4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
I think the thread(s) aren't that hard to navigate or search in - assuming everything else has been set by admins properly (rarely the case). YMMV. Third-party ticketing/integration bots with major services are seamless, but or course depends on your use case.
@premeena
It's not that they are hard to navigate necessarily, it's that for a technical based community where topics can be very long lived an instant chat platform isn't really a good solution.
Where instant chat is transient, forums bridge the gap between a wiki and asynchronous chat making it better suited for the task. Throw in external indexing and information becomes far more discoverable.