Anyone ever thought about making a discord server for us V1 fanatics?
I use discord for a lot of things and it’s a great way for instant support, real time chat, and just general off topic chatting and making friends. I’d join if Ryan made one 
I haven’t used discord, but I use slack at work. I guess my main suspicion about it would be the immediacy.
The delayed communication forces people on the forum to be a little thoughtful. It also encourages people to try some solutions out themselves while they wait.
Ryan also feels compelled to answer every unanswered question and he’s good at that, which takes up a lot of time. I don’t want to speak for him, but my guess is a real time chat would take a lot more time.
The other nice thing about the forum is the format had some future usability. Allowing future users to get help from posts in the past.
It would be interesting to spend some time with someone as they were bringing up a machine for the first time though. Or if we were all working at the same time on something like the PID controller, the instant communications could be exciting and a catalyst.
In my head, the perfect combo is:
- Some basics tutorials from Ryan (which he has). ((I’ve always wanted this to be more community sourced, but there isn’t really a good way)).
- A stack overflow like format for Q and A.
- A chat or forum for projects, ideas, development.
If there was a stack overflow like system for Q&A, or a way to encourage troubleshooting in the forums, then a chat makes more sense to me. Just my $0.02.
(I doubt I would have put this much editing jnto a chat response :P)
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Hrmm… Valid and amazing points. I can see both sides.
From browsing the forums 90% of the support given is “It’s too tight” lol. or… “Is it plugged in right”
reminds me of 90’s tech support for computers.
If not for anything other than chatting with like minded individuals, I still think it’d be a great idea.
Jeffeb3, I just installed your v1pi Gonna take me a bit to figure out how to make my machine move with it, but I like the interface a lot. Great work sir!
Charles
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Yeah a slack could be interesting. Some good points have been brought up here so I want to see where this discussion goes.
Well, from my experience about electric vehicles forums vs instant messengers, instant messengers systems tend to cannibalize the traffic from the forums and people tend to stop posting.
I personally prefer forums much more because they encourage us to give more details, to be more thorough and to think more before writing anything. Plus you can retrieve past information easily and you don’t have to repeat yourself thousand and thousand of times around the same questions.
Instant messengers are ok when it comes to quick help or new projects/ideas developments, but in the end they tend to get flooded with lots of off topic and there are less and less actually useful discussions. This usually ends up in a less active forum and a less technically inclined audience.
Just my two cents
Okay, Dui and Heffe are pretty spot on with where I am at with this. Not that I am not flexible but, I think I can add two other points. A previous company had something similar. Because most of the problems are
seriously, they did real time stuff but it was all cut and pasted. They sat there with a doc open of all of the reply’s, cut, paste, repeat. Because no one used the forums as much they had to repeat everything. I am sure for some it would be nice, but it is the few that wreck it. A few, will post of FB, Instant message me there, post in the forums, and use the contact page, all while I am typing a rely to them. The other reason is I am already stuck for a vast majority of the day in front of this screen adding another reason to be here would be a bummer. I have done a few phone calls but as you can imagine when I say something like, “what does it say when you type in m119” it takes ten minutes to get to the computer, get it booted up, find where repetier is, get the cable plugged in, ect. With the forums I can still do other things, but have a near real time response.
I would like to think if a person submits a question and pokes around on the site a bit, they have a high chance of finding the answer. Or if we could get them to follow the instructions all the way to the crown we would be better off.
I strive to be able to, at worst, reply with a page link that should solve the issue. Like the firmware page, that was for the first year most of the questions, so I took a few dozen screenshots of flashing a board. Now rarely does a flashing question pop up (aside from the few months of early marlin 2). But now it seems that most common issues are few and far between, except on FB…some of the people there somehow built a machine without knowing about the site at all. Some guy just asked if someone had some instructions…
With that said there is plenty of room for improvement, what I want I am sure isn’t what everyone wants, if you want to start one I could link it somewhere, or load a chat up in the side bar.
On the flip side, we are doing something right. Sales have been trending up since day one, with all sorts of new machines, products, revisions, etc, and Forum Trouble shooting questions peaked a long time ago and I would say are easily trending down. I much prefer spending time on the fun forum stuff vs, “why does my machine move 20mm when I tell it to go 10mm”.
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Haha, Such good points from everyone. I know that we could probably never have just a community chat room as support requests would spill into it, and thus drive the forum usage down. You’re obviously doing something right, keep at it!
Thanks for the insight and conversation everyone.
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I’ve been involved in some IRC support chats, and they tend to follow exactly what the others have said here. The only Slack stuff I’ve worked with were company specific and tended to be real time, I need some help with X right now, type things. Or, I’m going out for a sandwich, anyone need one too? 
Sure. I’ll have a turkey and pepperoni.
Marshmallow fluff with honey, yours sounds too healthy.
You want the cinnamon raisin bread with that, or the split Oreos?
Cinnamon raisin!!
I would say oreos, but how does the frosting get removed?
The frosting just helps hold onto the rest of the stuff… No need for removal!
I’ve been missing a more instant/informal way of communicating with the MPCNC community. Looking for a Discord server, I came across this post. I see all your points, and I respect the need for a searchable history - that people can learn from each other and that we are less prone to “have you tried plugging it in” sort of questions.
The thing is - I often want to reach out to specific people - without really knowing who or how. More specifically: I want to ping all norwegians, and ask them how the biltema-pipes have fitted their prints - if they have any gaps on the feet and the rollers. There are many more examples of small questions, that I’d really like to ask without it flooding the forums. Having a Discord/IRC/ie type of place for asking stupid questions is something I miss. I know that most of you don’t want to answer every single one of these - but being able to narrow things down in groups on a discord server is reaally useful.
If not - how to I actually ping/mention people? I tried @ and username, but nothing seemed to happen… are there other ways of reaching out, like group messages or such? I find the whole forum structure and functions somewhat confusing. Ie. when answering an old post from a norwegian user - I don’t think this person necessarily gets a notification without visiting this site.
I don’t answer pms. The number one motivating factor for me is that I’ve googled questions thousands of times and I frequently find the question asked and answered. I started helping here because it looked like a place I could get some of that karma back and I want people to be able to find it. I have a suspicion most of the traffic is from people who have never asked a question. So even if it’s a very specific question, I refuse to answer in PMs.
You can @ someone to get their attention. The name in the red ink isn’t their username. If you click on the red name, it will show their username (I have jeffeb3 for both, but many people have a name and a different username). @turbinbjorn, it looks like this. It looks like you’re using the same too. Bill is billsey.
Yup, remind me to tell the story of where ‘billsey’ came from (it was in the middle 80s and a XENIX machine was front and center).
Haha. Jeffeb3 came from the 90s from my aol account.
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As someone who ran a large forum with over 100k users for several years, I just want to give a warning about Discord, shoutboxes, etc. Any sort of indexless community platform.
There is no quicker way to kill your forum and add to the amount of customer support you have to do.
You go from a searchable, well formatted forum like we have here to an off-platform (i.e. not on this website) cluttered mess. Where instead of users making a thread that usually contains a problem and a solution that is able to be searched for by future users, you have one giant IRC channel where your only option to search is by using ctrl+f.
I’m all for a discord, it’s by far the best voice+chat community platform right now – but without a rule that all technical support needs to be a thread on the forums you’d be shooting yourself in the foot.
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