Sunsetting Technical Support on the Forum - Discussion

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Comments on Sunsetting Technical Support on the Forum

Its not possible to comment there so i will comment here…

I dont think it is good idea.

Mainly because you have not provided the alternatives. Here people have the search function which is not working on discord. Dev portal does not have any way of the commenting option nor if person is troubleshooting some issue he cannot find the solution.

You might have good response time when person asks for some issue on discord, but in my case for example when i asked for the dotnet support nobody knew the answer… Few hackathons back AF chilled out the support for the unity for example, and in that thread noone knew what level of support was Frank supposed to deliver even though he had some kind of contract with the AF. I am not even able to find that post now on discord… do they delete periodically?

I believe that its better to keep persistant F&Q somewhere… If you argue that ai agents learns from the old data from forum, i am 100% sure he does not learn anything from discord. And it needs some Q&A place to learn new things. So perhaps you may consider to use it at stack overflow and mark all old posts here as deprecated, or you just annotate all deprecated info here. The solution with bad ai agents data to kill forum is bad.

Or perhaps even better solution is to use the forum from the devs support more so that everybody when he looks for some issue can use the google and he is directed to the algorand forum…

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Hi Ludo, I will respond to various points individually:

you have not provided the alternatives

I provided three alternatives, namely our AI bot, the Discord server, and a direct email inbox for technical support.

Dev portal does not have any way of the commenting option

The new dev portal is under construction right now, but we do have a way for people to provide feedback about it through GitHub Issues here: https://github.com/algorandfoundation/devportal/issues

I am not even able to find that post now on discord… do they delete periodically?

We’ve never deleted technical channels from the server. They’re still in the archived categories down at the bottom. Some channels may not be visible anymore, however. If there’s something very old that is important for you to find, feel free to ask.

i am 100% sure he does not learn anything from discord

We actually had an AI tool that scrapes technical Discord channels and indexes the content, and this made it available in Google search results. That said, our significant effort to redesign and refresh our technical documentation for the benefit of human and LLM readers will yield far better results compared to unstructured chat content from years ago given how much our codebase has changed.

Or perhaps even better solution is to use the forum from the devs support more

We would be swimming against the macro currents of how people use the internet to invest more resources into a platform of waning popularity, and we the reality is that we must make business decisions in a resource-constrained context.

when he looks for some issue can use the google

Again, the future is AI-powered search, and so our strategy is to carefully curate high-quality, current, and correct data to give search engines, agents, and future tools the best chance of providing helpful answers about Algorand.

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ai bot cannot teach other ai bots how to do it
dicsord is perhaps accessible to google search api, your ai bot, and gemini, but not to others
direct email inbox ? i do not know about this, but i consider email the worst form of communication… i tried to fill in the contact form few times but never got any response, but it was years ago perhaps now you have better processes…

People do not have access to new dev portal, i dont know how to comment it… i just assume its not possible to discuss the examples, nor there will be the list of the errors the devs use to face during the dev process

I believe you… But still not able to find it… i think i posted it under the ask dev channel

i tried to ask the ai bot simple question to generate me sample code in dotnet how to call smart contract, and he told me he does not know about it…

i understand that you are resource constrainted, thats why i do not understand why you object against the community to help the community

We have the same goals :slight_smile:

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Also another point is… what is the process when for example i create useful library that others may want to use?

For example last week I took over the dotnet and built for the 4.0.1 the recent nugets - NuGet Gallery | Packages matching Algorand4
(Half of my projects is using c# and i am quite sad that Frank gave up the support for it…)

This week for example i created the ARC14 npm lib and ARC76 npm lib

When i ask your ai bot what is the arc76 he tells me that the highest arc he knows is arc74… The arc200 is quite important as well i think…

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I feel it the way that if will sunset the technical support from the forum and the devs will have nothing to do here, noone will get to know about it because the AF have the monopoly on what you consider to be legit to be showned to the devs… (through your ai bot, the non searchable discord, or your email group)

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Hi, @BrianW,

I also think it is an error to close the Forum for technical questions.

You know, Brian, there are several kind of people, and not all of them are developers. I lot of them just need simple help, like what to do when there is an error in the passphrase… or when Ledger Nano is not pairing, etc. They may have never heard about Discord, and it seems frightfully compilated to them at first – to complete some challenge even to enter into a Discord server.

And here comes the second point, already discussed by Ludo @scholtz , namely that it is a nightmare to search for something on the Discord.

Let’s wait till it is completed, and we will see. But untill then, do not change this Forum.

