I have been wondering about a real-time support platform for Rclone where people can ask or chat about rclone stuff without the hassle of creating a new topic in the community.
I am all good with the forum, but a more straightforward chat would be friendly to air quick queries, whereas all the higher levels bugs that need logs and commands can still go in here (forum). I have seen the Slack invite thread, but the inviting bot is dead. If the slack community is still alive, kindly share an invite.
Coming to the point, a telegram support chat for Rclone would be excellent and if the admins are interested, kindly start one (only if the slack community is dead)
If any of you are reading this and are interested in it, reply to this topic or leave a like so that the admin team can consider it.
For me, personally, I prefer the forum format for several reasons:
the forum makes easily searchable threads findable by search engines
having each topic separate makes giving support much easier
I don't work well with real-time stuff at all so I only come to the forum 2 or 3 times a day which doesn't work well with chats.
I had experience of using Cloudflare's Discord as their only support/discussion channel on the R2 Beta. I found it very difficult to find old stuff and keep the thread of conversations going.
I find real time stuff to be useful when I want to quickly fix something and less useful for longer support topics / bugs / etc.
I like searchable as well as I've used a few discords for support and you tend to see the same questions over and over as no one can search or find things.
This forum is pretty much like real-time chat, with @asdffdsa, @Animosity022, and @Ole replying almost immediately all day long. You don't get this anywhere else
I love this forum and especially the community. I started using Rclone way before registering an account on the platform. The read time should have crossed at least ten times the current read time on my profile.
I set up Rclone, the config, and remote connections without creating a single topic on the forum. Now I have nearly ten different remotes with over 15 concurrent tasks all set up via Rclone. This itself shows how organized the community and the documentations are.
I am all in favor of this community, and it should remain. I have suggested a direct chat scenario with a much easier approach. In the case of the current forum, you have to register a new account and create a new topic which might be tedious for some. In the end, it is entirely up to the admins whether this should be done or not
I am not a big fan of discord. It is too stuffed and, most of the time contains useless side channels. A new user will almost find it unwelcome, especially for a support chat. For other uses, it is good.
I also agree with people putting some effort into themselves initially. I haven't experienced any issues, as I have pointed out in my reply to @ncw.
This was just a suggestion, and plenty of examples of such support communities exist. I would have come up with some quick questions in the last few days, and I don't quite remember them, to be honest. It would be much easier to air these 'quick questions' on a direct chat rather than a posting forum. This was my idea when I created this request. Reddit also works nearly similar to a forum, with posting and replies coming by instead of a chat approach.
As already pointed out, this can be considered or not considered at all. All on the hands of the mods
--- who is going to provide the tech support to newbies on chat?
--- who is going to monitor the chats, to be sure the best possible advise is given?
--- when i give incorrect advice, who is going to catch that and offer the correct advice?
--- what if i offer a solution, but in fact, there is another much simpler solution?
--- what if i cannot answer the question, how should i handle that?
These are some of the questions that need to be addressed by the mods. I have just put forward a suggestion. I can help to maintain the group, but the support aspect has to be dealt with by the admins of Rclone.
