I’m unsure if this has already been discussed, but Discord is not the best tool for developer support. Content doesn’t get indexed by search engines, search is not always helpful, and the conversational UX feels off… we end up losing a lot of great content, resulting in the same questions being asked multiple times.
The forum doesn’t seem quite adequate, either. Many topics are floating around, but not much technical stuff, so it feels weird to come here and ask how to manage sessions in a Nodejs/Stacks app, for example.
So, Could we find a better place to handle developer support?
At first, I thought it would be awesome to have something like https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/. But I don’t think Stacks would have enough developer mass to make stacks.stackexchange.com a thing unless someone wants to host an instance publicly.
Another alternative would be using github discussions, but since we have so many different projects/repos I’m not sure it would work well. I have a feeling a central place for all dev-related topic would be better.
What do you all think? Do you agree that’s a problem and do you have other ideas on how we could solve it?
Hey there, agree Discord has its downsides, but it’s also where the community has chosen to congregate for better and worse. There are other options though, a lot of developers spend time in the following places you might check out:
And several hands-on courses/learning repositories: Stacks Ecosystem
sBTC Builders Chat (direct support for builders with companies on Stacks - ping [email protected] to see if you’re a good fit for addition there)
@kenny can share more about the current status of the StackExchange experiment.
My personal opinion is that no matter what place we create, people will do things in lossy channels like Discord anyway - I think that some of the things like ‘not search indexed’, public, etc. are features for many vs. bugs. In any case, agree that good stuff gets lost there. It’s got to be a community-wide effort to make sure those get added to more evergreen resources and to the documentation.
Yep and @kenny is working on an AI integration for docs that can be trained on various sources . I think we can make more meaningful progress on things like this post the big upgrades this year. Full steam toward Nakamoto!
Definitely agree with the problem of Discord’s impermanence. We do have a few SO tags set up:
But for whatever reason devs continue to gravitate to Discord to get support. I’ve encouraged people to ask questions on SO but Discord does tend to be the best place to get immediate support as the community is very responsive there.
Brice’s idea for a Discord bot is a good one, and we have a few things in the works to make it easier for devs to get support, a community-wide search that searches things like docs, the forum, the Discord, Twitter, etc. as well as an AI integration into the docs.
Greatly looking forward to put some serious time into the developer experience after the major releases this year.
It is good to know there’s a broader acknowledgement of the issue and that there are some planned actions. Hopefully, things will improve organically as well.
. I think we can make more meaningful progress on things like this post the big upgrades this year. Full steam toward Nakamoto! 
