There is a clear tradeoff between Discord and Forums. One can’t say one is better than another. Unfortunately I can’t see a balanced comparison between the two in the announcement and understandably that lack of objectivity has led to frustration expressed by some members. It’s as if the decision has already been made and now all we can do here is vent our frustration.
I’m glad others have already pointed out some of the benefits instant chat has over forums. I also agree that in order to get the best out of both worlds, you might want to cultivate the usage of both, especially if the community is still small.
Personally, if I had to jump into a young language such as ReScript as it is with very few resources available on how to properly do things beyond trivial examples shown in the (incomplete) docs and if I was forced to ask every single question in the forum and wait hours or even days for an an acceptable answer, I definitely wouldn’t bother, I would go back to Typescript and either never look back or check back in a few years to see if things have matured or not.
Also if the goal is to have an unofficial documentation indexed by search engines, StackOverflow might be a better choice because as new stuff gets frequently added and old things removed from the language, said documention can become stale very quickly. StackOverflow already has great tools in place to moderate existing questions and update them accordingly by the community. I’m curious to see how you will pull this off with the growing forums. It might be worth it to wait a bit before you go all-in with the forums, at least until the language has matured to the point where no significant changes are expected or you have better tools available for moderating the community.
What I’m trying to say is if the language is evolving quickly, it might actually be a good thing that old, no longer valid ways of doing things get buried in the Discord channels.
I hope I’m wrong, but this seems more like an attempt to gain monopoly over information than anything else really, which is something I can understand after a little snafu between a core developer and others in the discord, but arguably there are better ways to handle these things in the future.
To give some historical context on why the whole “forum discussion” started somewhere last year (after having 3 years of chat only), with a pretty intense post by justgage (actually a speaker we invited for ReasonConf 2019 conference back then in Vienna):
This was posted on the ReasonML forum. Thought this is still relevant to this day.
I think our response times are also not bad. The React.memo post was not clear / actionable enough to answer right away… it definitely doesn’t take 11h on average to answer questions.
Those questions usually just get ignored on chat, and that’s it… no answer? then it wasn’t relevant enough I guess.
Just because the question wasn’t answered right away, doesn’t mean it will not be answered at all. So far every question has had a somewhat meaningful reply, and I also took a lot of pride in writing well articulated, useful answers that are usable for future newcomers as well.
I’m sure the guy who posted it, would have still appreciated if someone pointed out more context was needed to be able to effectively answer his question. If no one can bother to write
Dude, we need more information!
(which btw happens a lot in discord due to frictionless communication there)
then how can it be expected that other questions get the attention they deserve.
It proves the point that forums are more official and you must make sure you question isn’t too vague, has enough context etc.
I think the response times are pretty fast on here. I was just responding to the question of whether people will get timely responses in a monthly mega-thread. Haskell reddit demonstrates that its scalable and the community will jump in and enjoy helping to answer. So beginners will get almost real time interaction, and feel less intimidated about posing their first question. There are also lots of questions that are very trivial and I often hesitate to create a full post to pose them. Such a thread lets me post the question and note that I don’t want to distract from the more substantial questions being posed.
Yes like this, except not after 13 hours has passed at which point the op might have already solved the problem on his own (or gave up). Kudos to @rickyvetter for taking time to create a playground, but generally problems like this are solved easier and faster with a little back and forth instant messaging
Ah interesting!
So you mean we should create a single thread on the forum per month, pin it on top where ppl can ask loose questions, and then we’ll archive it for the next month? That could actually work.
Oh dear Reddit… kinda off-topic, but someone bamboozled us big by squatting the rescriptlang reddit name. sigh
I’ve been enquiring about taking over r/rescript too, with the intention of handing it over to the community. The mod initially responded positively to the proposal but has since stopped replying…
Exactly, I wouldn’t even feel great hopping in on a forum for a language/framework that I’m comfortable in with a “can you tell us more”, but I’d happily post a quick “I think we need more info” or even try to help them get going in the right direction even on a ReScript Discord despite being only a few weeks into the language.
On a forum, I feel like I need to have solved (or mostly solved) the question in order to start interacting, and on the flip side, I feel like I need to bring a very detailed/correct question.
That may be more of a problem with me not being comfortable with forums, but I think based on what I’ve seen on forums (not just this one), that’s just the general way forums culture ends up.
I wouldn’t recommend getting a Reddit, they can spiral out of control too easily and require lots of dedicated mod time. That said, rescript-lang is available.
