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Imagine being in a corporate environment trying to implement an OSS into your platform and having to tell your 50 yo teammate: “Oh yeah, just pop in this Discord server real quick to see any relevant info”. Instant credibility loss
The loss of credibility is not because it’s discord,. specifically.
It’s because the project thinks a chat platform is an appropriate way to document a project. I would feel the same way if someone told me to get on IRC for docs, or Slack.
Matrix for example would be better.
Nope, should be on a forum or wiki or normal doc
Not even a forum.
Documentation is not a snapshot of a discussion. It largely falls into two categories
- collections of facts e.g. what command line switches there are, or all the options in the config files.
- Guides on how to use the software.
The first is vital. The second is really really useful.
Actually the first should be the latter, not in the sense that there shouldn’t be a list of switches, a list of options somewhere, or no terse sum-up docs for all those little things, but that those sum-up docs should be the header to a guide.
I may be getting old but I think earlier UNIX had that, and we kinda lost it: Back when programs had few switches the man page would have a header explaining the command tersely – “foo grobnitzes flobboxes” or such, two or three options described equally terse, then you’d get into usage and examples. Nowadays, where GNU less lists its options as
less [-[+]aABcCdeEfFgGiIJKLmMnNqQrRsSuUVwWX~] [-b space] [-h lines] [-j line] [-k keyfile] [-{oO} logfile] [-p pattern] [-P prompt] [-t tag] [-T tagsfile] [-x tab,...] [-y lines] [-[z] lines] [-# shift] [+[+]cmd] [--] [filename]..., note the fucking alphabet in the beginning, it’s pages upon pages of terse technical definitions in the rest of the manpage. (Yeah I know less probably doesn’t need extensive usage docs it’s pretty self-evident but my point stands).
We have hypertext now. This can contain a gazillion links to this. And please no no gnuinfo I still don’t know how to navigate that thing, I barely know how to exit it. Lynx and w3m prove that it’s possible to do intuitive design with links in the terminal, do better. Me wanting to quickly look stuff up is not the right time to insist I learn your awkward pet documentation interface, Richard.
In comparison to discord, but true.
Wikis always seem to produce second rate documentation, except maybe the ones that are designed specifically around software projects. There are any number of tools out there that produce better documentation and it can be stored alongside the source code in a git repository to avoid drift between the code and the associated documentation.
They are only second rate if not used.
Your wiki can be hosted in a VCS. gitit I think is the original and as it uses pandoc it’s probably what you want to use. (Not so) random example wiki powered by it.
Two big advantages over plain text in VCS: You get to look at hyperlinked and whatnot output, and non-programmers can contribute.
Might as well be a telegram group chat.
D🤮scord
I’ve literally never seen a project remotely interesting that has their documentation on discord
Revanced was one. Good thing they wisen up and have documentations now, though it’s just a set of .md files in their git repo.
Markdown in the repository is a pretty good way to keep documentation in sync with the source.
what is it
Modded version of youtube app that let’s you kill all the ads, among many other wonderful features. However, every 6 months or so, youtube does something where the videos stop loading effectively killing the app. I usually switch between vanced and revanced every 6 or so months because one has so far always worked when the other gets the axe. By the time that one goes down, the other one is back up and running.
To be fair, I could say the same, but is probably a biased sample.
I have other red flags, like only distributing on docker, that I’ve tried, and tried again, and found that it’s a sign of a badly run project. But I can’t state any confidence on the discord based rule, because I’ve never tried to make any run.
The docker thing really grinds my gears. I see it as the ultimate “works on my machine” mentality. Basically they can’t be arsed to write software that is robust to changes in hosting platform.
I have dealt with “only works in kubernetes” because developers couldn’t be bothered to make it even work on docker without all the hidden orchestration.
So, instead of documentation, they just make the service work in that one specific environment.
The Gagguino project is a counterpoint to this. They have some extremely limited documentation, but to really build one you probably are going to need to dig into Discord. I hate it. The project is really cool, though, and I’m building one right now.
Stay the fuck away from anything that’s organized over discord. Mod abuse and Nazis are a guarantee.
