Maybe a Discord channel?

Maybe the maintainers could create a official Urho Discord channel ? It facilitates a lot the community communication and it is easy to maintain.

What you guys think ?

I vote no, because a discord channel would do more harm than good. When I first started out I saw little friction because any question I had was already asked in this forum and public for everyone to search and view. If it was on a discord, I’d have to ask the same question as many others and receive the same answers. Discord needs registration and such to be effective for people to benefit.

The main problem I see with Discord is that it is not open source. In my view, anything official or standard should also be open.

My concerns are that there is already both this forum and gitter. Why add a third platform to keep up with?

There is one already: https://discord.gg/yNBhfN7

Edit: I should clarify that this is not official Urho3D discord channel. It was created by @Eugene however, so you can reach some community members through there.

So is github.

Which is one of the reasons I prefer GitLab .

The official forum is this one only.

I’m sure mentioning this point would be a mistake, but we’ve got enough drama here. The drama here is nothing serious, but instant messaging seems to bring out the worst in everyone. Whereas here you can type out all the insults you want, then remove before posting them while proofreading

My own concern with any technical support forum, is establishing a permanent archive of solutions for people in the future. I do not understand how Discord serves that purpose in any way. I’ve never looked up an answer on Discord. I’ve never seen an answer on Discord be visible to the internet writ large. From a sharing technical information standpoint, I think Discord is a black hole. And I think when people just talk, and don’t look up stuff, then they tend towards incompetence at solving open source problems and building for the future.

This view of mine is somewhat colored by a non-technical forum I participate in on Reddit, where people just ask the same questions over and over and over again, even though the answers have already been given hundreds of times in the archives. It’s getting so old for me now, that I simply don’t want to help noobs anymore in that forum. Or it very much depends on my mood, which can be a prelude to just signing off and letting people fend for themselves.

I realize that Discord probably accomplishes a social purpose, and that that has value. But for a technical purpose, it looks like a poor resource to me. And I echo other people’s concerns, about having more discussion venues than are currently needed or best.

Actually I can’t think of any internet chat medium that has ever provided a useful technical answer for me. Except the time I wanted to rescue my Yahoo! mailing list from imminent destruction. A chat happened to be the way to get info straight from the horse’s mouth, about which archiving tool actually worked. That’s it. 1 successful use of chat, in 3 decades of internetting.

I’m guessing it’s all about chats not being search engine visible.

What you see in other forums has nothing to do with Urho3D forum.

I disagree. People are people. Although I think the most likely endgame of a Urho3D Discord chat, is crickets chirping.

Do you have a positive experience to report about an internet chat, for a technical project? I have none to report, so our views might differ a great deal in this. I don’t actually think chat is capable of doing anything useful for a technical project.

Oh, and since part of my dim view comes from Reddit, I assure you that at least in large technical Reddit forums, noobs ask the same basic FAQ quality questions over and over and over again, because they’re lazy. People are people. I finally did quit those forums, as they are interminably boring.

YMMV for smaller, better managed and more manageable communities.

Amazing how every one of you have an opinion on what other people should or should not do. You folks should be concerned about what you should or should not do. I should have clarified that discord channel i posted is not official (will add clarifications to my previous post). Yes, forum is only official communications place, and that is fine. That discord server was created by @Eugene (i think), so while not official - some community members can be reached through that. If someone misbehaves they will be banned. Crickets are not a problem either because room was silent forever anyway. People are free to communicate however they want.

Though we are not able to force other people to not create their own channel of communication and frankly they have the right and freedom to do so, but we do have the right to only promote our own official channel for discussion.

And, based on the vote result above, I don’t think I am speaking for myself.

Your remark caused me to actually vote.

Yes, because some of us know that promotion and uptake strategies are the currency of the realm. Watering down traffic usually isn’t a viable strategy. This was certainly true on Usenet, back when we actually had to argue and vote about how official group names were going to be organized and standardized. And in the modern period, it’s not easy to sustain a group, on something like Reddit. I’ve got one, r/GamedesignLounge. I face the crickets chirping problem all the time.

But hey maybe you’re part of the contingent that dearly loves to chat, above all other things you could be doing. I hate the stuff! I type way too fast for most people, and I can’t stand waiting for other people to finish their slow thoughts either. Made slower sometimes by connection speeds. I’m async all the way baby.

I also can’t stand videos / video culture. But at least YouTube is a viable marketing platform for some.

I wrote a series of tutorials and public on one very popular Russian technical site, you can do something like that and give link to this tutorials instead answers.

I suppose, but then isn’t the actual value to the world, the permanently reposited and web search engine visible tutorials you wrote? Not the chat. The chat is for the lazy people who could not be bothered to type in the search terms to the web search engine, to find your tutorials. It can have a social function, it can have a training “here’s how you look after yourself as a productive contributing techie” function, but it’s not an archive of useful information.

Unless your tutorials were on actually difficult esoteric subjects, that even an expert doing some web searching would have trouble locating the answers to a sticky problem. I’ve rarely been in that position.

Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way against noobs. Everyone has to be a noob sometime. I’m against noobs who don’t make the basic effort to pull their own weight and figure basic things out. People have to try to get better at what they’re doing, and a lot of that has to be done on their own.

I’m also of the opinion that chat groups are of relatively low value when it comes to learning or tech support. There is a gitter in which a few individuals hang out, and it is very slow, often with multiple days’ worth of dead silence. I am a lurker in another small handful of gamedev-related discord, and while some are very active and provide social support, almost nothing of long-term community value is provided by any of them, imo. I believe that the Urho community is too small and too fractured to keep a discord alive and active, and the endless scroll of chat format is a terrible medium when it comes to archiving knowledge for future reference.

at least come on IRC, it’s not so difficult

Can you give me a invite to the discord?

Sure: https://discord.gg/yNBhfN7
Also updated original post with this non-expiring link.

That discord is very much dead though.