Sublime Forum

Discord server vs officially hosted forum

#1

I’ve been (mostly) away to this forum for several years and when I’m back now, I noticed that there is also a Discord server now.

I love the opennes of Sublime Text community and still benefit from posts written 7-8 years ago on this forum. This is thanks to a nice categorization and being searchable on search engines.

It looks there is high quality discussion going on the mentioned Discord server but -by design- they are consumed immediately by the involved people and not searchable on Google. Even if I jump over the loginwall and try Discord’s own search capability, the results I get may be pretty confusing since there is no thread concept (begin & end) and also mutliple unrelated discussons may go in parallel in a single channel unlike thread model of forums. Thus, I have to look at a flood of sentences and find the relevant ones manually.

I know that instant chatting is a need for some sort of discussions and helps keeping main forum clean. But looking at the Discord server, it seems it’s being used for everything and already has started to steal role from this forum.

I’m writing this only because I feel worried about some good discussion being disappeared in the future or being locked behind a proprietary 3rd party app.

2 Likes
#2

The discord server has existed for a while as an easy-to-use chat option, and was created by the community, like the IRC channel was. It just so happens a lot of power users prefer Discord over IRC.

Currently Sublime HQ is using it in a specific fashion for feedback from power users. Part of the reason it is being used for the current task is that we don’t want certain topics linked and spidered on the public internet, yet.

When we are ready for that we’ll definitely post here and on the official website about them.

3 Likes
#3

I definitely agree on the archival and searchability part. In general, it’s quite useful for quick interaction and dicussions with little latency, but as soon as lots of information is involved (like reproduction steps) or a long discussion has come to a conclusion, the results of that should be archived in either a forum post or an issue (comment) on GitHub. I try to do that in the discussions I participated in, at least, and I suggest other people to do the same, should they notice such a discussion.

Because the Discord serves as a kind of aggregator for many topics and especially regarding the current state of topics, the information being archived as a result is spread over several locations, but usually GitHub issues and not the forum, because the forum tends to attract more publicity or the information is mostly relevant for specific packages (like LSP).

1 Like
#4

Thanks for the responses.

Very understandable use case, and it’s certainly out of my complaint.

We can be sure that most of the time people won’t do that (due to limited time etc.) :slight_smile: Anyway, thanks for the discussion, and for your work, here and there. Let’s see how it goes.

Regards,

0 Likes