check https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin/22

The flexibility of Ruby makes it kinda easy to change behavior.

Full Disclosure, I work there.

What's wrong with vBulletin and phpBB? It's a genuine question, mostly naive - I've used but never admin'd them.

I'd imagine that the complaint is that they're old and don't particularly meet UX expectations in the 20s.

I do like them, and have great memories of them, they were my childhood. But I do think we're overdue for a modern forum stack. Discourse was a step in that direction, but a lot of people strongly dislike it, and it doesn't seem to have gotten the reach of others before it.

A real contender for "new forum software" would have to address the fact that Discord is its competitor, not other forum software, and it would have to have a very compelling answer for "why this instead of Discord".

> modern forum stack

Genuinely curious, what would that be?

From user perspective is there anything else to the forum than Read/Post/Search?

Or are you referring to administration and moderation tasks?

I'm referring to the whole UX of it, really. The experience for mobile users, the "join community" process for new users, the experience for the community owner, not just moderation but how easy it is to start a new community. You can go and start a new Discord community in a minute. It's free and with no restrictions on the number of members.

Anyone wanting to launch new forum software needs to compete with that.

And on top of that, "just self-host" isn't enough in an era where developers don't even want to self-host their own projects anymore, let alone some third-party forum. That's another thing that has -deeply- changed in the last 20 years.

This really describes the value prop of reddit, or something like it.

vBulletin is commercial, as is Invision Community, its primary competitor.

phpBB is pretty badly dated. It still works but it's clunky and development has been very slow. (The last major release was four years ago; everything since then has been minor maintenance.)

Well for vBulletin specifically it's that the software was bought out by a company called Internet Brands, who got rid of the original team and screwed up the last three versions of it.

vBulletin 4 is okay, but 5 and 6 are poorly coded, extremely inefficient and full of bugs even today.

Some of the original team went off to create XenForo, which has basically replaced vBulletin for most large forums now, though that itself has its own issues.

Afaik Flarum is open source. Also there is still xenforo as a paid alternative with available source for self hosted licenses

Agreed, have they not open sourced it? It seems like an org that would.

There's thousands of alternatives though, it's assessing them that's difficult.

Anecdotal, we moved to Xenforo some years ago, it was built by the people that built vB before version 3 / before it was bought up and made shit. It's nothing fancy but it has everything you need. It doesn't get updated very often either, but then, it's feature-complete; vB suffered from feature bloat, including stuff like adding a CMS to it.

I’m curious why they chose to implement their own forum. Discourse, and the alternatives mentioned are mature and proven solutions.

(Founder) we wanted to be able to capture questions on each page of our docs - so someone learning about our JS SDK (for example) could see questions about it under the main docs content, to try to avoid people missing gotchas.

In general we invest a ton in the website as we don’t do sales - it is our sales team!

And in future we anticipated building ie merch rewards for people that answer questions, people about to submit blog posts and stuff all through the same login… community based things. This is all pie in sky at moment but we’re going to experiment with it.

It seems that you want to take this under your wing because you think that this could be a key differentiator / value provider for you. Nice to see an example in the opposite direction to the outsourcing craze.

yep - on the grounds we have lots of competition so we need to stand out! And hey, front page HN for doing weird stuff… :)

Discourse can do that…

Speaking as someone who had to maintain a Discourse instance for two years: It’s mature and proven but still a lot of work to maintain. We went away from Discourse because it was not a reasonable use of time and not trivial - so you needed someone with dev skills to take care of it.

What are the alternatives that are less work to maintain?

Slack was the alternative. We use a service that creates a static page from all Slack conversations so this way we have a searchable index and can work around the messages disappearing due to the free plan. There are other limitations but it works well enough for a community of about 4-5000.

I wonder if they considered reddit.

Base your business on proprietary platform with history of making user hostile actions? That couldn’t go wrong.

Reddit missed a massive opportunity imo. They could have become a really good disqus competitor if they allowed embedding of Reddit comments in the post it links to.

Or Stackoverflow? They basically have this answer-question-thing solved very good.

Given reddit's recent middle finger to it's long time user base I'd not base any part of my business around it. Sure, if some employees wanted to hang out on reddit and answer a few questions more power to them, but as the official company forum/info outlet? no way.

