this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
1303 points (96.0% liked)

Open Source

31723 readers
126 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 29 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes, discord is for chatting, that's correct. It's not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think discord is great for the technical support side of things. It gives you a chance to talk through a problem in real time with someone more knowledgeable and ask follow up questions without waiting hours for a reply lile frequently happens in support forums. That being said it should absolutely not be the repository for documentation.

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The problem with using it for real time tech support is that when someone else comes along with the same problem, they have to search chat logs and hope they can find the thread where the issue was mentioned/fixed. Forums are much better at making past information accessible, but you're right, a chat client like discord is better for quick response times. It's a trade-off I suppose

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 1 points 9 months ago

I would argue that is the point of having an FAQ/Examples in your documentation. Ideally someone would stop their first before asking clarification questions in the discord. Admittedly a lot of people are just going to go straight to asking questions but personally that's not really been something I've ever really minded. Some people just learn better that way and it's unusual for one of these discord channels to be so busy that repeat questions are drowning others out.