• Terrible format for archiving knowledge
• Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
• Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
• Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
• Prevents indexing by web search engines
• Antithetical to interoperability
• Privacy-hostile

A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.

Correcting some misconceptions…

Element for Android doesn’t support searching in encrypted channels

That’s true of regular Element for Android, but it’s being replaced with Element X (which is built with Rust). I would expect search to be added there if it isn’t already.

and I think you can’t use E2EE in the browser at all(?)

I have done it in Firefox, so that’s false. Perhaps you had trouble with a specific browser?

plus basically every other client has even more drawbacks when it comes to E2EE.

Nheko handles E2EE just fine, so that would seem to be false as well.

Since you’re looking for recommendations, it would help if you said which clients you tried and what problems you had with them.

In case you haven’t seen it, you can set a Features: E2EE filter on this list:
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

I bought one during the clearance sale for the price of shipping, assuming that it would be abandoned but maybe still useful as a low-power linux server. I guess I ought to set it up and take advantage of it.

Thanks, Valve, for not letting these things become instant e-waste.

Your guess is confirmed here.

There are plans to update the forum, including for better security (the main issue with changing the forum software is concern over reliably migrating all of the existing content). After emailing (admittedly not current best practice), the passwords are hashed and only the hash is stored.

…and later…

The forum has been updated to https, and passwords are no longer being sent by email.

Which raises the question of how old OP’s screen shot is.

Also, no, the password would not necessarily still be stored in plain text on their end. The cleartext password used in that email might be only in memory, and discarded after sending the message. Depends on how the UBB forum software implemented it and how Larian’s mail servers are set up.

EDIT: I just verified that this behavior has resurfaced since it was originally fixed. OP would do well to responsibly report it, rather than stirring up drama over a web forum account.

Open source inherently means you can compile the code locally,

Open Source means more than that. It is defined here:

https://opensource.org/osd/

If you use the phrase “open source” for things that don’t meet those criteria, then without some clarifying context, you are misleading people.

for free.

Free Software is not the same as “software for free”. It, too, has a specific meaning, defined here:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

When the person to whom you replied wrote “free software”, they were not using it in some casual sense to mean free-of-charge.

Selling online games and then shutting down the service should forfeit the right to interfere with reverse engineering projects. Maybe even require opening up the service specs so reverse engineering wouldn’t be needed.