Hoping someone was going to show a phpbb or vbulletin theme that makes it look like slack if you are logged in, and look like pinterst / instagram / tiktok - when logged out.

Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to move a lot of people back into forums - they just expect the threads and thumbs to look different on mobile.

Their forum has a nice UI too. Big tech companies have “public Q/A”/“knowledge base” forums for this kind of stuff that usually have terrible design. This is more appropriately dense and easy to navigate. Nice job.

I'm impressed by how much sheer ~style~ PostHog is rocking, from the Ursula von Der Leyen privacy notice to hedgehog Godzilla hero video on their home page.

That's a bad sign since it implies they know what their own name means rather than it being some kind of weird coincidence.

XMPP would have been a nice substitute. Will all the history record in plain text and grep'ability without having to write slack webhooks handlers to perform basic automation is a serious time saver and force multiplier.

I think the most troblesome aspect of Slack is the "highlighting" individuals.

Usually the most productive command during a typical work day is ... `killall slack` :)

> useful solutions aren't searchable on our site or via Google.

And since their forum does not render without Javascript, it is still not archived on archive.org, and probably not searchable with Bing or Duckduckgo

It's working fine once it's archived tho, see e.g.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240114085417/https://posthog.c...

My bad, it wasn't visible until I disabled uBlock, requests seem to be caught by the "uBlock filters – Privacy" list. Does the IA actually run the JS and archive the fetched JSON on its own, or does it depend on someone visiting the archive page with their browser to trigger archival of this JSON data?

Their blog also seems to rely on JS to render text. I mean, most sessions will have almost no user interactions besides scrolling. Generating the HTML and serving it static seems a no brainer...

another reason to stop using SPA and use island base or NO JS web page for informational stuff like forum and discussion. At least displaying of information on the web should NOT depend on JS.

Slack is reviewing and canceling long-standing discounts these days, so there’s going to be many more instances where companies are no longer willing to pay $$ per user per month instead of hosting a forum.

It never made sense to pay per user for a public support-oriented slack.

Internal slack with a finite number of people, that's another matter.

It could make sense, at the time, if your support staff were on Slack, and you had high hopes for community engagement, and Slack offered discounts to get you hooked.

> you had high hopes for community engagement

If you have high hopes for engagement instead of offering a product people want to buy, you deserve your fate :)

> your fate

Up to and including the collapse of your business and/or a successful VC unicorn exit, yes!

Laravel does this with their Laracasts forum and it's great. It's the first place I seek answers for it, before ChatGPT and before StackOverflow.

You simply can't beat well moderated public forums when it comes to historic search.

true, I do the same when I'm looking for truenas or proxmox answers

I've been part of an open source project for well over 2 years now. We use Slack for community management (3k users). It's pretty clear to me that Slack was never really meant to replace forums:

- Lots of the previously answered questions are lost

- Search is not great and is limited to Slack. We have many non-slack users searching through Google.

- It's noisy with random chatter

- It's harder for us to keep track of questions to answer.

I think Slack is great for really small communities or for new products that need quick feedback but not for large community management.

I think forum/mailinglist and Slack/Discord/IRC are different kinds of communication: the first is rather asynchronous/offline while the second is rather synchronous/online. I believe they can exist next to each other within a project or community.

For keeping track of specific questions and how those can be answered, a forum is a lot better. But random chatter can also be useful and that is a better fit for things like IRC.

Both forums and discord are really bad for finding quick answers. You enter a 40 page thread with post on post of speculation and "try this" - if you have more than 100 active users you need a voting system like Reddit or Stack Overflow. Otherwise the best content gets drowned out by the bad content.

And even with those you need strict content moderation, else you get the same problem.

Wondering why they do not use GitHub discussions. Found it quite great to use. Also costs less to maintain raw money-wise.

Any negative opinions around GitHub discussions?

The only chat community I enjoyed was stackoverflow chat. The early days, 2010-2015 I think. The UI was simple, no fancy stuffs. Very fast on mobile browser, no push notifications, no fancy avatars, reminds me of IRC.

I've been using https://aihackers.ai as my forum for the past few months for my own community (built on HN clone tool) - works very well for me.

