EDIT: I don’t like the term ‘soy boy’, just picked ‘soydev’ for a lack of a better word, intending to use it semi-ironically.
recently I saw a project move PR discussions to discord, like what’s the point of using a git forge at this point, you can as well just use git send-email
Ah yes, let’s move everything to a place where it’s impossible to follow conversations or retrieve past information
They even started putting in a forum system further cementing the problem…
I’m not advocating for people using discord in this way because it’s awful, isn’t indexed through web browsers and it’s far from a long-term way of hosting these discussions. However discord isn’t hard to use, searching past information is pretty easy and conversations are just like anywhere else so from my point of view it looks like people here are just hating on it because enough people are misusing the platform.
“Searching past information is pretty easy” except for the fact that you have to apply filters to each search, by default it searches in every channel (instead of the channel you are on) and just puts all the answers together (grouped by date, not channel).
I’ve even encountered the problem of their search servers being down (less than a year ago).
Not to mention that you have to have an account and you have to be in the specific server you want the answer from, which is not trivial since you also need to know that the information you search for is in a discord server to begin with.
by default it searches in every channel (instead of the channel you are on) and just puts all the answers together (grouped by date, not channel).
not to nullify your argument, but if you press Ctrl+F it searches that specific channel.
Don’t forget that when you join a server you may have to answer a bunch of stupid onboarding questions.
isn’t indexed through web browsers
* search indexers (but probably even that one is wrong)
Anyways: This is the exact problem we all have with it.
I hate how devs use Discord for documentation. All the info on there is fleeting.
If you have a problem, you can’t just look up the solution. You have to ask in the Discord channel, hope someone is friendly enough to repeat the solution. And if someone else has the same issue, they have to do it all over again.
Know what data source isn’t fleeting? Forums.
I hate how devs use Discord for documentation. All the info on there is fleeting.
Guilty as charged, but in our defence we mirror most of the info from/to GitHub best we can. Also you can make the information somewhat less fleeting by pinning comments to a channel, using forum channels, or creating channels where users only have read access. Of course this doesn’t prevent the data from going away if Discord does, but to be fair the same can be said about almost all other services as well. GitHub servers get ransomwared and they don’t pay? Yeah your changes until their last uncorrupted backup are gone now unless you had backups of your own.
The reason why we use Discord in the first place though is network effect. The amount of reports and questions we get on Discord is simply no comparison to GitHub. It’s more simply because more users already have Discord than do GitHub leading to a lesser barrier of entry (account creation/program installation), especially for gaming related projects like ours. Of course this creates some added bureaucracy for keeping track of important reports from Discord. It’s kind of manageable to do manually, but I have been looking into ways of having a bot transfer messages/threads to GitHub by simply replying with an
!issue 4321command or something. Sadly I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t get half the reports we do on Matrix/IRC/XMPP/whatever, same diff if we were to switch from GitHub to GitLab basically.Lastly, a server owner (or someone given the rights by them) can get an API key that enables them to dump the full server logs to disk. So if you really want your Discord server content to be indexed by search engines the possibility to just host a copy of your logs as a static website is technically there (we admittedly don’t do this yet, not sure if there are existing projects for this).
Know what data source isn’t fleeting? Forums.
Guess you never were a member of a forum with private sub-forums that went out of maintenance? That info is just as gone as our Discord logs if the company croaks tomorrow. And the public part is only available if it was mirrored to web.archive.org or something, which isn’t guaranteed either.
In summary, yes Discord isn’t the shit, it’s just shit, but the people are there. If the mountain won’t come to you, then you must go to the mountain. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You are not alone in this.
Prior to discord I’d get maybe a bug report/month. After, about 1/day.
Simply put, the barrier to entry is huge.
However, documentation on Discord (other than simple end-user instructions/links to git readmes) is sort of stupid.
Absolutely, what we have on the Discord in the way of documentation is a straight forward install guide with one screenshot and a download link (of the GitHub release) and a FAQ channel, which is basically just links to the GitHub for a good part of the answers. We also automatically mirror our changelog there. But that’s it, and it’s all on GitHub as well.
What gets sadly lost on GitHub sometimes is “emerging events” like a new release of ours or the game we mod breaking something, where we will get yelled at on the Discord immediately and might have a hotfix release out before anybody even managed to create a proper GitHub issue.
Edit: Oh and temporary workarounds. If we figured something out on the Discord it doesn’t get posted to Github necessarily even if there is already an issue. Hence why I’m looking into having a bot for that instead of literally having to copy and paste a message.
While discord isnt great for dpcumentation, you dont have to ask and hope for a response. Well modded servers have forums in the server.
I’m old enough to remember years of people complaining about overzealousness in closing threads as duplicate on forums, even when the issue might have been somewhat specific but the user could have just been unable to correctly recognize all factors at play with their issue (things like firewall, dependency versions and their configuration, environmental variables, hardware etc.) or the issue was actually caused by new bugs or API/ABI changes.
