Messages

I understand your concern, we just disagree. :)  And so do our 700 members apparently.

You've got mad lads like Marciel helping people one on one and serving the community in a great fashion.

Hes not the only one, plenty of the people in there serving the greater community as a whole.

I mean, I guess I can see where you're coming from. but Im very happy other open source projects dont follow this mindset.

Wazuh has been invaluable on their discord and super helpful.
Gitlab is another.
Kali Linux. I know nobody has ever heard of this but the discord is ridiculously helpful.
TrustedSec has one and many of thier tools are opensource.

While I can defintley appreciate what you're saying and 100% agree forums are invaluable, discords are too. :)

Understood.

Just a crossing 500 bump :P

[I]

It is not that I "dislike" Reddit or Discord, but rather I like a "single source of truth" instead of having to look all around on the internet.

Like, if you say that certain answers to problems have been answered in Discord - fine, but probably they have been answered for the umpteeth time before here already.

Josef Weizenbaum once called the internet a big dung heap. He referred to it as this because he argued: If you pose a question in a forum (the then-current variant of social channels like Reddit and Discord), what you get is assumptions, opinions, dumb comments and in the best of cases, after a few pages of back and forth, the real answer may be given, only to be followed up by posts with "I do not believe that is the real reason" or ongoing off-topic discussions. Correct answers - if any - are buried under loads of garbage.

Nobody ever takes the time to clean up the threads of that sh.t in order to make the content more useful.

While this is true on many other forums as well (and w/r tho the missing cleanup, here, too), what I found here is a remarkable portion of well-behaved and knowledgable people. Of course, some newbies still do not search the forum first for answers that have long been given (like currently, most threads about problems with the new widgets), but in general, the info in this forum is mostly valueable.

I cannot say that for many other tech forums, much less for most social platforms, including Facebook, Telegram, Reddit and: Discord - and as I said, I have dug around in the OpnSense Discord.
I do not want to keep anybody from using it, however I will not take part for the reasons given.

Yeah the internet is the place youll find anything youre looking for. Want to see why the earth is flat? its there, want to see why the earth is round? its there. :P

I would say the same about the forum for the most part, we put together the discord, not because there was any issue with the forum, but because its a different avenue and medium for communication. It grows the community as a whole.

Fair points and I can understand your POV. Hope to see you in there at some point but enjoy your time bud!

Personally, I like the ability to get in touch with others on a topic and get help quickly. As a Discord user, however, this relates more to the areas of operating systems, gaming and AI. When it comes to network technology or IT security topics, I see it differently. Discord has a fast pace that is due to the generations that follow me. Everything always has to happen quickly. Reading half a DIN A4 page is already too long for them. In some cases, because their concentration is already diminished. It should be clear that OPNsense and other topics are not easy, even if you can find a lot of help on the Internet. It's not something that can be dealt with quickly via a yes/no chat.

I would therefore be particularly interested to know why there needs to be a Discord. In your experience, what are the questions that are increasingly asked there? Which can apparently be answered there in chat? I would like to include them here in the forum. In case it turns out that they are recurring questions and are not yet dealt with here. In this respect, you could take up the need from there here. I don't want to go into threads in Discord, because we already have the forum character here. So it shouldn't be too difficult for someone from Discord who opens a thread there to open one here.

To your first point, I would disagree, plenty of quick one off answers happen constantly in the discord.

To your second point, There's not a need for a discord, nor really is there a need for a forum, or a reddit, However there is a want, and an obvious desire, so here we are. :)  I wasnt the first person to ask or make one, however our team was the first to build and implement it in a helpful manner that has been working quite well imo.  Different strokes for different folks, ya know?  if you dont like it, then just like anything else, dont use it. all there is to it. :) If you want to see what theyre talking about so you can include them in the forum, feel free to join and look for yourself. Im sure you have plenty of self initiative to get that done. :P  But like we, who work in IT or Cybersecurity know and understand, we cant hand hold every end user and have to equip them to answer thier own questions. so, https://discord.gg/X6cSuuheGG  Hope to see you in there! We've got a whole section for guides in the discord too, might be worth a look if youre looking to convert information, but I do believe the guides are also here on the forum as well.

