rhyssullivan1

Glad we got this resolved and it was all working properly, the site does need to do more to make it clearer when viewing a private message while signed in added it to the backlog sorry about that!

Welcome to the Answer Overflow community! I agree it'd be good to have a quicker way to setup multiple channels - to be honest it's kind of far in the backlog as it's pretty rare a server has many, but the UX could be improved there

If you have any other feedback, please send it to me on Discord so I make sure I see it - thanks!

Ah I see how that’s confusing, sorry about that! I’ll update it in both places to make that clearer

Where did you see self hosting is a pro feature? My bad if the website gives that impression. It will be free, the whole codebase is MIT licensed.

For all the extra bells and whistles, it’s mainly for people who are doing community support at scale who need it which would be paid customers - I do sort of need a way to support myself so I can buy groceries. The core of the product that matter is free and working well for indexing content so now the focus is “what else can we do to improve community support as a whole?”

As for self hosting, if you submit a PR for supporting it I’d be happy to get that merged but it’s not really a priority at the moment. The codebase is setup to be pretty easy to make a self hosted version though.

Send me a message if you have any questions! Happy to help with getting it setup

Most Discord communities aren't meant to be indexed I agree! Thanks for linking that article it was interesting to read

There's lots that have support channels though for programming libraries, for games, etc and having all of that content locked away can be really damaging.

One of the interesting things I've noticed is when a community for a more niche game / programming library joins Answer Overflow, they often shoot up to being top performers on the site which is great to see.

Along with that, not all channels are indexed, mainly just help channels. What's nice with this is it keeps that cozy feeling of a private place to talk, while helping more people find a community they will enjoy and keeping information accessible.

Long term, I'd like to implement forms of anti-abuse tools for communities to use so they can understand what the types of people who join their server from Answer Overflow are like. For example, if it turns out that 90% of the people who join are abusive, then it'd make sense for them to turn off indexing.

You could possibly make the argument that for the long term health of some communities, having indexed content helps to keep the community active

I think it's due to how Discord evolved as a platform

Discord start as "your private place for your friends to talk" during a time where there were a lot of privacy issues with other communication methods.

Then as it grew beyond this scope of being a private place for friends, it would have been good for indexing to be added but indexing a normal text channel is really hard since you don't know where the conversation starts / stops to submit to a sitemap.

Now we've got large public communities and forum channels so it's possible they roll out their own version soon, but it does still slightly go against how their product was originally created so there may be some hesitation with adding it due to not knowing what the community reaction will be like.