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The rise of Discord?


Guest Arantor
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Guest Arantor

I'm not a huge Discord user - I tried it for a while, didn't like it much, never went back. But I see a number of RP sites using Discord, and I'm intrigued by this.

 

Firstly, doesn't it have the same issue that shoutboxes/chatboxes/chatrooms always did on a forum - namely, making it possible to have chats and content produced essentially 'off forum' that don't necessarily end up back on the forum after? (I'm mindful that meta content, e.g. storyline planning, might flow better in such an environment but I'm curious to see how far RP forums deviate from the forum norms on this one)

 

Secondly... when we talk about 'integration with Discord', are we talking just a menu item somewhere to a Discord space, or integrating some kind of chat widget (effectively reimplementing the chat/shoutbox thing of old), or something else? Curious what people do, what people think and more importantly what would be interesting/useful/cool to have.

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Generally, yes, you're going to have threat of anything that isn't a post in a thread being made and never getting to the forum itself, but there's never really a way around that. PMs can produce the same effect, if members are determined enough to let them. I personally have never seen it happen, with anything, but I suppose the people I tend to role-play with just aren't the type to end up talking the talk and not walking the walk too.

 

A vast majority of sites will place a widget for their Discord onto their site somewhere. The main reason why is this widget allows people to chat in it without actually joining the server with their Discord tag, and making it awkward to leave if they change their mind later, and of course, guest-friendliness is important. Titan Embeds was a big deal once, but it's lost its traction and WidgetBot seems to be taking up the mantle. Others may decide to only post a simplistic widget that shows how many people are online and displays a join link. Even others may not embed anything at all. It depends on what works for your community.

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Guest Arantor

I'm intrigued partially from a RP community standpoint but mostly from a building-a-forum-RP-platform perspective... is Discord support enough of a thing that I should consider making it a core feature to handle it?

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Discord is quite literally the biggest, most favorite, feature of the Initiative. Having our posts go to our discord server is a super important feature. It's important for staff to be notified of content that may require their attention, it's important because it's a great way for us to talk to our users if the site is down it's also perfect for us to simply chat outside of our standard conversations.

 

As a roleplayer it's just as important to have a discord or other chat widget. I prefer discord because it's searchable (so if I forget a detail here or there I can find it again) and it's got everything I need to personally interact and plot. Plotters, PMs are not my favorite way. They take too long and require page refreshes. I can plot on the go with Discord.

 

There are some people/places that use slack but Slack is too business oriented for me. It doesn't hold all of my history and it also ties into my work conversations so it's easy to accidentally crossover stuff.

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Guest Arantor

Interesting, I somehow got the impression it wasn't a major facet of the Initiative, and I can totally get behind the other aspects such as searchability.

 

I'm beginning to wonder if I need to think about it as a core feature to have Discord integration out of the box then, and make it easy to do things like getting posts across to it.

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6 minutes ago, Arantor said:

Interesting, I somehow got the impression it wasn't a major facet of the Initiative

 

I'm not sure how you got that impression. Could you better explain?

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Guest Arantor

So I'm looking around the site. I'm reading content, posting content. I have the site maximised on 1920x1080 in Chrome.

 

I see lots of content, lots of interesting things to read but the only things I can see about Discord are a link in the footer, and a small image banner on the right-hand sidebar area. With an occasional slightly-larger banner appearing in the top space where ads normally seem to be.

 

For someone who is a veteran forum user (if not a veteran RPer!), this doesn't seem like it's a major part of the community to me, it feels like a thing that isn't going on - and I don't see *that* many topics talking about it, but maybe that's just because there's an amount in my head of skipping over it... but it doesn't feel prominent to me even though it sounds like a cornerstone of the community.

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5 minutes ago, Arantor said:

So I'm looking around the site. I'm reading content, posting content. I have the site maximised on 1920x1080 in Chrome.

 

I see lots of content, lots of interesting things to read but the only things I can see about Discord are a link in the footer, and a small image banner on the right-hand sidebar area. With an occasional slightly-larger banner appearing in the top space where ads normally seem to be.

 

For someone who is a veteran forum user (if not a veteran RPer!), this doesn't seem like it's a major part of the community to me, it feels like a thing that isn't going on - and I don't see *that* many topics talking about it, but maybe that's just because there's an amount in my head of skipping over it... but it doesn't feel prominent to me even though it sounds like a cornerstone of the community.

