There was a thread on

r/programming

a while ago on Slack vs Forums, linking to a blog post: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qpz8jz/you_should_use_forums_rather_than_slackdiscord_to/ https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3451 The blog post suggest forums are better because (filtering to the first two, the other points IMO are less important): • Slack Free plan has limited history, so information is lossy • Google can't index Slack chats However, Reddit comments do highlight that Slack is free and easy and forums don't have an equivalent "free-and-easy" drop-in. I wonder how much support could be lifted from the devs here if Google was able to index the answers y'all provide to questions 🤔 (Obviously there's no silver bullet, and Slack is great for a ton of things. Just food for thought. Maybe there's a slack Q&A bot with fancy AI stuff? Who knows)

+💯. As Pants' devrel lead, I'd love for the community support to be indexable by search engines. Not only so that more people can find the literal text content, but also so people can readily observe for themselves the community's culture of kindness, thoroughness, responsiveness, transparency, and commitment. Of course, there are pros and cons to switching to a publicly indexed forum or else we would have already done it. Folks, let's discuss. What are your thoughts?

We've discussed this in the past, there are definitely pros and cons to all options. Switching up is a major undertaking, so we keep punting on it, but there is a bullet to be bitten at some point... maybe now or soon

That's probably being considered - but if anything would love to have Github Discussions for that matter - would make it centralized with code and easy to access / contribute to

Funny you should mention. I've been interested in that as well. Things like being able to move issues and questions around seamlessly to the right place, and being able to mark questions as answered, etc are intriguing. https://docs.github.com/en/discussions Have you been using it for your team @loud-stone-83419?

We have been using it for some of the inner sourcing community we are trying to build

One thing that GH Discussions lacks is DMs. That's a significant portion of the slack's overall activity.

Forums seem like they could be good overall. I’m not sure if it is easy to replicate the “agressivly” friendly pattern you have going here: I clicked on the link just to check what information was posted, one of the maintainers reached out to see if I had any questions, that led to me asking said question rather than just continuing to hunt on my own, and discovering that this is a really useful resource in a way I might not have otherwise

That's great to hear! Your experience is definitely the one we aim for, and hopefully is replicable elsewhere. But for sure it's essential that no change of platform undermine the aggressively friendly pattern 😉 we've built up here.

I very much don't want to give up DMs. For example, I've had cool conversations with people about where we live for example that would be probably spammy for everyone to see. Same with coordinating pair programming Readme discussions were fine. A little harder to debug things imo because it's not as instantaneous

Yeah, I agree DMs are really valuable. I can't see losing them either. Why wasn't readme instantaneous? Is there a notifications lag?

No delay, I mean that forums and GitHub issues are generally a slower medium than chat

That intangible sense of immediacy.

I think mirroring makes sense. I like the idea of indexability, but forums remove the immediacy of chat-based communication. Also using a forum feels like throwback to the 00s-era internet, and not in a good way.

Prior discussion: https://pantsbuild.slack.com/archives/C046T6TA4/p1593032139044300