Considering switching this forum to Discord. Faster and more interactive, cheaper. Main issue is the history of the forum posts would be lost. Double edged sword. The history is often confusing for new users because something true in 2018 is often not the way to do things today. But it does provide searchable content over 15 years which is useful.
Most likely will setup Discord, promote it as the primary support forum, leave this up for a year or so, set it to read only. Or just stick with this forum software. Just feels less common to use a forum for these things these days. What do people prefer?
You definitely shouldn’t remove access to the content here. Much of it is indeed out-of-date, but much of it is still really useful. Either 1) keep this around for historic purposes or 2) load a curated extract of the content here into Discord or 3) add current and useful content from here into your FAQs / setup guides (understanding that that’s a lot more work for you!)…
Discord would be great. Agree with the others, and you, on keeping this around as a read-only resource. The best thing you could do for a more interactive experience is stop with the heavy hand on moderation.
Moderating a forum is different from moderating a chat. In a forum, the most misdirected post is frequently and even likely to become the first post a new user sees and gets put off or confused by. In a chat, nonsense scrolls off quickly and is always in context historically (you had to scroll way back). Less moderation needed to be sure. In reality, not only does this forum require “heavy handed” moderation, but really I should go through and prune many old threads as well that just don’t apply anymore. Even in a chat group, archiving old chats to clarify they might be old garbage is common. There is a lot of cruft in this forum so one goal is looking to eliminate about 60% of the posts to reduce that.
Also, this is a vendor forum. If you go look at Apple’s Developer Forum for example, or many others, you will see much more vigilant moderation. Whereas, in a chat group, nobody really cares because you know things scroll right off and moderation is really for outbursts or language, etc.
I think the main issue I have with Discord is search ability. We use it internally, it has reasonable search, but in general this forum software has somewhat better search. However, one has to weigh that against the idea that, if switching to Discord increases participation, it is better to have more searchable content even at the expense of some functionality.
There is a forum type feature in discord if you wanted to try it. We tried it with our AV group a year or so ago. I’m on several discord servers so it works for me switching. Agree with the others. Keep the forum read only for a while.
