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 Much of it is indeed out-of-date, but much of it is still really useful.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.
The forums were never quite the right match. The primary issue is that users come here thinking that it is support, realize it is not support, and get upset about that and think there is no support overall. Even veteran users will come here and ask some very user-specific subscription related question that could only be answered by support or at the very least in private communication.
For the people that come here regularly and understand what it has been useful for, it’s great. But for new users, it’s terrible. So the first steps I took are removing all links to the forum in RRX and the website.
Discord wouldn’t be better because the setup barriers for that are way too high – it’s simple for you and me, but there is a set of users that definitely won’t make it to the end. Then there is the issue that a chat system is not well suited to the kinds of things a forum environment is good at.
We’re going to switch to a dedicated Reddit sub. Overall, I want to see how well the AI Support Agent works as the next step while eliminating the confusion introduced by the forum.
A Reddit sub might still have the issue of “I expect an official reply but didn’t get one” and support requests will still need to be moderated out. I don’t know why it’s sometimes hard to understand that official support comes from the official support mechanism which is the AI Support Agent that gives you a button to contact human support if needed. So perhaps removing any other overlapping concepts like a forum will help with that. The prominent button in the old app and at the top of the website led too many people down the wrong path.
I’m working on a solution to archive the important content from this forum before making it read only and eventually taking it down. Meanwhile, the new Reddit sub has just been created here, please join that and direct new posts there:
