Tangential but figure eyes are probably on here:

Any good guides or discussions for setting up and running Matrix in a VPS? Been thinking on and off I should do that for a few months now (and lack of account migration means I either start with my own domain or forever use a generic).

It also causes the problem that no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.

Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be… bad, it isn’t THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.

What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn’t have to explain why that might be a “pro” as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.

As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.

It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.

For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.

Tell me you’ve never provided support without telling me you’ve never provided support, heh.

So… they wouldn’t be raw dogging stack overflow? Because raw dogging the code you get from a rando off stack overflow is a bad idea?

Because you can just as easily use generative AI as a component in test driven development. But the people pushing to “make coders more efficient” are looking at firing people. And they continue to not want to add the guard rails that would mean they fire 1 engineer instead of 5.

It is if your software goes anywhere near infrastructure or safety.

Which is literally what musk and the oligarchs were arguing as a way to “fix” Air Traffic Control. And that is far from the first time tech charlatans have wanted to “disrupt” an industry.

How much of that is the chat bot itself versus humans just being horrible at self reporting symptoms?

That is why “bedside manner” is so important. Connect the dots and ask follow up questions for clarifications or just look at a person and assume they are wrong. Obviously there are some BIG problems with that (ask any black woman, for example) but… humans are horrible at reporting symptoms.

Which gets back to how “AI” is actually an incredible tool (especially in this case when it is mostly a human language interface to a search engine) but you still need domain experts in the loop to understand what questions to ask and whether the resulting answer makes any sense at all.

Yet, instead, people do the equivalent of just raw dogging whatever the first response on stack overflow is.

There are layers to this.

Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.

As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.

As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago… Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help…

Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And… you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but… yeah.

And that isn’t going to change. So they’ll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable… like Matrix.

This is bad.