Discord and Discourse - Better Together | Blog

[oshyan (Oshyan Greene)]

Nice, thank you. I’m definitely hoping for deeper/more sophisticated integration which may be out of the scope of what you’ve developed. But it’s definitely a nice plugin to have in the meantime.

By the way, more generally, I subsequently discovered this earlier post from Sam that shows this has been on the Discourse team’s mind for quite some time! Some great details on his thinking are over in that thread, this is just some of it:

@sam

there are just so many parallels between what we do and Chat.

• We support a very rich security model to facilitate proper groupings of people
• We have the message bus that gives us live updates
• We have a very rich Markdown engine
• We have a great system for community flagging
• We have bookmarks, replies, quotes
• We have a pretty good search

@sam

When it comes to “integrating” chat I see a few directions I would like to explore:

1. A richer messaging system. Messages can act like chat a lot of the time, they often involve rapid and somewhat raw conversation that are unfocused. It is a balancing act, cause it could be very onerous to be forced into chat with everyone the messages you. That said, in many cases chat can be perfect.
2. A distinct chat UI that ships as a plugin. I feel a lot of the fear of chat is having it infect a forum with unwanted features. Trying to jam chat into a site can feel very forced. A full screen Slack like chat UI could easily act as a compliment without forcing its way into the forum UI. The big advantage here is that so many of the features are shared and there is lots of value in having a single integrated notification stream. Also, another great thing that can be achieved with this is allowing people to cleanly “break out of chat”, select a few messages and turn them into a proper topic.