But at least there was some redundancy reduction and things were usually well categorized and tagged and many places actually implemented some pretty decent fuzzy search for similar existing issues. Instead we’ve ended up in both users and maintainers really wasting their time on something already resolved much more often.
If you don’t have time/are too stubborn for that, good luck skimming through tutorials to extract the info you need and pasting/adapting others’ code all while hoping there were no breaking changes since the snippets you want to use were published. At which point you might as well go ahead and browse type definitions and function signatures if you’re lucky to use something written in a self-documenting style.
Wargaming deleted their forums and fully switched to Discord for all discussion. It’s frustrating seeing a bunch of search results for my questions and half of them lead to nowhere
It’s not a good documentation thing by any metric, but can’t you just search? Discord has a search button!
Having tried it, search is horrible. You have to look up the help to even know how to filter the search to a specific channel, by default it searches the whole server. I never managed to find anything, I had to ask again instead…
You can inside specific channels, but curiously, not specific forum threads which is the most annoying thing. I was in a discord where they had a forum channel for “other games”. Inside there were threads for dozens of games, many with thousands of messages. Want to search through that game’s thread? you’re shit out of luck, you have to search through ALL in the “other games” forum.
- Ctrl+F
- Clicking the search box literally shows you all the filters and their descriptions
The newest mobile update restricts you to the current channel when you search
For those having trouble filtering to a specific channel:
In the past I would get full server (or multi-server) search. Its not happening now, but how I got it to focus:
Click inside the message input box like you are typing a message, then hit Ctrl+F. That would send me to the search box with “in #channel-name” to filter for only said channel.
You don’t need to hit the box; just Ctrl + F brings it up
It shows you all the filters except the one for the channel…
It shows it. You either glanced over it or didn’t scroll down, plus Ctrl+F is a common shortcut anyway.
I might’ve very well glanced over it, but the point is that I missed it when it’s probably the most important one. Why is it added when you do ctrl-f but not when clicking?
EDIT: Actually, it doesn’t show it until you actually type in the box:
I agree with the meme, but “soy dev” makes me think this was written unironically by an incels 4channer.
ok mr. cum
For real, what idea was that actually meant to convey? OP seems confused about having been indoctrinated with cult language
(OP I’ve been there, good on you for reflecting on it, but there’s more unpacking to do)
sorry, I used to watch a lot of Luke Smith, I used this term somewhat ironically for lack of a better word
I decided to Google that name to understand. First blog I clicked on has a paragraph that starts:
I think it’s especially absurd to place your trust in Mozilla FurryFox and their team of stereotypical SJWs and soydevs …
In 2020 this person was substituting coherent points with trite schoolyard namecalling from over a decade before. So that dude’s not only an incoherent idiot but also dangerous. Man.
Also game Devs that have discord for their community and then there are channels for bug reports and channels for suggestions and feedback.
Nothing will get tracked, nothing will be retrievable, you might as well yell into the void.
I think it’s reasonable if the users are given the ability to fill in bug reports via discord and then that gets forwarded to a git forge via some bot so that they don’t have to deal with setting up an account on said forge. But if discord is the primary tool for such tasks then it’s kinda messy, like trying to idk, replace pliers with scissors, or trying to use a ruler to cut things. Technically you can and it might work, but we created specialized tools for various tasks for a reason, why try to make the tools we use like jacks of all trades and masters of none?
Depends. I’ve seen games where they have official staff that act as front line on discord and log actual issues into their bug tracker.
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But then people will see how many bugs your code actually has, and how you actually can’t be bothered fixing any of them!
They did have a link to it, it’s just that most players preferred interacting via discord
That sounds like a nightmare. I would only discord for conversational communication at most. How does that even work?
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Lumia stream uses discord but the “post” type of channel, it works pretty well, searches for similar before adding a new entry, each has its own thread. Easy to peruse
I’d prefer GitHub and proper error reports but from a reporter side it’s convenient at least
Not quite. There was an interesting talk by the devs of slay the spire. If i remember vorrectly they just scraped discord and then made an evaluation of this data and from there generated useful feedback for development.
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Indeed. That it most likely is!
The only time I’ve seen this done right is when there was interaction between discord and github. It was fantastic and I never looked into how it was setup.
What’s a soydev?
IDK either but I’m guessing it’s a play on “soyboy”, so basically just calling the devs that engage in this behavior wusses and losers.
I hate how soy has been used by bigots as an insult. Soy products are bloody delicious!
Agreed, it’s stupid as an insult.
I agree and am aware of the connotations of such terms, didn’t really mean to get associated with bigots like this.
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There really is a universe of alternatives that could have made this meme work but instead it’s going to choke on it’s own ill-conceived wrath. Whatever, meatface.
I thought it was a racist slur for Asian devs…never heard the term soyboy before, but would have assumed racist slur as well.
never seen it used in such context
I mean like i said, I have never even seen it used before, in any context, so this is only my initial impression of the name.