And just to top it off here, I appreciate the 2 cents and input, I really do.  Discord adds another medium to the equation that the forums dont, and does a bit better than reddit.  Interactive community in a different manner. We can be in there chatting about other things, networking about different topics, just general conversation that isnt set for a forum or similar medium. People talking about thier home labs, games they may play, automation they can pair with OPNSense, memes, laughing at our own mistakes with our #10001waystodie channel where we talk about how we killed our networks with bad configs, and just enjoying general conversation, there has been conversations of people talking about all sorts of things related to OPNSense and relative topics to OPNSense and firewalls, some people even chatting about CPU's and GPU's for thier gaming system, and so on.  Open, low pressure communication helps bring communities together in a great way, and I've seen this in other communities I run that are larger than the OPNSense Forums. :)  Its just another medium that grows the community overall.

I second those arguments wholeheartedly.

Also, as has been said before, I think knowledgable people will not share their attention to multiple channels, but rather concentrate to one central point of contact (which for OpnSense is obviously this forum, which has over 30000 members as compared to 500 on Discord).

If they did, it would draw their attention away from where it is needed most. I also doubt that they either could or would offer faster help on discord than here - after all, it's free.

To check this, I just entered the server for a few minutes and looked around for the "usual suspects" who help others here and guess what? I found none of them - and sorry, but I think that is a good thing (tm).

Just my 2 cents.

Appreciate the 2 cents. But your assumption that knowledgeable people wont focus in multiple avenues, I think you could simply look on the reddit and debunk that theory, the admins here, and the 'usual suspects' also interact on the reddit as well, so. That may be more of a YOU thing than everyone else thing. which isnt bad, but just your experience, and I can understand that thinking. :)

Comparing the forum to discord would be a bit lackluster in its weight, the forums have been here... how long? vs the discord?(1.5 months)  Time is a lot, and what users are comfortable doing is a variable as well. And the note about it being free, theres no cost with discord so thats a moot point. Sure, maybe all the "usual suspects" arent in there and thats ok. Theres more than one way to skin a cat, and we have very advanced users in there helping and assisting and just interacting with people, from the tone of your message I would think you'd probably fit with the PFSense crowd, OPNSense community culture is quite a bit more open and friendly as opposed to the sentiment thats coming from some of the detractors to having a discord here, not all of them by any means.

However, if this is your attempt to say we're useless and theres no help, and nobody with any knowledge in the discord helping anyone. I would ask that maybe you stick around for more than a "few minutes" and see, Also I would suggest that the idea of rapid answers is very appealing, not that the forum is slow by any means but the rate of response is much higher on discord than it is here. Again, not to say that the forum is slow, and as I have stated, even in the discord if you took a look around, we encourage people to look and help on forums and bigger issues are better served on the forums as well.

With any Opensource product or service, community and community viability are very key items. if you have no community you have no opensource growth for the most part.  Discord isnt the end all be all for that but it does add an avenue to grow the community and the skillset of the userbase as well. Thats simply undeniable.

Your detraction from it is simply "Well we already have 2 lanes on the highway, why do we need a 3rd lane? I dont think it makes sense to add the third lane because everyone can use the current 2 lanes for free"  I can understand if you dont like discord, thats fine, if you think it hurts the community, thats ok to have that opinion as well, I wont argue you there, but overall, the discord has been healthily growing and been very active, and we have done as much as we can at the moment to integrate the community into the larger OPNSense community.  Maybe spend your energy correcting Lawrence Systems on why OPNSense is good and solid, as opposed to making inferences that the people in your community using a different communication medium arent skilled or intelligent on the platform. Thats my 2 cents. :)

Thank everyone who has been joining as we close in on 500 members. :)

No such thing as live support would be blatantly false.  We've got people troubleshooting "live" even as we speak in discord.

How to miss the point.

Never mind. I am not here to debate it and won't post further on it.

Ok.

Just crossed 400 members! Thank you guys!

Greg_E gave most of the detail, to which I will add that there is no such thing as "live" support from a single differentiated location in a world with 24 hours. The forum is asynchronous but reliable. Replication and resource-splitting are therefore pointless from that perspective. I have yet to see a good reason advanced.

I do not control what others do, only my own optimal response to the conditions presented. The fact is that whereas where OPNsense won out in previous consideration, my other three options retain coherent support and I continue to follow their activities the same as I peruse this site daily. Optionality helps.

No such thing as live support would be blatantly false.  We've got people troubleshooting "live" even as we speak in discord. Someone wasnt able to connect to a game and hes getting help in real time to fix the issues. Im watching it as we speak.

now theyre talking about DOOM, or not doom and how FPS gives them headaches. but the issue is working through and should be resolved.

