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this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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When support is hidden away in discord, web searches can't find it. Nobody can even look through it without having an account.
I agree that it sucks. I would much rather use a more open platform. But my users don’t want that. Discord is convenient, people want convenience, and I want to give my users convenience (even if it means I have to answer the same questions once in a while).
Only convenient for those who are on discord. Everyone else is excluded.
Sure, but I’ve actually had people ask me to set up a Discord, and no one has ever asked me to set up anything else.
I wonder if they just pass on the project since the documention is hidden away. I know I've done it a bunch of times
Support != documentation. I have plenty of public documentation.
Yeah, I gave up long ago to suggest ppl some alternatives. The problem PPL Here have is the discord only thing. With tools like matter bridge you could combine several tools seemlessly, but that is of course way to much trouble for smaller projects.
Having the ability to bridge doesn’t mean you always should… you are now exposing folks to Discord’s data collection + ToS as well as all the inevitable spam that flows into these rooms.
If past support questions showed up in searches, then more users would be able to help themselves and would never need to ask for support, so it wouldn't matter as much what platform it happened on.
Personally, I think it would be good if support discords were all bridged to matrix spaces (currently doable, but matrix needs locking down more than discord to stop spam as the tools to prevent and remove it are worse) and the matrix history was archived somewhere search engines could index it like mailing list archives are (currently not doable). That approach would let users use what they want without forcing anyone else to, and keeps self help as easy as it was in the days of forums.
Typically, what I’ll do is if multiple people ask the same question or need the same guidance, I’ll put it in the readme or the “Quick Guide” section of the demo site. If anyone knows a solution to make the discord server publicly viewable/searchable though, I’d happily implement it.
Right now, if you have a Discord account, you can join and view the server, and post in the support channel and forum. Maybe there’s a Discord bot I could set up to mirror the content.