I like the current focus on the forum, things are very searchable and it forces you to engage with the community in a more thoughtful way at your own pace. A good change from the norm in the rest of the thousands of chat servers and communities IMO.
I do understand and value the chat servers, but mainly for casual discussion around specific topics, like gamedev, or other miscelaneous topics. For Q&A it is usually more immediate but the knowledge always gets lost to the sands of time.
If somehow the chat server rules and question answerers encourage the askers to make a forum question, and link it in chat and then provide the answer here as fast, it would be a nice addition.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Especially with a small, unpaid core team we need to be as economic as possible with the time and attention the team has to offer.
Hey, Gage here , I wrote the article that @chenglou mentioned. I have a few thoughts.
Forums & Longform writing have an impact!
I’m amazed that my article had such an impact! I think this kind of proves to me the power of a forum. I wrote that a while ago and didn’t realize it would help reshape the community. If any of you have a big idea, write it up! This is the place.
RE: Forums are Scary, Chat less so
I 100% get that forums are kind of scary looking. I think forum software just kind of has a “look” for whatever reason that’s hard and unwelcoming. You can see the sharp buttons, the complex stats on posts and I do also think the length of posts that people write is perhaps intimidating, but still feel that it’s valuable.
And for all the people that normally spend time on chat but wrote up their thoughts here about why they like chat, welcome and I’m glad you wrote it on a forum so that I could actually know this topic exists and read through your comments .
Answer Quickly
The experience of people getting answers quickly is on us, right? There’s nothing stopping us from taking every beginner question and handling it carefully. Be the change you want to see in the world .
If you forget to check the forum due to it being a PWA you can add it to your desktop using this button:
(NOTE this is in Brave/Chrome it might be elsewhere on other browsers)
Zulip
Zulip is actually pretty good, perhaps not on mobile but I think most people who are programmers are on a computer trying to get stuff done for work when they are needing to ask questions. Maybe that’s wrong . I don’t think it’s as good as Discourse for longer-form discussions. BUT it’s far better than normal chat! I think that would be a cool thing to try out.
Maybe leave the channels as they are and let them be reason specific. Rescript topics can leave the current discord without touching the reason stuff. Having spent a lot of time working on ReasonReactNative I have not yet thought through how I feel about both the channel closing AND the project being renamed. We could have easily forked the reason code into rescript focused repositories and let reason focused code live on. Feels like the code for Reason on the browser is getting cut off when, without doing else its perfectly viable code with a compiler. Not to mention someone might decide to keep working on it. Thinking out loud…
I do wonder about the impact on the barrier to entry for people giving it a first try though. As a newbie it’s both hard and sometimes maybe embarrassing to write carefully focused forum questions.
Maybe an explicitly rescript-newbies focused discord is worth an experiment? Make it clear that it’s for first fumblings only, and don’t be afraid to send people to the forum very quickly once it gets past the sort of “but why does this even” questions that require some quick to-and-fro to avoid very early discouragement or never picking it up in the first place? (or some other chat system – personally I like element.io / matrix and it seems to be growing from my uninformed casual observations – I guess the merger with gitter helps)
Of course a problem with ideas like this is that the thought is easy, but the same small handful of people tend to provide the majority of the work to actually do these things, so I hope that those people especially take this just as an idea, not a demand!
I think the type of culture we want to foster and strife for in our community is far more important than the choosen communication channel.
There is only a barrier for new users to the lang / forum if we choose to have a culture of overly formal communication and such, but this can be shaped accordingly.
I would personally miss the Discord chat a lot, especially as a beginner. When I’m starting out I don’t really feel like advertising my ignorance in a forum, but doing it in a live chat room isn’t so bad.
If a question doesn’t get answered in a chat room then that’s fine; I never expect them to be, but if someone happens to see a question and happens knows the answer then great. If they are bored and fancy a geeky discussion about something, also great. If no-one answers I wouldn’t take it personally and would either forget about it or maybe post it on the forum. For me, that’s why talking about “response times” on a chatroom isn’t that important.
I would be a lot less comfortable in these languages without the helpful Reason/Rescript folks on the chatroom (and the folks on the Elixir chatroom which is another great example of a helpful livechat community).
, I wrote the article that 
and I’m glad you wrote it on a forum so that I could actually know this topic exists and read through your comments 
.
.
. I don’t think it’s as good as Discourse for longer-form discussions. BUT it’s far better than normal chat! I think that would be a cool thing to try out.