Everything else you have no arguement from me, options are always good, hence why Discord is here. Optionality is a good thing. ;)

Keep in mind, since you were threatening to stop donating to OPNSense because someone in the community made a discord, this discord isnt official and is run by a group of community members around the world. :)

Happy Friday! and to those who celebrate it, Happy Fathers day this weekend! :)

I couldn't agree more about the company. Watching these forums is what pulled me over from PFSense.

The community is great, but data loss is always a risk, right?

How many problems in IRC got fixed and never reported? Or in FB groups, etc.?

I think there's some valid pushback, and then there's just some sour pushback from people who simply don't want Discord at all, no matter what, because they see it as a "younger" thing. I'll tell you right now, I'm almost 40 and a director of cyber at a Fortune 10 company. Its ease of use and functionality are solid. Is everything going to make it back here? Nope. But of all those other platforms, even IRC, how much of that data makes it back here as well? We don't know.

I understand the concern about splitting resources for sure. However, I would say that with how we're running the Discord, with a Reddit tracker, it has led to a lot of people getting into Reddit to resolve issues when they see something come up.

I would love to find a way to track the forums as well. For example, if someone makes a forum post, it notifies in Discord, and our people there see it, respond, and resolve.

Gotta find the perks, bud! I think we have plenty of perks here to justify this. It's not like I woke up and chose violence to make an OPNSense Discord. :P haha.

It's just another avenue, another lane on the highway to OPNsense. If that lane or avenue ends up increasing the number of people in the community, then overall, it may end up resolving more problems in the end or at least expanding the footprint.

Heck, I'd love to find a way to bring OPNSense into work and use it for our dev environments. I tried with PFSense, but the PFSense team ended up just being a bunch of asses and ruined the process for themselves. Shrug I have total faith that if I can set that up again, OPNSense would answer the call very well.

Maybe its good there is a community where no official staff is involved. When the reddit communities got merged, the biggest concern was having staff as mods.

Having something independant could increase trust and show its really open in any sense.

I can understand this take for sure.  Just note, we have Mod Roles in the discord, doesnt mean that they would necessarily RUN the show or anything like that, but they would be able to join in on the conversations, see the community interact and grow, to which theyve been working to do long before I came along.

We do the same mod roles for the reddit and facebook group guys too (I think the reddit are the same) but facebook has a massive group and we've offered those guys to tag along as well. :) 


Also, we doubled our numbers overnight. Grew to 300 from 150 yesterday!  Thank you everyone!

Observing this deliberate division of the community and support, I am reassessing my commitment to OPNsense and monetary contributions thereto.

It wasn't broken.

Hey passeri,

Id be very curious on how this is a division?

Some notes I'd like to make here,

1. We have been working to ensure everything is as tied into the forums and the standard community as possible, Links to the forums, links to the opnsense donation portal, notes stating "the forum is still the best place for advanced troubleshooting"

2. If you have 10 legos, and someone brings 1 more lego, is that destructive to the other legos? Or does it help build?  If this was simply a "this OR that" conversation, I could see your point for sure. However, we are adding onto the already existing community.

3. Is this going to make opnsense some wildly popular Palo Alto competitor overnight? Nope. Its not honestly going to do a ton overall imo, however, it gives people a place, with familiarity to join in, learn, troubleshoot and network with other users.   Will we grow the community? Im not sure, Do I hope so? Yes I do. Do I think it will? Yes I do.

There is no deliberate split of the community. I would say that if you come talk to me or the discord for a few minutes, its very apparent we are all tied into this thing together and nobody wants to do anything other than help build and grow this thing we enjoy. :)

This is UnOfficial.  and asking the mods to join up isnt handing them over anything but making sure they can see and have some visibility, as well as seeing a community theyve worked hard to grow, at work, interacting, and growing as well. :)

Noting, if youre a mod of the reddit or forum community, PM me and Ill get you Mod tags. :) Already made and awaiting yall :)

Hey guys! Just an advert post for the OPNSense Discord (just another thing we've got better than PFsense. lol)

We've added guides, troubleshooting forums, alongside automation topics and more, as well as adding a donate to OPNSense link in the discord as well. :)

Growing quickly, crossed 150 members, and its very active! Edit: We just crossed 300 members overnight! thank you guys! 6/18, Just crossed 40 members! thank you guys!

Just wanting to make sure if anyones looking for this as a venue then its there for you guys to hop in! :)

https://discord.gg/BFPFj2uBAY  (Note: This is an Unofficial discord, and community run.)