There’s four tiers of support channels imho and I think the issue is that people try and push discord as a solution for all four.
- documentation is meant to be official and the best effort representation of what a user should know from the perspective of the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine.
- forums where support questions come up that may or may not be answered by the documentation. This is still externally searchable which makes it a great secondary form of documentation.
- community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it’s more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing issues that have been brought up before.
- 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but allows for more sensitive discussion.
The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But the lack of search engine integration and low history limits means that it’s really inscrutable to people who are trying to solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community and waste everyone’s time with repeating the same thing again.
there’s a place for each of them, and I think too many projects try and treat one as a silver bullet
- documentation is meant to be official and the best effort representation of what a user should know from the perspective of the dev. This should be easily searchable from a search engine.
- forums where support questions come up that may or may not be answered by the documentation. This is still externally searchable which makes it a great secondary form of documentation.
- community chat which acts like a forum but allows for faster and more ephemeral solving of issues. This is great because it’s more interactive but hard to search for newcomers experiencing issues that have been brought up before.
- 1:1 support which is more focused but still not searchable, but allows for more sensitive discussion.
The biggest issue for me is that the forum and the 1:1 support tends to have fallen by the wayside with chat replacing them. But the lack of search engine integration and low history limits means that it’s really inscrutable to people who are trying to solve an already solved issue, but now must join the community and waste everyone’s time with repeating the same thing again.
there’s a place for each of them, and I think too many projects try and treat one as a silver bullet