Bridging Slack's #Helpdesk and Discourse (Proposal, feedback welcome!)

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The ideal situation seems to be the following:

  • A user writes a nice descriptive question (that has the possibility of a good answer) in #helpdesk in Slack.
  • The user gets the answer on Slack, typically over a set of chat messages.
  • After getting an answer on Slack, the user summarizes the answer nicely and posts it to the bridged discourse post.
  • There is now a permanent record of a nice question with a nice answer, something akin to a stackoverflow question.
  • When someone googles the question, they will find the Discourse thread.

Now, does this happen in practice? From looking through the bridged category (and having these bridged posts show up on the discourse front page all the time), I would say no. What seems to happen in practice:

  • Since Slack is a chat, the original question is often low-effort and the details of the question will usually come out after some back and forth in the Slack thread. This is not reflected in the Discourse bridge post.
  • Many questions are double answered (Slack and Discourse), causing extra effort by the community.
  • The author of the question almost never replies to the bridged discourse post with the answer he/she got in Slack.
  • The type of questions are not really those that you care to achieve anyway, often the user just wants to have some discussion and it isn’t a “stackoverflow type of question”. An example is “Does anyone have experience with saving/loading arrays with JuliaDB and Dagger”.

To me, the bottom line is that a chat and forum are two different kinds of medium and they have different cultures in how you are expected to behave. In particular, on Discourse the culture is to have quite well-written questions, provide MWEs etc. In Slack, it is a more laid-back and free-flowing type of communication. Cross-posting Slack type of communication onto Discourse makes it come off as low-effort and almost rude. There is not a problem with the Slack communication itself, it was just forced onto a place where it wasn’t intended.

The net result feels to me that the #helpdesk in Slack is noisier with the bot messages and Discourse is noisier with all the perceived low effort questions. And the tangible benefit for this is very low if any. Neither do I see a good way of fixing it with some small tweaks. So personally, I think it was a good experiment but I don’t see much reason to continue it further.

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