NEWS: Wyrom laid out his reasoning and guidance for Discord and the Discord Forums in a long post.
Text of Discord Post follows:
PM Wyrom
Why Discord?
on 3 January 2023 5:21 PM
from the Official GemStoneIV Discord Forums
in the general Category / Discord Forums ThreadWhile the plan is to revert some of the archived channels. I’d like to just to give some insight on why I support the forums here.
In a channel, a player might bring up an important topic. Let’s just say loot cap since it’s an example thread here on the forums as well. They’ll bring up an important concern or question that has all the chatter of the channel in it. In a thread (forum/channel) it’s always easy to see the topic and most people are only active in that area when the topic concerns them. If something happens, we can always close a thread and worst case scenario, delete it. It’s very easy to moderate a thread. It’s a lot easier to follow specific topics. And it allows those who want to just chat to chat in the channels.
If you have Discord on multiple devices, you lose where you are in the chat a ton. For example, I might see 200+ unread messages in a channel, but my desktop version differs a whole lot from my mobile version. I take Discord on the go a whole lot. It’s helped me be able to keep tabs on everything way more (maybe even too much) compared to play.net forums. But the channels still exist, and if people want to chat, I think using any channel we have is good for that.
I know art was another big concern with going away as a channel. Most people don’t read all messages like I mentioned above. It’s so much better to make individual threads for art so your art is always seen. With the channel structure, it’s buried and you have to hope someone wants to go back through it. Especially if it happened in a high traffic channel during a hot topic time. This is a lot better in the long run so your content is seen. Urls to the thread also work, and you can even tag a thread in channels. It’s a huge win, and I think once the icky feelings of change wear off, it will be seen as a good move.
I will say, not a fan of the mega threads, because they go against the whole moderation preferences and the chances of us closing them are going to be high over time. I don’t think I’ll participate in those.
Lastly why Discord? Why are we using any of this? Well, it’s no secret that play.net is dated. We were reminded often that a napkin and pencil would be a better forum than what we had. Simu wanted to retire them last year, but things changed in terms of having a web person. I don’t know the state of that, it’s something I’m working on getting an update on. I just manage the LiveOps for GemStone IV, I don’t manage anything at Simutronics. But Discord is free (for now) and lets us do more. We can build out tools to help us control it, like play.net has. That’s why we chose it. Every forum software out there is going to be different with their pros and cons. But we finally can break free from our dated forums and use something that has thousands of members with ways to discover us. It’s a win.
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