Going Discord

[nyx 164]

I love my cbox but lately, I've been thinking of adding discord to my board. I've been playing around with it trying to get familiar and it's been going well so far. I had a friend mention adding bots to me in passing and it made me wonder what type of bots do people normally add to theirs? Where do you get them and do you find them to be helpful?

[StormWolfe 557]

Here's where you can start with browsing bots...

 

https://discordbots.org/

 

I use Dyno which I love because it's set-up interface is so easy to use. I use its greeting and announcement features.

 

https://discordbots.org/bot/dyno

 

Lots of people use Tatsumaki which does basically the same things.

 

https://discordbots.org/bot/172002275412279296

 

There are also bots which let you embed Discord on your site. I've stopped using those in favor of just a link.

 

What I like about Discord over Cbox is the ability to set up separate channels for separate topics in our Discord server.

 

Personally, I love Discord. I have even added mods so that posts and topics feed to certain Discord channels. Some people have done the same thing by using RSS feeds, but I am clueless on that one.

[Guest Bekah]

On TotH, we use both the Cbox and Discord. Discord is where the informal chats take place between members, image sharing of memes and cats are also really popular between our members. It's a great place to talk to your members and to make announcements. We also have a dice bot, to help members decide on which posts to make. They seem to really enjoy it ^^

 

As StormWolfe said, you are able to make various channels for a variety of topics. Our list is ever growing, from various show spoiler chats to recipes and book requests!

 

We still use the Cbox because it's new members and guests first point of contact. We also have some members who just prefer to talk there, so it will always be a staple on our site.

[Robyn 54]

We have both an on site chat and a discord. We have dife rollers on both to help with that. We have a few game bots (e.g. pokecord) to add to the fun and of course some mod bots. We specifically use Dyno, as previously linked.

[Kit the Human 758]

Mee6 is useful.

 

But you can get a list of bots here! Have fun with that rabbit hole.

[Deep Sea 326]

You can use If This Then That to set up webhooks that will follow an XML feed and post in your server when there's a new thread posted! @Morrigan linked me an article that showed me how. Personally, I had better luck with Zapier over ITTT - more reliable, easier for me to understand the instructions - but also a paid service, so NOT ideal if you have a lot of activity (unless you're willing to pay).

[nyx 164]

Thank you for all the bot ideas, I had no idea there were so many lol While browsing, it made me think of another small question. Do you have the actual chats (through titan) on your board or the link? I'm leaning more towards the chat option myself but I was just curious what others like.

Edited May 7, 2019 by wicked

[Kit the Human 758]

No.

 

I used to but removed it for a few reasons. I'll leave one out because it's not at all pertinent to you:

1. I'm weird about chilling out with a community where everyone can see. It's like, hanging out with your friends in your home, but you leave all the doors and windows open so anyone can just come in and stare.
2. Takes forever to load which is, as a member, a PITA when I'm already in your server. I don't need it on your page too. You could probably solve that by just running a lil script that checks that the group number is not whatever the guests group number is. (Or that AND checks to make sure there isn't a custom field set to "I don't need discord on the forum.")

When it comes to Titan, I'm a bit weird too about it's you have to register a name as a guest to browse the chat shtick. You might just be trying to suss out the community, but you still need to kind of announce yourself by giving yourself a name (which generally means there's a post in the discord telling everyone to watch out so and so is here.) To me, that kind of nullifies the reason to have a forum based chat in the first place, to let people browse your community and get to know your spirit.

 

I'll be honest though @wicked, I'm about 90% sure that my opinions here are very minority. The community as a whole seems to be trending with discord on site.

[StormWolfe 557]

I liked the ease of embedding Titan, but eventually went with WidgetBot for embedding the chat since it is just a small Discord icon that you can place in any corner of your board.

 

However, like @Kit the Human, I removed all chat embeds off the site because I just don't like them. Instead, I put up a permanent invite link to our Discord. If people don't want to join and live chat to get the quick answers, there's a guest friendly Help board they can use.

[Morrigan 1,826]

I'm the same as @Kit the Human and @StormWolfe I removed all embeds. Especially since you get punished for load times in google. Embeds actually increase your load times between 15 seconds to 30 seconds and for a normal user that's just a pain in the ass. Honestly if you want to chat join the discord, if you don't, then don't.

[nyx 164]

 

 

 

On 5/4/2019 at 5:58 PM, StormWolfe said:

I have even added mods so that posts and topics feed to certain Discord channels. Some people have done the same thing by using RSS feeds, but I am clueless on that one.

 

Thank you so much for the Dyno bot suggestion, I added it last night and I'm in awe of all it does. I'm kicking myself for not joining the discord train sooner haha This mod to feed posts and topics to a channel, is that with Dyno bot too? It sounds amazing and super helpful with some things I want to do.

[StormWolfe 557]

3 hours ago, wicked said:

This mod to feed posts and topics to a channel, is that with Dyno bot too? It sounds amazing and super helpful with some things I want to do.

 

The mod I use is made for IPS forums (same forum software as this site). A similar feature will be built into Gaia when it's released - not sure that Gaia's will be in its first release or not. I think there's a similar mod for Xenforo (not sure).

 

For other forum platforms, you would need to search their mod sites. I know that some people have set up Discord feeds using RSS. However, you cannot do that on JCINK as it does not have RSS.

 

Here's the guide on RSS set-up: http://mattdemers.com/guide-automate-discord-posts/

 

If you search for Discord's bots with the keyword RSS, it will bring up several. Now, this might not be true of all of them, but I have heard there's a delay between posting and feeding to Discord with most of them.

 

Hope some of this helps you.

[skyemoondancer 6]

The mods we use are Sidekick, Birb, and MEE6 since they all have features that we use in our chats. I have not yet decided if we like having our discord embedded on the site or not though. I feel like the cbox gets forgotten when there is a discord but wanted to give guests a way to communicate with us if they didn't want to join the discord server yet.

 

I haven't used the Dyno bot before but now that I'm reading this thread I'm sorta thinking about testing it out to see if it is right for us or not.