Beginning Friday, August 18 support will no longer be provided over Discord Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Community-based support will transition to the forums, forums.apiscp.com. Discord-based support will continue to be offered Monday through Thursday, which coincides with release schedules. This transition enhances support visibility beyond Discord, as well as provides a better process to collate related support inquiries.
You may still ask support questions Friday through Sunday on Discord but these will be limited to the lounge. Moreover, there will be no official representation from ApisCP for questions asked during these days.
Originally, support was offered over Discord to rapidly digest and turnaround on an issue, whether a production bug or enhancements. Four years later and nearing 1,000 community members (!), this process has hit its scalability ceiling. Discord introduced both Threads and forum-style posting which is a vast improvement over its chat interface but no matter how you skin it, it's still a chat application at heart.
Chat is great for rapid communication at the expense of properly structured data. Discord doesn't provide for preset templates that can help collect required information and some posters are, to my chagrin, better than others relying on a stream-of-consciousness style of writing that drags bug reports longer than necessary.
Forums offer category templates that direct bug reports, encouraging thoughtful composition, and this speeds up development considerably.
Overcoming the walled garden
A common criticism is that Discord is difficult to search. Metadata isn't searchable: code fragments, commands, and even blockquotes lack basic result visibility. It's not only difficult for someone looking to get help but also difficult to refer back in time to a previous solution. Worse yet, this data generated is internal. ApisCP has little presence outside Discord. Prospective users looking for answers are forced to download Discord, adding yet another layer of onboarding hurdles.
By moving future support to forums.apiscp.com, this data may now be readily indexed by search engines enhancing problem resolution. Existing support threads generated within Discord shall remain on Discord to respect privacy of its contributors.
Moving from chat to forums is a first step in fixing a progressive problem. Code is becoming increasingly complex to implement, so interruptions and back-and-forth become more costly. I hope this is a step in the right direction to balance customer and product demands.
Stay tuned.
