p.s. major kudos to @mcwumbly for his excellent writeup over at the Ember forum, which I completely neglected to give him due credit for upon publishing! 
His post was the foundation for the entire “Complementary Workflows” section and I even reused his apt take on “Don’t try to move the conversation over while it’s in flight” pretty much verbatim.
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Thanks for the additional kudos, @erlend_sh.
I really appreciate how you synthesized a number of discussions over the past couple years in this timely post.
This is an important topic for online communities today and I look forward to any further improvements and guidance you and the team can offer to people trying to find the best ways to use these different tools together.
Great point below by @mcwumbly on using Slack with Discourse. Both that and @erlend_sh blog post have been extremely useful for my communication strategy development.
if anything new came out of the Slack chat, summarize it in a follow-up post on the Discourse topic
Ty for this post @erlend_sh ! Super informative! And giving some answer to questions i had from a long time.
In our small group we increased the use of whatsapp and as a result Vbullettin forum post collapsed.
Having moved on mobile people feel more easy and immediate to use WA.
I’ve set up a Discourse forum which is much more mobile friendly to counter this trend.
But chat is still very active and forum is quieter than i would like… (Users are still getting used to the new platform so i need more time to see the final effect!)
I would like to know if there are some suggested way to integrate forum and chat.
I see many plugins for chat platforms (not whatsapp) but it seems to me they are meant to push important thread from the forum to the chat to highlight them more.
I wanted to know if there is something to get part or all the chat and import it in the forum.
i agree that chat and forum are different mediums but i think it’s worth to integrate them better!
I very much enjoyed this post. In particular, would you have a reference (paper, news article) that could help me support this quote? I’m trying to make an argument that my [scientific] community needs something like Discourse and stop relying solely on chat rooms.
This could be one reference I guess?
But that’s a long book! I was hoping for shorter references…
@jonobacon has a good post on this as well!
In this article, they keep saying that Discourse is not good for real-time communication, a.k.a. chat threads.
Is it the case though?
So effectively Slack is a subset of Discourse in some sense.
While using Discourse for realtime chats though, one would benefit from tight integration with the threaded discussions and knowledge base if it’s hosted in Discourse.
Am I missing anything?
P.S. The only thing that Discourse is missing when it comes to realtime chats, in my view, is the “compact view” - because chats often consist of short messages but there are many of them.
Well, we are bringing a flavor of chat to Discourse in future releases. It’s something we’re working on now. We think Discourse can bridge the short (chat) and long (paragraph/topic) forms of memory all by itself!
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