Archive #programming-help threads on the website #28

Now that #programming-help uses threads, we have the ability to easily archive these threads to the website for later searching. This would expose the infinite wisdom of Martins to the broader internet and generally avoid one of the big downsides of doing programming help in a chat server.

I don't think we want this to be a full forum integration in some way. The cadence of conversation on Discord is

like

pretty different from what you do on a forum

and having all these messages show up as separate forum posts would be pretty disastrous for the rest of the UI

So, I think it is fine for this to be a one-way message archive, and not a live thing.

One question is how to represent users who have not linked a Discord account. We don't want to show their actual username and profile photo, because we want people to retain a level of anonymity. However, I think conversations would not be very readable if we simply said "Anonymous User" for everyone without a linked account. Therefore, I propose that we give each unlinked conversation participant a random profile pic from Anime Girls Holding Programming Books.

As for privacy in general, I feel that it is fine to reproduce the contents of #programming-help on the website because it is both explicitly on-topic and posted on a public Discord server. We should however respect message and thread deletion and reflect that on the site. Also, we could possibly add an explicit opt-out that an admin can manually set for a Discord user (linked or not), in case someone is uncomfortable having their programming questions being exposed to search engines, even in anonymous form.

We will have to modify our Discord code and data structures somewhat to allow us to save message content even for users without a linked account, because we have not done so up until this point. At the moment I think we have a beautiful setup that does nice cascading deletes of message content when you unlink an account. Sadly, that might have to go.

Now that #programming-help uses threads, we have the ability to easily archive these threads to the website for later searching. This would expose the infinite wisdom of Martins to the broader internet and generally avoid one of the big downsides of doing programming help in a chat server. I don't think we want this to be a full forum integration in some way. The cadence of conversation on Discord is like pretty different from what you do on a forum and having all these messages show up as separate forum posts would be pretty disastrous for the rest of the UI So, I think it is fine for this to be a one-way message archive, and not a live thing. One question is how to represent users who have not linked a Discord account. We don't want to show their actual username and profile photo, because we want people to retain a level of anonymity. However, I think conversations would not be very readable if we simply said "Anonymous User" for everyone without a linked account. Therefore, I propose that we give each unlinked conversation participant a random profile pic from [Anime Girls Holding Programming Books](https://github.com/cat-milk/Anime-Girls-Holding-Programming-Books). As for privacy in general, I feel that it is fine to reproduce the contents of #programming-help on the website because it is both explicitly on-topic and posted on a public Discord server. We should however respect message and thread deletion and reflect that on the site. Also, we could possibly add an explicit opt-out that an admin can manually set for a Discord user (linked or not), in case someone is uncomfortable having their programming questions being exposed to search engines, even in anonymous form. We will have to modify our Discord code and data structures somewhat to allow us to save message content even for users without a linked account, because we have not done so up until this point. At the moment I think we have a beautiful setup that does nice cascading deletes of message content when you unlink an account. Sadly, that might have to go.