Discussion happens more on board than on discord... Which is more there for quick and easy chatter. Laid back bullshitting? Discord. Lengthy debates on stuff? Forums.

 

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I think you misunderstand our users. The users that want to be a part are on the discord, those that don't, aren't. If we make it a bigger thing then we are basically intentionally pushing out a user base that doesn't need or want that feature of our site.

 

Being that it's part of our code of conduct to use our staff contact center to reach out to our staff it makes over advertising our discord a moot point.

 

Over half of our active user base is on our discord server.

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Guest Arantor

Ah, that explains it. I was looking at it from a way more forum-centric view than I'd realised, but I'm a forum person so this isn't surprising...

 

Thanks for helping me understand how you all roll 🙂

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Everyone has their own thing, Forum, AOL, Mail listing and Discord. Thought Discord is just an evolution of what people use actually. Discord was originally designed for gaming chat and to make it easier for online gamers to interact with each other. However it became more and people are actually switching more and more from the regular IRC, CBox or any other chat program towards Discord. Why? Because Discord is very easy to manage as administrator, you get better notifications and people can choose between chat and voice chat 🙂 

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Keeper RaWolfe

Owner of the Exonia Realm

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I looove Discord!

 

I never liked cboxes. They were too chaotic for me, since it was just one room and people would try to have so many different conversations at once. Hated it, never participated in them. But I adore Discord because you can have different channels under a single server, so that takes care of the chaos! I also love that it has a phone app, so I don't have to be on the site to be connected to my communities. Bonuses are that users can be tagged so people don't miss important things, and the channels have a search feature. Heck yeah.


As far as IC content goes, people can totally do RP over Discord and post the log to the forum. I encourage that, even!

 

And on RotE, we have a few IC communication channels that happen in real time and are considered canon. (Unless people specify otherwise, like sometimes players toss a new character in there to test them out.) They are basically IC chatrooms. The logs of those don't generally get posted to the forum because they move so fast and so much happens, and the conversations get referenced in threads anyway, but people are totally welcome to do it if they want.

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I find discord incredibly frustrating and dislike it from a general conceptual level for RP boards. Much of it is that I like everything to be separate and isolated. I don't like that I can't maintain anonymity while using discord. I also like to be able to control how readily someone is able to contact me and know what I am doing and where I am playing online. If I give out my IM information, it is a huge step for me, so... yeah. Discord makes me squeamish.

 

That said about personal opinion on discord, it is a very good alternative to the traditional cbox especially if you have a huge user base and a need for the ability for more than 10 players to chat at the same time. (As we all know, when the cbox moves suuuuuper fast, it is hard to keep up with. )

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2 hours ago, Thyme said:

I find discord incredibly frustrating and dislike it from a general conceptual level for RP boards. Much of it is that I like everything to be separate and isolated. I don't like that I can't maintain anonymity while using discord. I also like to be able to control how readily someone is able to contact me and know what I am doing and where I am playing online. If I give out my IM information, it is a huge step for me, so... yeah. Discord makes me squeamish...

 

What you are stating is actually settings you are referencing towards 🙂

  • Separate and Isolated (when managing a discord server) is done by creating a private room that got a specific role assigned towards. Members that have that role can view the channel
  • If you go towards your account settings, then Privacy & Security, you can set your account to I Live on the Edge (under Safe direct messaging). So, people, can't send you any PM without your request. Plus under Server Privacy Defaults, you can turn of direct message off totally.
  • If you go towards your account settings, then Connections, here you can manage your social media settings. 
  • If you go towards your account settings, then Games, here you can turn on and off the Display Currently running game as a status message, feature.

Hope it helps 🙂  

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Keeper RaWolfe

Owner of the Exonia Realm

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Our sites live and breathe Discord. We have one or two forums for those that aren't comfy with live-chat, but the focus of our boards is IC interaction and writing. Ninety-nine percent of our plotting and planning discussions happen on Discord. However, due to issues with the Discord integrations (bots) on the forums, we now just have an invite link.

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Dreams get pushed around a lot, and I doubt if we'll survive.
We won't get to wake up, dreams were born to disappear.
And I'm pretty sure that none of us are here.
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