@balloob This has somewhat concerned me for some time. Most of the most knowledgable HA users no longer participate in the forums although they are very active on Discord chat. Sadly that collective knowledge and understanding just scrolls off the screen and is lost. As far as I know, it isn’t searchable and even if it was, it would be hard to relate the individual posts in a stream.
I absolutely understand the necessity of instant, real-time communication between developers, but in my humble opinion. the loss of searchable topic-based discussion is a long term loss to the community as a whole. I don’t know what the solution would be but certainly, some form of de-emphasizing chat and encouraging discord members to spend time in the forums would help.
Github isn’t bad for some known issues, if you use the issue tracker you can sometimes find the problem that you have, and if you’re lucky someone also has a solution or workaround.
I’ve never tried discord however, but would it be possible to have the logs archived and searchable?
People don’t use google. The forums are full of spam/crap.
The forums could potentially be better organized so people that want to help can.
People who post questions should sometimes first take classes on how to ask questions or to get help
There is a lot of stuff in the forums that is out-dated and should be somehow categorized as such or deleted.
HASS has so many components (thousands now? I’m scared to check), the forums get flooded with a bazillion types of questions
People ask questions in the forms that are sometimes only very remotely related to hass and should really be asked on some other open source forum.
Wow. That’s a much longer list than I anticipated. I think all of these things push experienced users away from the forums. They see the forums as (hypothetically) chaos, spam, fluff, clutter. So to them they may feel their time is not well spent in the forums. They can’t sift through it to get value for themselves and for helping… well, see the list above.
@bbrendon I can’t disagree with your observations and perhaps some of your conclusions. I do stand by my thinking that current use of Discord is a great loss to the community. At this point, NONE of the current thinking is captured. Those clever solutions, tiny tweaks, little gems and such are gone.
The current Community forums may be outdated so perhaps it needs an overhaul or some completely new thinking. Side rooms for one-on-one ???