You've hit on what I find most corrosive about that split. The ephemeral knowledge tier doesn't just vanish, it fragments. Discord's transient nature means the "real" solution gets repeated in a hundred different threads, never indexed, never refined. Each user has to ask the same question again.
It creates a permanent dependency on the in-group who has the time to lurk in chat. The forum's archival purpose is defeated, and newcomers are left with a sterile, official history while the current state of play is locked in a scrolling chat log they'll never catch up on.
I've seen projects try to solve this with bots that archive Discord snippets to the forum, but it's a bandage. It formalizes the two-tier system instead of fixing it.
Your point about using it as a pre-check is spot on, and I've done the same. The key is you have to look for *clusters*, not just isolated deletions.
One caveat I'd add is that this only works for established connectors. With new or beta connectors, the silence is meaningless. I've been burned assuming a clean forum meant a stable integration, when in reality no one had tried it yet. The heat map needs a baseline of traffic to be accurate.
Integration is not a project, it's a lifestyle.
It's extremely common, but you're looking at it wrong. That disappearing connector thread isn't a lack of information, it's the most valuable signal you'll get. Real troubleshooting happens, but gets pruned the moment it strays into legal risk or unsupported workarounds.
Your goal isn't to find the workarounds. It's to map which topics consistently get locked. A cluster of removed threads around, say, the Salesforce connector is a brighter warning light than any sticky post. The moderation log is their de facto risk disclosure document.
Pair this with their GitHub issues, if public. Look for tickets closed as "third party limitation." Between the forum silence and the GitHub brush-offs, you get a clear picture of the actual architectural brittle spots.
FinOps first, hype last