It seems insane that the right choice for PostHog is to build (using a CMS) and then self-host their own forum.

Surely there's a Discourse or similar that provides a hosted forum solution equivalent to Slack?

Why is it insane? I'm thinking of hiring an intern to build a forum for my saas using my platform. I can have fantastic integration and make it open source to educate on my platform.

It's ridiculous we've had forums for decades and people still feel the need to re-invent the wheel (at the huge engineering time and cost involved).

Because simply put, thinking that a forum is a weekend project is the issue.

I thought that once... it's just a couple of tables in a database and a nice frontend, right?

I've been at this (building forum software) for a decade now, and I'm still innovating. Good luck!

Not a huge fan of moving to forums for these kind of community activities. A big barrier when things get indexed by Google. Limits discussions.

I think this is a good move (leaving Slack) but without knowing more internal info I think it could equally be a bad one.

The issue I see is they are building their own in-house solution. That’s a project in itself - and time not focusing on the core products.

It could have been mitigated if they used on off-the-shelf solution as a foundation, but instead they are re-inventing or rebuilding login/regi, user management, moderation, threads, etc from scratch - with the bugs that come with it. They at least considered it and would be interested to know their rationale.

That’s a lot of internal resources. Time will tell if it’s worth it.

If someone wanna build an XMPP modern open source UI, we could could cooperate with building the missing features on the server side with MongooseIM.

The open source clients are currently pretty outdated. Matrix protocol has nice UI clients though, but not XMPP.

I wish all software products would do that. Chat applications are like a busy town square where everybody is yelling into the crowd and important information doesn't survive the moment, while a discussion forum will eventually grow into a public library which preserves information and makes it searchable (assuming that search engines have access to the information of course).

Oh certainly - I go ballistic whenever I see a Discord link for support or community

At the very least discord doesn't make threads which get lost in the channel like slack. But both suffer without tools like telegram which automatically catalogs all links, files, images, etc into tabs. But at the end of the day a chat system isn't meant to be documentation. It's meant to be chat. If you and me talk in the hallway, we wouldn't then tell a colleague oh yeah we figured it out in the hallway don't worry. We would try and document it somehow so that it's useful later.

“We figured it out in the hallway, go play back the recording from the hallway recording system until you find the bit where we addressed it”

Discord does have threads, just that they are so heavy weight and even less discoverable that they don't get much use.

Glad to hear I’m not the only one. It makes me irrationally angry when I see Discord being the support channel for a product.

What next.js does is pretty neat. They have discord but they have a bot that mirrors all the help threads onto a public website so that it can be indexed by search engines

Both chat & forum have their uses: you help specific person (interactive ephemeral back-n-forth in the moment) in chat. While a forum (/stackoverflow) is oriented more to future readers from google (asynchronous updatable reusable info).

Mixing both produces conflicting goals and disappointment due to wrong expectations (e.g., it happens with StackOverflow when some expect it to be the former rather than the latter).

Huh? Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

Whether it's a forum or a chat, the data structure is largely the same, especially with Slack/Discord as they have threads.

I’ve never succeeded with slack chat. Basically I just have to remember when a conversation happened and go to that time and scroll until I see it. Even if I remember most of the words of a message I’m searching for.

Outlook is the reigning champion of terrible search, but don’t Slack is the runner up.

I have. Sometimes it does its job.

The problem with their search is that it’s only their search — no other engine can index it.

And then the medium tends to make discussion a ripple in a pond rather than a running discussion.

Come on. Discord or slack is like a forum where you have every post ever made on a topic in a single thread, 92,000 pages long. Sure, you can use search, but the nature of chat means that once you find one message (say, where a question was asked) you have to then skim through other discussions also going on at the time — often many of them — wondering if anyone answered the question, or if the discussion might continue after each interruption.

It’s okay for some applications I guess, but it’s the worst replacement for a forum, wiki, or knowledge base I’ve ever seen.

It's a bit disingenuous to pretend like they're the same thing. Explicit design for threaded discussion encourages a different style of communication than design primarily intended for real-time chat. Even if the information exists somewhere in Discord/Slack, it's often harder to find, harder to link to, provides less context, requires login and access to a specific community, isn't indexed by search engines, etc.

