We accept that. Some of us are also Discord users.
we think that using chat and long form discussions side by side is a great pattern when it works well, and it’s great to hear you’ve found ways to encourage healthy behavior here - it can be a challenge, but it’s something we’ve been saying for a while as well. We’re more invested in doing it within the platform now with chat, but we’ve also made significant investments in chat-integration to enable folks to do it with multiple tools.
I would be so happy if we could tie Discord Forums and Discourse together. So that you can interact with our forums in either tool, in a native format.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but my community has an active subset of users on both discord and discourse. The fourm side has been around for 10+ years and the discord for 5+. Most users are in both but people have a clear preference for which format they prefer.
Both platforms now have huge inertia in my community. There’s no way people who predominantly use the forum are interested in discord’s new forum feature. There’s also no way of convincing the Discord side to chat exclusively on the forum. I haven’t turned on Discord forums or Discourse chat for these reasons.
The only compromise I can see in my case is getting the two platforms more integrated. I have created my own Discord/Discourse plugin (partially based on yours, thanks for that!) and one idea I was flirting with to extend my plugin was to sync one of the discord channels with the discourse chat. The benefit in my case being less of a friction/divide between the two partially overlapping communities.
This is a longer post than I wanted but basically what I’m saying is that for communities with a large amount of inertia with Discord and Discourse simultaneously, such a synchronization is useful
This is the case within my community, as well. I’ve turned on Discourse chat, but for the moment used CSS to hide everything except the ‘Personal Chat’ sections, which are a nice quick & clean upgrade over long chatty PM topics that are often used.
A crossover general chat between the two platforms could be quite nice though, bring folks together that are a little more platform-separated right now.
edit ~ reading more carefully, it seems like this may be possible to a large extent already, I’ll have to look into it more
I made quite a few additions. I’ll plan make a meta topic on it one day but as of now, there’s still a critical bug in it I haven’t been able to quash that requires the plugin to be reset every couple days.
Users can only see their own posts on this page but staff can search any user from the “admin panel”. Users who connect their account get a “Verified” rank on Discord which is required to view the channels there. Other ranks are incremental and based on post count as seen in the above image. Hitting a rank gives you a button to “collect” a badge for it on the forum. Obviously all this functionality depends on Discourse knowing about Discord messages so I added a table in Discourse that syncs over all Discord messages. Once every 20 minutes ranks and posts get synced. I also have new forum topics getting cross-posted onto Discord in a dedicated channel. As you are probably aware, some of these functions are based on the construction kit you made.
A lot of these features are unique to our community’s needs so I’m not sure if there is any general application. But the way I have it set up doesn’t make it too difficult to cross post between platforms for users that have been “Verified”.
But yeah, just to bring this back on topic, this has been my compromise between the two platforms. There’s zero probability I will get the entire community to use a singular platform at this point. The culture between the two is very different and so are the types of conversations that happen; I see value in both though. Because of this, Discord Forums and Discourse Chat are pretty redundant and I’m not sure if I’ll use either for anything other than syncing content between the two platforms.
Perhaps like email sending and cloud image serving services, it might be more of an integration option? Easier “mixed media” discourse would be pretty awesome.
I’m not sure I’m following you, can you explain a bit more how Discourse features are “spreading everywhere”?
As Pixlz said, forums were popular back in the days (2000-2010) before habits changed, social networks sort of took over the Internet, and communities migrated to Facebook groups.
I heard that Facebook is less and less popular. I’m not a Facebook user, but the few time I have to use a Facebook group, I’m baffled by the mediocrity of their interface and user experience. Slow, painful to read (the realm of “click to read more”), painful to reply with wonky 2 levels depth of nested threads, inefficient search, redundant information, interface cluttered by annoying default settings…
Maybe because of Whatsapp & similar software, and Discord, and Slack, etc… Internet is now a bit of inside the chat era, but chat is hardly compatible with in-depth discussions about various topics (hence the “thread” integrations in Discourse, which… Somewhat led to their new “forums”).
The means of online communication have always evolved and mutated. Discourse integrated its chat solution, Discord integrated its forum solutions. These platforms are somehow converging through similar features but it’s hard to see what the future will be.
Maybe some Discord servers will have low activity chats and active threads, and some Discourse forums low activity threads and active chats…
And maybe forums will have an activity peak every 15 years. Or maybe there will be other means of communication on the Internet we don’t have even imagined yet.
That said, my message is not much more than a general feeling.
We are going back to the topic of ”how we can beat Facebook”, but the issue is not lousiness of Facebook or great things of Discourse. It is mobiles and that interface. Creating text based content longer than two sentences and three emojies is just pain in the ass.
That’s why chats, and social media in general, are so popular.
we think that using chat and long form discussions side by side is a great pattern when it works well, and it’s great to hear you’ve found ways to encourage healthy behavior here - it can be a challenge, but it’s something we’ve been saying for a while as well. We’re more invested in doing it within the platform now with chat, but we’ve also made significant investments in chat-integration to enable folks to do it with multiple tools.
