LinuxCNC Discord? (for chat & support)

I like Discord because it doesn't seem to matter what your timezone is. Often times it's used like a bulletin board, but if someone happens to be available it acts like a chat. And with the search features you can find old topics much easier than you can on a forum. It also supports mobile media much better than a forum, or IRC, which is a huge help when diagnosing technical issues.

Another problem with searching the forum, is that it defaults to limiting results to 1 year old or newer, But there is often lots of older pertinent information (depending on what you're looking for.) It often helps to click on "any date" for that setting on the search page.

You expect people to search ? And give then scroll through the options....hahahaha what a world we live....no. no their particular problem is the ONLY example of that problem.

You never know a few individuals may not want to be perceived as "one of those lazy gets who asks the same question that's been asked and answered over and over". (Isn't there a word for that?)

A Discord channel would be nice, for sure, but I'd really like to see a more modern forum, like Discourse . The Swift community recently switched to it from a traditional mailing list (and migrated all the old threads to the new platform), and the improvement is astonishing.

If for no other reason than its formatting tools (it supports posting in Markdown), it's very well-suited to discussions requiring the exchange of machine-readable file snippets, like code or configuration files.

I suspect this forum is run on a much tighter budget than what Discourse requires. To be honest, I'd much rather have a Reddit community than this forum, if budget were a concern.

A better comparison is IRC vs Discord for search. It has been my experience that an active Discord has all questions answered and the culture of Discord is such that searching is common because the results are reliable and easy to find. In this way it is worlds ahead of IRC and often better than a forum.

lukepighetti wrote:

I suspect this forum is run on a much tighter budget than what Discourse requires. To be honest, I'd much rather have a Reddit community than this forum, if budget were a concern.

Discourse is free, and can run on a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet. This forum probably needs a slightly bigger droplet, but I doubt it would need more than the $20/mo one.

Much harder is migrating the content and user ranks.