> Have you not used the search feature in Slack or Discord?

I have. Discord, in particular, has the worst search function I've ever seen in my life, or close to it.

My understanding is that when people are talking about search, they are talking about outside of the community/client itself.

I can search Reddit with Google. I can’t search Slack with google. So if you are using it as a repository for information or troubleshooting or what have you, it is completely worthless outside of its use for the people in the actual community/on that client, e.g. slack/discord. Whereas a thread on Reddit, HN, etc. that addresses some issue I am having is discoverable to everybody.

Let me put it to you another way: how many tech problems have you solved by searching Google and finding a Reddit thread, and how many times have you solved one by finding something on a Slack or Discord server you weren’t already a part of?

Discussion forums often turn into a black hole for information as well. IMO they aren't something to aspire for in terms of storing and organising information, whatever their advantages and disadvantages compared to a chatroom.

Related: AnswerOverflow makes Discord messages searchable on Google/ other search engines. It’s open source.

https://www.answeroverflow.com/

I'm always happy to see an org host their own forum, but as a user I've found the friction of needing yet another account enough to prevent me from casually participating in a lot of them.

Social SSO isn't a solution because I'm not interested in Google tracking every community I log in to.

I'm surprised there isn't a popular forum built on ActivityPub yet. The ActivityPub dev community doesn't even dogfood one, they use Discourse[0]. It could work like a normal forum for users who don't participate in the Fediverse, but for those who do you could post from your existing Mastodon/Lemmy/etc ActivityPub account.

[0]: https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/robin-berjon-running-a...

Given your complaint, what benefit is there to building a forum on ActivityPub over just allowing ActivityPub as a login mechanism?

I'm assuming you mean sending a one time passcode to the AP account? I think that would be a great idea. But it's also highly phishable. And full AP integration allows users to own their data if they want.

Discourse is currently working on AP federation: https://meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794/117

I am pretty excited for the future of the open Web for the first time in a long time.

The fact that the Socialhub uses Discourse is as you said, no forums pursued ActivityPub integration at that time.

NodeBB, Flarum, and yes, Discourse, are pursuing it now.

For me, Reddit is basically my forum of choice (yes, the "old" version is in fact a forum).

You can concat several subreddits together that recreate the forum experience of yesteryear. For instance one of the many I follow daily:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AZURE+CCDE+Intune+PowerShell+ccnp+m...

Not the greatest but it gets the job done (mostly)

Neat trick!

I never got why big forums/engines back then weren't converging more to reddit structure, like the ability to subscribe to specific threads and have a custom starting screen.

A useful LLM-based product would be something that can scan discord discussions for "useful" information and replicate it in a forum format, for posterity, but ignore the mundane/trivial.

It means this sites will also be closed? animeleaks.com and luckyanime.com

Seriously, a critical issue when deciding to use a forum software is security. Once a software is popular (or insecure by default) you are required inviting hackes while you are sleeping.

Security is very expensive and few companies have the budget and the attitude to be continuously awake and proactive.

Nice that should make it much easier for ChatGPT to access that information and make it so that humans aren’t needed at all!

I’m surprised I haven’t seen a chat interface on top of the Discourse, or other, forum.

Discord introduced subject-based chats, but they seem secondary to the fire hose of the topic channels and not used much where I participate.

NodeBB has one

How come so far there has been only one mention of Zulip?

Duplication and painful search and information access seems so intentional in tools like Slack and Discord. And these feed each other in a vicious cycle.

What is the best opensource forum software?

Discourse is popular and pretty good. I think Zulip could be better, but less popular.

From a user perspective I really like Flarum https://flarum.org/

Some example forums that use flarum:

Flarum itself:

https://discuss.flarum.org/

GrapheneOS:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/

Kagi and Orion:

https://kagifeedback.org/

https://orionfeedback.org/

Mailcow:

https://community.mailcow.email/

Many more can be found here:

https://builtwithflarum.com/

Awesome trend!

> Rather than using an off-the-shelf forum platform, like vBulletin or phpBB, we decided to create our own forum using Strapi as a headless CMS.

So, they did no research on actual modern forum software. Got it.