[michaelt]

> I miss the days of forums, and wish something like them could thrive again instead of rather private, but importantly ephemeral chats.

Open source projects have long had ephemeral chats, private to the people in the chat at that moment - it just used to be called IRC.

[foresto]

And they have also long had places for collecting persistent, searchable information alongside their IRC presence; usually public bug trackers and/or forums.

It has become all too common for a project to offer only Discord, which not only makes all community-collected information more or less ephemeral, but also locks it away behind some corporation's ever-changing terms and conditions, some of which are onerous.

GP's complaint is not that ephemeral chats exist, but rather that there is often nothing else.

[macintux]

Except there were open, archival solutions for IRC for projects to take advantage of. Are there any for Discord?

[voxic11]

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Discord

[macintux]

Sounds like you have to join the server to see the logs, something that was not required for IRC archives.