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 No need to write documentation that gets outdated every few weeks, when you can help people live in discord.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.
I’ve never seen Discord messages turn up in any Google or DuckDuckGo search
Why are you redacting platform names like it’s profanity? My brain keeps trying to read it as markdown…
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.
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.
Stay the fuck away from anything that’s organized over discord. Mod abuse and Nazis are a guarantee.
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.
What? I agree that discord is a bad platform but those aren’t a guarantee
D🤮scord
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.
I’ve literally never seen a project remotely interesting that has their documentation on discord
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.
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.
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.
