OPNSense Discord is growing!

[Baender]

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.

[meyergru]

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.

[Srixun]

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. :)

[meyergru]

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.

[Srixun]

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!

[Srixun]

Just a crossing 500 bump :P

[franco]

While I don't mind having a Discord available and discuss it here I'd appreciate if we didn't get topic bumps designed to gather more members that ultimately end up in more knowledge being locked away behind a membership signup.


Cheers,
Franco

[Srixun]

Understood.

[audun]

I'm personally strongly opposed to using Discord for open source projects. This forum is searchable and within the control of the opnsense project itself (I presume), while Discord is none of those things. Every question and answer given on Discord, or any other walled off proprietary garden, is a question and answer that no one else but that isolated community can view or comment on.

If this is happening between two people that wouldn't use the forum anyway, fine I guess, but I think awareness is needed that this type of community can lower the quality of "open" (searchable) alternatives, like forums.

This is nothing new of course, the same argument could be had against IRC or whatever, but it's still perfectly valid in my opinion. Forums are invaluable, organic knowledgebases that grow over time. They shouldn't be replaced or even amended with something that doesn't bring the same benefits.

My five cents, anyway.

[Srixun]

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. :)

[bitcore]

The concern is over splitting resources. How many places can one person look for assistance with an issue. Suppose something big get uncovered in Discord and fixed, but that info never gets back to official channels, so they never officially fix the issue?

I agree.

The other challenge I have with discord or other "chat-like" communities, is you can't search them via web search engines. History on Discord tends to dissolve into the ether, whereas a forum - it's preserved and accessible to all with nothing more than a web browser. Using kagi, duckduckgo, google, or whatever flavor - I can aggregate information from reddit, forum posts, github, personal websites, and even the pfsense communities (wherein a similar problem/solution could exit), and the rest of the entire internet.

With discord, you can't do that. You must search in the app and hope someone had an un-threaded real-time discussion that was relevant to your topic of interest.

Threading is terrible in discord - it's a chat and voice app first and foremost. It's is fine for Realtime discussion of an issue where low latency and rapid exchange is required, and not a whole lot else.

[Srixun]

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.

[Greg_E]

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.

No, not serving the greater community, serving YOUR community. Again that lack of open web search, not getting back to the official developers, etc.

Let's look at some stats:

Total Members:39052

Online Today:873

time of posting  575 Guests, 23 Users (1 Hidden)

The greater community is clearly here and all the information is publicly available to all who seek it (and indexed on open web searches).

[edit] No offense, I don't like the default layout, I like forums like this much better. And the search is cluttered with reddit threads, not limited to the discord. I tried it, I'm probably not going to go back. Mostly I wanted to see if their was a paywall that people keep talking about, I was not asked for a payment to enter like many other Discord "channels" (not sure of the proper wording). At least I looked, I'll probably just stay here.

[franco]

I mean just replying will warrant a periodic ping on the topic. I don't see the point in replying if you all disagree with this. Just look at the pattern. ;)


Cheers,
Franco