Very nice… very nice… but yes, sometimes we should swim “against the macro currents of how people use the internet”, because this Forum has low entry barrier, can be searched, and the necessary infrastructure is already there.

I hope you can change your decision, and will change your decision.

Best regards,
Maugli

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@Maugli, you have personally received answers and assistance from my own team, our engineers, other community members, and our AI bot on the Discord server, so I am surprised to see you advocate against the Discord in which you have been helped so frequently.

Let me respond to a few of your points individually:

several kind of people, and not all of them are developers

The forum will still exist for governance discussions and general usage, but it will not be an official channel we maintain or promote for technical matters.

it is a nightmare to search for something on the Discord

The content you are searching for on Discord almost certainly doesn’t exist here on the forum, either, which sees much less activity. This isn’t a reason to continue operating a mostly abandoned segment of the forum.

this Forum has low entry barrier

This is actually part of the problem. For every legitimate post you see, we are moderating ten others that you don’t see. The signal-to-noise ratio is very poor. It is hard to overstate the intensity of the efforts of scammers to defraud people in the crypto ecosystem, and while this is mostly hidden from regular users it consumes resources from the mod team to operate across multiple platforms.

The slight barrier to entry on Discord is a good thing because it means those in need of help are more likely to get real help from a legitimate user on an actively monitored platform. For developer assistance, I don’t believe that joining a Discord server is a major barrier, and it brings many other benefits to join our community there.

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A duck walks into a store and asks, “Do you have any grapes?”
The shopkeeper says, “No, sorry, we don’t.”
The next day, the duck comes back: “Do you have any grapes?”
The shopkeeper replies, “I told you, no!”
The next day, the duck asks again: “Do you have any grapes?”
The shopkeeper yells, “If you ask that one more time, I’ll nail your beak to the counter!”
The next day, the duck walks in and asks, “Do you have any nails?”
The shopkeeper says, “No.”
The duck grins and asks, “Do you have any grapes?”

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The duck has also been shopping at the grapes superstore down the street all along but is curiously concerned about why the corner shop has decided to stop carrying grapes :thinking:

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Some people are opposed to moving to Discord, but given our limited resources, I think it makes sense to transition if it allows the technical team to handle even one more request.

Right now, the guidance for using Discord is quite rough—just telling people to “create a thread on Discord for technical questions.” This does make it a high barrier for users to actually ask questions there. However, if we provide clear instructions, such as “Here is the Discord invite link, post your question in this thread under this category,” most people should be able to find their way. And if someone still has trouble, the community members can help guide them—it doesn’t have to be the technical team doing that.

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Help me understand how the guidance on using Discord is “rough.”

The app can be launched in a browser window, the onboarding process prompts new joiners to visit various channels, and there is a single post-join question that asks if you are there for development, which reveals a category of channels called “Dev Help.”

Have you tried it? Ping me in the server, and let’s chat about your experience! If it’s confusing, let me know what was unclear and I’ll modify the onboarding steps to make it better!

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Guidance to use discord can be simple… just post and pin to the forum message that prefered way to get the tech support is the discord.

However discord is “rough” because:

  • you cannot easily see your posts… in forum all submissions are indexed by person who is submitting it
  • the search function does not work… when i write the c# in search it does not find anything even though i used it in the post before
  • search engines cannot crawl the discord and thus the searching for the issues is much more difficult… i understand you can teach your ai, but your ai text generator is at the moment dumb and teached on old data… for example it does not know anything about the arc76 saying that the last arc it knows is the arc74…
  • it seems that the AF from time to time does not respond till the end… I am not saying this may be better in other channels, but other channels have its featurs. I ping you in that c# post
  • when people want to say something to the technical algo community and not ask the AF question, then the chat type system is bad to do so, and forum based system is much better
  • with discord the AF is bound to single company to rely on… What if discord increases the subscription fee, will loose the data, go bankcrupt? What happens in 2030 when AF will be out of funds? Who will pay for the discord subscription? If we loose all data from discord, what then? I hope this will not lead to the argument that the algorand code should change to inflationary model… I would love to see the progress to community driven model rather to the centralized AF model in the future…

I did, and for chatting with the AF the discord is the second best thing (the first is the direct communication with the person responsible for specific thing)

I still have to find out how to communicate with Fred Estante, because he ignores my messages in twitter and also my emails. What is the best way to push some news on our products?

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Thank you for your reply.
I have responded on Discord.

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The new dev portal is available here: https://5182016e.devportal-7it.pages.dev/
I think it is a very impressive initiative.

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