Should we enable chat?

Meta
1

Discourse nowadays has a chat functionality. I haven’t generally enabled it, but it’s there if we want to. I know some people prefer the more direct chat, and I’m sure there are several Syncthing chat rooms on Discord, QQ, Slack, whatever, but we haven’t had anything “official” since the IRC channel on Freenode.

Obviously, hosting it ourselves in some form of official capacity means we are responsible for running it, in terms of moderation and spam control. I don’t think we can promise any kind of effective 24/7 moderation, but on the other hand this hasn’t been a real problem on the forum itself so far.

Using it would require an account, I believe even for viewing. It can also be limited by discourse “trust level”, but I suppose one point of having it would be to allow new users to ask questions so it would be counter productive to be too strict on that point.

Personally I find it tedious and frustrating in the extreme to debug and troubleshoot issues over live chat, but I could see the use for less on-topic chitchat.

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I really don’t think we want to commit to some sort of live support. Or give people the impression that something like that exists.

Forum has a much better flow that is not intrusive and can be answered at your own accord.

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3

I fear that the effective half-life of information in a chat is also a lot lower and not available via search.

4

Agree with both of you. It tends to be much harder to follow, judging from my experience with other projects on e.g. Discord. Would it be a generic “chat room”, or is there some kind of thread management and continuing topics?

Overall, Discourse as we have it now is a magnificent solution.

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