zachdaniel:

Hey everyone! After lots of thinking about options for the community going forward, including pros & cons of discord, I’ve ultimately decided that leaning into discord is the best way forward. As you may have noticed, the server was reorganized recently, with a focus on forum threads. There is a method to this madness that goes beyond the niceness of forum posts. With that, I’ll introduce the first of 2 announcements.

AshHq + Discord Forum Mirror

One of the things that is very frustrating about discord is that all of the information is hidden behind a login. This makes our community less visible to the elixir community at large, and also hurts discoverability of fixes and resolutions to problems. This is just a start, and there is plenty of “jank”, to be resolved. But if you head over to https://ash-hq.org/forum/announcements you will see that the forum posts from <#1066223107922210867> <#1066222835758014606> and <#1019647368196534283> are all being synchronized to a read only forum view on AshHq. Anyone with design sense: please help me make it not look like crap 😄 It is a “slow sync”, checking every two hours for active & recent archived threads, so don’t expect it to live update quickly, but it can be great for posterity and for allowing the outside world to see the kind of activity here. There are links on each forum post to open them in discord web/discord app.

AshHq Discord Bot

Next, I’ve created a discord bot that runs on AshHq that provides a /ash_hq_search slash command. It will show the top 10 results, and supports searching specific libraries & types. For example, you can do /ash_hq_search aggregate guides ash_postgres . Please try it out and let me know what you think!

I’m very unfamiliar with the discord API/tooling, I basically just winged all of this, so I have no idea how stable it will be. But we’ll tackle issues as they arise. I’ll see you all next week!

zachdaniel:

Leaning into Discord: Forums & Bots!

zachdaniel:

As you can see, the message format is still a bit strange, showing identifiers for channel references, that kind of thing. I don’t know how much we really need to rectify that, since the idea is to be discoverable and people can open the discord if they really need to see that information. https://ash-hq.org/forum/announcements/1066637094459551804

zachdaniel:

I should probably change how the bot responds. It adds a public message to the channel, but it should probably just only show the person who asked

zimt28:

The link doesn’t without adding a channel: https://ash-hq.org/forum/showcase

zachdaniel:

Fixed thanks 🙂

bread.k:

This is awesome! Just saw the post on the gleam server too. Could lead to a really great way to get people to the answers they need from one source c:

jharton:

This is neat work Zach.