Recently concern was raised in Discord regarding the index-ability of the questions & answers in discord server.
The problem is that since the discussion in discord server is not indexed by a search engine, users can’t find the discussion easily and they get lost after a while.
The obvious solution is to encourage this discuss forum more (since it is indexed, and is more efficient at preserving knowledge from the past), but the question is how we get there.
I’m opening this thread this to continue this discussion (and not lose it in the middle of discord threads )
I know that we moved to discord not long ago, but would abandoning it or limit it just for developers coordination and leave all community support on the forum be open to discussion?
I agree the forum structure makes a lot more sense to find solutions again especially through search engines. My biggest issue is that I find it hard to manage Discuss. The chance you get an answer from me on Discuss is so much higher because in any free minute it’s so easy for me to see where I was tagged and answer on any platform. Discuss I never found a way to keep the overview. Maybe that’s just me. If you have any tricks to make manage Discuss more easy I’m very interested to learn.
Note: I would not have seen this thread if it wasn’t announced in the maintainer call.
In my opinion limiting Discord to devs may lose the heat and the engagement as a community. Also, if discuss had a more handy way like an app to handle the discussions would be much better as Matthias mentioned. Not everyone is always having their laptops with them and still they would like to make the engagement be there.
Maybe a way for Discuss posts to be posted in a Discord channel (with a link) so that you can easily browse the posted topic, click on it to enter in the forum post, then limit Discord to Devs.
I can only speak as a simple user of PX4, but for me the Discord is way easier to interact with the community than on the Discuss. I’ve only seen this post because of the weekly email digest of the forum.
I find that asking smaller question easier on Discord than on the forum. There’s less friction in the flow of interacting with the community.
And I was thinking that maybe a good way for keeping the information indexable but to still use the Discord service, would be a both that would do the translation. Let’s say that creating a thread on Discord would create one on the forum and add comments to that thread once someone replies on Discord. You would need to have the authentication setup prior to using that, and I don’t know if that’s possible. But I like to think that might help.
I agree with @LudovicVanasse, since I started using Discord (and Slack before) I have had more interaction with the community and the developers. That helped me a lot with my work.
I think that a bot would partially solve the problem. This bot could create a thread on Discuss with the main question and all the answers, but only if a developer/moderator (whoever has permission) writes a special command in the Discord thread (something like “publish it on Discuss”). It could help to avoid too much spam or useless threads on Discuss.
P.s.: I didn’t see this thread too, I noticed that in the weekly email.
)