there are lots of valid reasons why people dislike Discord as a platform for project bug reports & documentation, but the one I haven't seen people mention much is that most people only have transient interest in that aspect of a project, e.g. because they ran into a bug or need to figure something out from an FAQ, whereas Discord cannot service that transient need without also subjecting people to a long-term realtime chat subscription where most of the content is irrelevant noise.
this is also why I dislike mailing lists as a bug report platform, but Discord is worse because it's a for-profit platform that can only survive through engagement farming behaviours, and it inherently has a much higher volume of communications and a lower signal to noise ratio, plus many other issues that others have covered in detail.
@gsuberland I'm the same tbh. If I see a project using something like discord for faqs/issues then I pass, I don't need the noise.
@gsuberland
Yeah, it is annoying how supposed documentation is hidden on some discord "server" instead of being anywhere where it can be indexed by search engines.
It just makes the project look mostly dead with some random github repo.
@gsuberland I couldn’t agree more, compounded by the fact you join a server and are immediately added to every single channel with push notifications turned on. Nobody needs that in their life.
@gsuberland also, mailing lists can be archived and read from a website
anyway the whole thing is tedious and I'm more than happy to just not use or contribute to things where the docs/support are solely based around Discord or mailing lists or Matrix chats or whatever. I've long come to terms with the fact that these things are incompatible with me, and I'm not going to waste my time arguing with people who insist on doing things that way. that's a task for people who have more energy to burn and more control over what they burn it on.
(this is life advice I really could've used in my 20s)
@dlatchx yes. I have a decade-long historical backup of the Full Disclosure mailing list since it's one of the fastest offline ways to search for a product name and find security analysis work and some occasional useful chat about it.
I have other specific complaints about mailing lists as a maintenance channel, especially in regard to source management and PRs, but marcan already did a thread on this a while back and covered everything I'd want to say on the subject.