You use “soy” as a negative appendix to something, soy is Asian in origin (I think?), which is why I perceived it initially as a racist slur.
nah, it’s more related to the soyjak meme, ie consumerist, yet smarter than thou npc
I like it, makes sense lol
I’m imagining devs that use MS word as revision control.
Edit: apparently I imagined wrongly
I had a professor that did that exclusively to piss people off. It worked.
He imagined wrongly?
the impression i got is that soydevs are developers who create or use bloated apps or websites
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I’m an aged university student, and I spend most of the first day of any group project trying to convince people why NOT to use Discord or Instagram for all our comms.
It’s infuriating, but sometimes I feel like I’m yelling at a cloud.
What’s the issue with using Discord for communication for a group project? I understand for coding, and why not to use Instagram, but if it is just a group project why is Discord bad?
Cool for communication, not cool when it is the only reference for decisions/planning/references/general doc
But for an uni project… sometimes it’s also good.to stay pragmatic and stick to something everyone feels comfortable with
That’s what I would have thought. What exactly is a typical alternative approach, commercially? Open source projects might maintain a wiki or traditional website, and documentation files within the source itself.
For open source, GitHub has a crap load of stuff that you get for free, their features beyond code, issues & PRs is pretty cool. IIRC for when you get past free tiers, they have a program for open source where you can still be eligible for more of their otherwise paid offering
As for students, if it’s code, GitHub! Other than that, Trello maybe?
I think Microsoft still also hands out license for various tools or SaaS that one could use for that. Atlassian likely too for their jira/confluence. Or just some docs in a shared Google drive
For open source, GitHub
… should be avoided. Try gitlab?
I usually use it in conjunction with a Google Doc or something else. I guess i wouldn’t be surprised people completely use it for everything which I agree is dumb
at work you’ll probably use something like jira, github projects or taiga so it’s good to learn using and relying on a single source of truth designed specifically to see who’s working on what and keeping the specs in one place. Also this one is a disputable, but I think that compared to e-mails, IM apps feel slightly more hostile towards the right to disconnect (read receipts and activity status for example). Also in professional env if a company cares about it’s trade secrets it will not rely on 3rd party solutions for all of it’s communications.
Also in professional env if a company cares about it’s trade secrets it will not rely on 3rd party solutions for all of it’s communications.
This one is big, and shouldn’t just be professional environments. People rely on open spy devices in both environments because they’re dumb.
Element would be a great alternative. Signal would also be decent.
Signal is great but Element doesn’t yet operate at the speed of light like a modern communication app. I’m sure that’ll change eventually!
I am talking about general projects and nothing specific to coding. Unless I misunderstood their post.
I think my students all use git. May be location dependent.
Never heard about projects using Discord for docs (sounds terrible and useless, tbh), but now I’m afraid of it.
I like self-hosting and it’s far too common for newer projects.
There’s a certain irony in self hosted programs posting this stuff on Discord… It makes me question the integrity of the project.
There is several ways to post your docs without wasting money, in a far better way, like using ReadTheDocs or just generating it with whatever library made for your project’s language, like Pydoc, and serving it from GitHub Pages.
It’s not even complicated, I don’t know why keep making it complex…
I worked at the server company that previously hosted discord servers (no longer exists) and let me tell you right now that all your conversations were accessible on the server to anyone in the company and completely and totally insecure. Overall security was pretty meh and it wouldn’t be very difficult for anyone who really wanted the information to gain access to anything on your server.
It is not a valid place to store or discuss anything that requires operational security. It is also not a place where customer data should be stored or discussed, in fact you’re also probably breaking gdpr by accident if you ever do so.
I’m gonna just leave this here: https://www.answeroverflow.com/
Could not replicate the information I had gotten earlier on Discord for some specific project. Also, even if it did it would probably still be only an API change away from not working.
Ugh. This is why there is a, you know, CONVERSATION tab on PRs.
And for the old school folks willing to pay, there’s Discourse.
I feel old. So many open source projects use discord these days. It’s kinda absurd putting documentation and support in a platform not indexed by search engines.
Using discord is fine; as long as you use it for what it does best.
You want docco that exists outside discord? Don’t put it in there. We have enough wisdom to know the difference, or we shouldn’t be making these decisions. (See ‘systemd bloat’)
100% agrees. There’s way too many times I had to join a discord server just to ask a question, then get buried by dumber questions
When you consider “my problem is solved this time” as documentation then a discord discussion can be considered good documentation. But If you want documentation as reference for everyone and don’t wan’t to repeat process/procedures every time some one needs it. It’s the worst platform for it. And For documentation we never want the first.
In this context email lists were the best of the best documentation ever.
I think a discord server can be a useful tool, but a proper doc for things is also important. Definitely sucks when I want to look something up or troubleshoot an issue and have to search through discord threads for words vaguely related to my issue and find half a conversation spaced between year old memes and 3 entirely separate issues.
Our only hope would be feeding the whole instance to an LLM and hope it gives correct answers
