Comment on Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• PiraHxCx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yep, hate when I want to follow some project and they link you to X, Reddit and Discord lol

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  • P1nkman@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Need support? Contract us on @SupportThatNeverReplies on Shitter (the nazi-everything app)!

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• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn’t. We’ve discussed practicalities before, the project doesn’t stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.

  I’d be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that’s a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model to most of us is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I’m still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.

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  • Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Putting valuable help, trouble solving and FAQ stuff into a discord is … annoying. You cant find it again. So it will only help the original poster

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.

      Discord’s search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you’re already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you’re having. The biggest problem is that it’s gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.

      I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it’s closer to real-time communication, it’s more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it’s more casual.

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      • stray@pawb.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Maybe they’ve changed something since I last tried getting help via Discord, but I found the search feature extremely lacking. I never have trouble finding someone else with my same question/problem, but there’s no means of viewing replies to the message in question, or even whether anyone replied at all. One is required to manually browse potential hours or days of messages in the hope of following a conversation chain that might not even exist. This is made even worse by the fact that replies to a message aren’t necessarily registered as replies because they’re just subsequent chat messages.

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  • i_am_tired_boss@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Damn it. I did not come here for a reasonable and valid explanation.

    ಠ_ಠ

    Begrudgingly puts away pitchfork

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    • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Image

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  • boatswain@infosec.pub ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I get it, but if bigger projects don’t move to alternatives, those alternatives have a lot less pressure to evolve. If a big project bites the bullet and moves, then there are more technically minded folks with a vested interest in making the platform better.

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  • PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Thanks for the insight.

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• Sineljora@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  stoat.chat/download

  Stoat looks promising as an open source alternative

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  • Marvie@lemmy.world ⁨48⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

    Honest question, would something like stoat allow forum threads like in discord but being accessible through a classic forum style webpage through matrix protocol in order for it to beindexed by the wider web?

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  • FalschgeldFurkan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Looks promising…

    ~…but why is it always electron…~

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    • Glitchvid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Because people want fancy animations, images, videos, stylized text, etc. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to just use a browser under the hood.

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    • quips@slrpnk.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      FOR REAL BRO

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  • Turret3857@infosec.pub ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Theyve been around for a few years and I’m still not really impressed. No E2EE, No federation if the people running it go belly up. You might as well use signal ATP.

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    • Marvie@lemmy.world ⁨46⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      As far as I understand it can be somewhat federated using the matrix protocol? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/stoat/

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  • RandAlThor@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I just tried to sign up for it. Installed app and signed up, it wouldn’t go through. So I go to web interface and create an account there. I’ve waited ONE HOUR for email verification, and NOTHING. Asked to resend verification, they made me click through 5 captivas, and still NOTHING. Moving on from stoat.

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    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Misconfiguration with SMTP is likely or their SMTP server is under maintenance and you just tried at a poor time.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  There are layers to this.

  Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

  As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

  As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…

  Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap.

  And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.

  This is bad.

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  • RamRabbit@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years.

    It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

    • For the user this causes significant delays. A problem that could be solved in minutes with a search now requires hours for someone to respond to their specific problem. A problem that likely was already solved 10 times before. And god help you if the server is active, your problem might get burred instantly.

    • For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to solve their own problems.

    These issues compound on each other as support staff burn out and users get tired of waiting. Leads to people just going elsewhere.

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    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

      Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.

      What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.

      As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.

      It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.

      For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.

      Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.

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      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person’s alleged experience is so completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they’re talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there’s a command to quickly give a canned answer.

        And the questions aren’t repeated because there’s no way for users to search (there is); it’s because it’s usually faster in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You’re generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn’t want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.

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