Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active.
Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called “Searchcord” based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.
Seriously. It’s beyond painful when some open source project only uses Discord for communication. You have to hope that you post your question at a time when the right people are online, and that there’s not a more interesting conversation going on, otherwise it just gets lost. Index that whole dataset.
I’ve seen a few projects doing just that with answeroverflow.com and they have come up in my web searches. Not really a solution but at least a stopgap.
Given some similar issues, why is it some projects still use IRC then?
there’s a difference between using irc for livetime troubleshooting and not having a forum at all and directing everyone to your livechat discord. i’m sure some sicko out there has run an OSS project on only IRC, but their project likely got no traction because a history of problemsolving posts is important in open source. generally speaking, you need:
too many projects these days only have that last one in the form of discord
For projects I am involved with all irc chats are archived and searchable. There is nothing private, no registration needed and searchable.
Quite a bit different.
That would be equally annoying. Probably a better signal to noise ratio on IRC though; Discord descends into memes almost instantly.
Because IRC is awesome, always has been
I’ve always wanted to contribute to The Cutting Room Floor wiki but they hide registration behind a Discord server bot that will give the registration code.