Do you use Discord and Discourse?

Community
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I’m curious to learn about your experience running Discord and Discourse.

Questions I’m interested in learning about…

  • Do you use both simultaneously?
  • What do you use them for?
  • Is one more popular than the other?
  • What would be the ideal setup?

In addition, we are currently looking for Discourse users who have an active community present on Discord.

If this is you please let us know as we currently experimenting with an AI-powered Q&A Discord bot that answers questions using Discourse as the knowledge base. We would love for you to try this out!

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2

I use Discourse mostly for my TTRPG campaigns. They hold all my session notes from various games over the years. I have tried to encourage conversation between my players outside of the games on various categories in Discourse, but most of that chatter (chat, really) happens on our corresponding Discord server.

Ideally, my gaming groups would only use my Discourse setup for chat and the like, but you can’t beat the ubiquity of Discord among gamers. That, and the voice/video functions.

My preference would be Discourse because user generated data in Discord is something I inherently distrust and would like all the data on my own hardware without anyone else snooping (not saying that Discord does…)

I am not actually in the use case you provided for the AI-powered Q&A, but I thought I would chime in on the other items. :slight_smile:

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3

I get that you’re mostly interested into hearing about owning or being users of communities that make use of both platforms, but are you also interested in experiences from using these platforms separately as an admin or user in different communities?

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4

Our community uses both Discourse and Discord :slight_smile:

They serve 2 different cases - our forum being the place for community support, while Discord being the social space, as it leans towards having a more “real time” and social side to the community.

I wouldn’t say one is more popular than the other, more that they have different use cases and serve each accordingly. We do notice however people are creatures of habit, and if they have a technical question, they will ask in Discord, regardless of the forum being the ideal space.

This definitely sounds like something our team might be interested in hearing more about :eyes:

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5

Thank you for your insight!

While I am primarily interested in hearing about users who have run both types of communities, I am more than happy to hear out your own experience from an admin/user perspective

Sounds great, sending off a PM!

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6

I don’t like the idea of an AI power Q&A Discord bot. Beyond the extensive waste of water and electricity, a properly maintained knowledge base and frequently asked questions resolves most use cases. In addition, prompt injecting and AI hallucinations are an issue that I’ve yet to see resolved.

My take is both are meant to be used. Discord is meant for real-time chatting and presentations and discussions. Forums on the other hand have an expected time delay and are more importantly index-able by Google.

If there’s questions and content that users wanna see and know about, like say issues with the main website; forums a really good place for it. Users can go to their favorite search engine and find out about their tech support questions.

Whereas with Discord everything is intended to be accessible only if you have a Discord account and the user has been verified to the server’s specifications. It doesn’t always happen that way, especially with a rogue Discord bot user feeding the chats online or some sort of Discord proxy. The chats are just meant to be chat at the end of the day though.

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I don’t disagree, but the reality is users don’t search. They ask one after one same questions again and again, even in chats (no matter of platform). And at that time a bot can be helpful, or useful anyway.

The right solution would be fix that main reason why users must or need to ask, but maybe building a bot is easier than fixing reasons :smirk:

Generalisation [1] of course, because there is as many reasons and needs to ask than is people.

But this sidestep is off topic now, because it is about do we need AI really everywhere and this topic is beyond of that handling one special case.

  1. just FYI, but I didn’t remember english form and I asked AI to translate Finnish yleistys. It offered announcement, and that wasn’t the first time when here used model is on google translator level ↩︎

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Many users, in many places. Not everyone, and not everywhere (as I’m sure you know!)

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