What? I agree that discord is a bad platform but those aren’t a guarantee
Just when I finally think I’ve found one which is safe, I am painfully reminded of my place.
People organizing on Discord when Matrix exists 🙄
Its the same as the GitHub problem though, if you want to get community involvement then the necessary evil is to go where the people are. We use GitHub and Discord as that is where the vast majority of our users are, our Lemmy community sees barely any activity over our subreddit, we have barely anyone clamouring for Matrix or IRC. Our Mastodon is probably our only large ‘fedi or fedi—adjacent’ platform and thats because we drew the line at twitter. Would I love to get away from Discord? Absolutely, but that limits our ability to have an active community whilst we are still growing the project.
I’m involved in a few projects that are organized over private Discord servers. No mod abuse or Nazis involved.
My biggest nightmare is one day you will go on to a random website and when you press “contact us” it opens an invite to a discord server.
or better yet a QR code to scan in the Discord App. Great way to get your account credentials stolen
You old farts should keep up with times. /s
This is often done by people while the project is unstable. No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.
thats understandable but at least use something searchable that has tagging capabilities and is archivable so that you can come back to it years later
D*scord is technically searchable and fairly archiveable (messages never get deleted due to old age (in my experience at least) or if the original poster deletes their account). And some d*scord servers even have a Q&A mode similar to st*ck *verflow. But yeah, not the right tool for the job, not to mention ＡＢＳＯＬＵＴＥＬＹ ＰＲＯＰＲＩＥＴＡＲＹ
I think what they really mean is searchable without an account, but otherwise you’re right.
But also Discord search is catastrophically bad and won’t find lots of matches.
Or find lots of things that aren’t matches because it’s a fuzzy search with no way to search for exact text.
I’ve never seen Discord messages turn up in any Google or DuckDuckGo search
Kinda tempted to make a bot that automatically joins d*scord servers, indexes all the messages, and publishes them to a public website
Why are you redacting platform names like it’s profanity? My brain keeps trying to read it as markdown…
Same reasons you’d censor profanity. To show that I don’t necessarily agree with or support them. Maybe I should start using the vomit emoji instead of asterisks like u/pancakes [joking].
To me it comes off like you’re irrationally afraid to invoke its name.
I get and appreciate that you’re trying to make a statement here, but in my opinion it isn’t landing the way you think it is. By giving its name special reverence you’re needlessly elevating it, not diminishing it.
deleted by creator
Well that’s just fucking bullshit.
I get the statement you’re trying to make here - serving the name of a platform you dislike with the same reverence as he-who-must-not-be-named in Harry Potter (Voldemort) - but all you’ve done is obfuscate the search engine. Now if someone is skimming for information on the platform via search, you’ve hidden your comments and post from someone who might find your perspective useful. No one is going to try 15 ways of spelling a platform name (except maybe trying stackoverflow with and without spaces). Internet users are pretty lazy.
Zulip is a little better in this regard. I’m involved in Lean, which uses Zulip as the primary mode of support and documentation. While it’s usable, I still think that a Discourse style forum is the way to go.
when you can help people live in discord.
That live support is super handy when you’re 8 timezones apart from the maintainers.
- Hey there, how do I get this thing to compile?
11 hours later
- Ok just need to make sure you have this list of prerequisites installed and then we can walk you through the compilation process.
6 hours later
- Nevermind, I built and installed another project.
Or if you find the project a while later, and the link/server is dead, either because the maintainer forgot to update the link, or the server shut down/removed invites for some reason, like spam prevention.
There needs to be some plan to migrate to stable documentation at some point though.
Hell, even a small traditional forum is better searchable.
What I see happen is that the people with the knowledge get so busy answering questions in discord that it impacts the efforts on documentation and on the software itself.
I am already happy if there is any documentation at all. And I am euphoric if it doesn’t suck, i.e. sufficiently detailed and up to date.
So I guess Discord is better than nothing. But sure it’s a turn off.
Log into discord, copy the documentation and create a PR with it. (Or make a wiki?)
Preach!
