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.
Matrix for example would be better.
Nope, should be on a forum or wiki or normal doc
Not even a forum.
Documentation is not a snapshot of a discussion. It largely falls into two categories
- collections of facts e.g. what command line switches there are, or all the options in the config files.
- Guides on how to use the software.
The first is vital. The second is really really useful.
Wikis always seem to produce second rate documentation, except maybe the ones that are designed specifically around software projects. There are any number of tools out there that produce better documentation and it can be stored alongside the source code in a git repository to avoid drift between the code and the associated documentation.
They are only second rate if not used.
D🤮scord
I’ve literally never seen a project remotely interesting that has their documentation on discord
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.
Markdown in the repository is a pretty good way to keep documentation in sync with the source.
what is it
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.
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.
I have dealt with “only works in kubernetes” because developers couldn’t be bothered to make it even work on docker without all the hidden orchestration.
So, instead of documentation, they just make the service work in that one specific environment.
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.
But also Discord search is catastrophically bad and won’t find lots of matches.
Or find lots of things that aren’t matches because it’s a fuzzy search with no way to search for exact text.
Zulip is a little better in this regard. I’m involved in Lean, which uses Zulip as the primary mode of support and documentation. While it’s usable, I still think that a Discourse style forum is the way to go.
