Luke Plunkett: Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord.

Discord excels as a means of real-time communication, for people talking in the moment. What Discord is not good at, however, is being a long-term repository of information, the kind of place you can ask a question, get an answer then have that answer remain easily accessible for months, years or even decades to come.

Few things on the internet make me list my mind more than, “for instructions on how to use this thing, go to our Discord.” I try to keep it relatively clean on this blog, but pardon me a moment while I say fuck everything about this.

Discord is great for chatting with a small to medium sized group of friends. It’s absolutely abysmal for being the place you provide documentation on how things work. I also shouldn’t have to join your sever to get access to download links either. And yeah, it’s not just the mild inconvenience of going to a URL I’d rather not use, it’s that I need to have a Discord account and join your sever as well. And since Discord defaults to showing you every…single…channel when you join, that can mean spending the next few minutes trying to figure out if the docs you need are in #announcements or #support or #help. Even if you know what channel they’re in, you’d better hope that the thing you needed was posted recently (in the last 5 minutes on busy servers) otherwise it’s off to search for…something, it’s not always clear what you need. Oh, and Google can’t help since Discord chats aren’t indexed so it’s not like you can even get deep-linked into what you need from a competent search engine.

The web is good. Public sites are good. Discord for chat is good. Discord as a replacement for the web…well that absolutely sucks.