Let's work out some official rules for this forum.

[Buster's Uncle]

The Management frowns hard upon Discord.  It killed -finally- WPC; it doesn't grow the community, and good luck finding a conversation from even yesterday, the former having everything to do with the latter.

The Management has tolerated its last link to any Discord.  The Management reserves the right to -maybe- retroactively apply this rule, as we should not be obligated to host cancer.

-Similar could apply to any invitation to join the writer offsite, especially avec link -we've been getting sicker and sicker of GitHub for quite a few years, for example- and such is very much not encouraged.


The Management feels like a jerk, but believes this is a survival issue.

[bvanevery]

Discord drives me nuts.  It's more of that social media generation short attention span stuff.  I am a master of the long-winded email and forum post.  And I prefer to be able to find things in archives, years after the fact.  Otherwise there isn't much cumulative knowledge or expertise.

GitHub has its place for coders.  Like there are 2 major SMAC mods that have their code on it.  I don't know what other use GitHub would serve.

[Trenacker]

Discord is just another step in the proliferation cycle. At some point, BBS cliques founded colonies, and ever since, it's been harder to keep up.

The same thing happened with computer gaming. Now it's not enough to get matched via the game's servers. The most successful players communicate via Discord during matches.

Discord is annoying in the same way keeping up with AIM, ICQ, mIRC, and MSN was annoying in the 1990s and 2000s. More conversations to keep track of. And in each place, you get only a fragment of the whole population.

I appreciate looking with suspicion toward any community that pulls energy away from the main forum, but it's significant that while these boards were down, that's where the community shared updates and looked for signs that these boards would return.

Discord also makes it fairly straightforward to explore adjacent fandoms without creating a new account at each stop. It's a great way to figure out who would be interested in coming here, if only they knew about it.

[bvanevery]

I think a game binary that actually integrates messaging and AAR writing, might be a market opportunity for 4X games.  Compared to the typical dev trend of "we'll outsource to Discord".  But, the only person who's going to write that forum integrated 4X game, is me.  And I know very well, all the kinds of work that are needed, that aren't that.  Thing is though, I actually have the modding and AAR background to understand these issues well.