Discord discoverability and searchability | emberjs | Page 1

tawny pewter Mar 16, 2026, 8:27 PM

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Hi community (and mods specifically). Over the years pretty much all community conversation has migrated from Discourse/Slack to Discord. This is great for a number of reasons but there's a big gap in terms of public discoverability/searchability. That manifests itself in at least two ways:

a lot of publically searchable information is very outdated
searching Discord isn't super fun, and it's very difficult to do programatically.

TBH i don't really have any ideas for solving item 1 however I have recently been working on a "deep research" style agent search for my team to use using specific sources and i was thinking it would be really nice to allow read-only API or MCP access to this discord server so an agent could parse through all the threads/channels for help understanding a specific topic (e.g. migrating from ember-cli-mirage to ember-mirage or straight to just miragejs, or migrating to warp drive, etc).

Thoughts on that? Would the mods be willing to allow select read-only bots for this purpose (i have one basically ready to go with just read message history and view channels scopes)? Other better ideas for exposing Discord data more broadly?

ocean light Mar 16, 2026, 8:55 PM

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I'm a fan -- but also, I want to expose everything to the public anyway (at least the public channels)

I asked the mods about this a while back, but got no response:
https://www.answeroverflow.com/ ?

cc <@&480472562761990174> ❤️

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would your MCP be public?, @tawny pewter ?

tawny pewter Mar 16, 2026, 9:00 PM

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my plan was just to use an existing MCP (or not even use one at all and just use the API?) with a bot token, but adding the bot is what requires perms. I think i could make the bot public but i dunno how bot tokens work tbh, like if the bot is allowed, can anyone make a bot token for that bot and the nuse it on their own MCP?

ocean light Mar 16, 2026, 9:44 PM

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would answer overflow serve the purpose you need? https://www.answeroverflow.com/docs/overview

for privacy, this is pretty good: https://www.answeroverflow.com/docs/user-settings/displaying-messages

I don't know if it has a nicer api than discord tho 🤔 hm -- but would get our info indexable by search engines and AI, I think

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and I think if we let users opt in to being recorded here, that's pretty good

tawny pewter Mar 16, 2026, 9:49 PM

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yeah answer overflow seems like it would probably solve both problems pretty well? if problem 1 is solved then problem 2 definitely is. so yeah, seems perfect and way better than a bot lol

earnest phoenix Mar 17, 2026, 1:54 AM

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Admin/mod here. I’m conflicted about automatically surfacing discord conversations into additional spaces on the web with no way for our users to opt out, even if those channels were “public.” I feel like nobody can say yes on behalf of everyone.

That said… It helps that AnswerOverflow has a per-user consent process built in. IMO that makes it a viable option. I would want the core team to weigh in.

I feel like there’s still some risk with adding these kinds of tools, but also there’s risk to doing nothing, in the sense that ai powered tools will theoretically do a worse job at Ember without this info. Then, devs have a harder time.

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@ocean light do you have any info about AnswerOverflow that helps on the trust front? Like who is building it, other major orgs/companies that use it for professional purposes?

ocean light Mar 17, 2026, 2:05 AM

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yea, I think it's this guy: https://x.com/rhyssullivan -- pretty trustworthy tech influencer as far as I can tell

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repo is public: https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow

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(last commit was 7 hours ago)

#Discord discoverability and searchability