Hey everyone! I understand why having a forum is good for historical/archival reasons. But I believe that visibility here is not the greatest, specifically for users helping users. I myself for example would only visit the forum if I got a question to ask.
If there was an official discord channel (or slack), we’d have a tool that many devs nowadays will have open all day anyway.
Also, having a direct communication channel with fly.io folks would be cool.
Advantages
Direct channel between users and users with great visibility
Possibly direct channel between users and devs
Great way to announce events and host them
In case of discord, no limit to message history
Pitfalls:
Make sure to clarify that fly.io folks will not always respond to questions, so the tool will not distract them too much in their day-to-day work
Make sure to point users to the forum if the question needs to be archived or tracked
Examples
Just a few companies leveraging slack or discord to engage with the community (or let community engage each other).
My big problem with using discord or slack for something like this is that it creates an information silo, and shifts it to the user to take the time and effort to document it elsewhere. For instance for a number of “how to do x with fly.io” Google searches lead to forum posts where the information and answers is already stored in a public manner.
That being said, I do like having more informal ways to chat with people so I see the value in a chat platform for something like that, so who knows.
Yes, as mentioned it’d needs to be very clear that bigger questions are routed to discourse. I’m sure the community would be able to do some moderation here. Also, there is some great integration possibilities as seen at Discord and Discourse - Better Together | BlogDiscourse
Use discord as login provider to discourse
Discord widget in discourse
Advert discourse posts in discord
We could set up a discord channel that gives alert about each new forum post automatically to increase visibility
We could setup a bot that helps post interesting discord questions to discourse
I don’t hate that. It would be pretty easy to hack together a bot that posts roll-ups of threads to discourse once a question is marked as /solved or some such. I’m sure @jsierles will see this tomorrow and weigh in but I bet if we did go this route fly could give a bit of monthly compute to hosting the bot and such.
I’m having initial deployment issues and was looking for the same thing.
By the way how Stripe does things in discord is worth looking into. They’re API dev channel is remarkably effective (maybe because they staff the heck out of it, I’m not sure).
@jsierles we could make this into a good guide for the docs we were talking about a while ago “deploying a discord bot on Fly Machines with Terraform” or the likes.
Hi, so I’ll just make a move here. I’ve created an initial version, but some stuff missing. I’m super happy to give complete ownership to fly.io staff at any point, just let me know. Also happy to have people here on board as mods or co-admins. Send me a PM if you’re interested.
What will need to be done:
Finalize/iterate on channels
Setup channel rules and a nice welcome message
Setup roles
Find a few people who’d be willing to moderate and co-administrate
Setup bots
To post chat messages to discourse (will definitely need some discourse API key from fly.io folks)
To post forum posts to discourse
Setup a link to discord on fly.io website (if you like, would be useful)
This is super cool! @jsierles have set up a discord that I am just working on getting some moderation bots and stuff set up before we turn it loose onto the internet. I really like the channel setup. Would you maybe be interested in recreating that on the one Josh made?
@DAlperin@jsierles@kurt Would be cool to have an update, got discord messages from a few people already who’d like to join or help with this Don’t want to invite them to the dummy I created if you already created some channel with automations.
please feel free to go ahead with your project— we’re super stoked to see how the user-led discord turns out! Like kurt mentioned, We’re happy to set y’all up with an org with credits, etc whenever you’re ready
I love the idea of a community Discord server. We’d be happy to see it exist and I think some of us would participate.
