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Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:39 pm
by thinkslogically
I don't really know discord too well, but am I right in thinking it's built for voice chat and instant messaging? My concern would be what happens to archives, and how easy it will be to find everything all in one place. Right now I can log into the forum and see immediately what posts and topics are new. If I have to remember to check a dozen different channels for every game I'm in, or to check if someone's recruiting... Well, I'll probably forget and miss it.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 4:43 pm
by Dusk9
Yeeeeaaaaah, I'm gonna side with "no" on that one :roll:

Personally, I've never used Discord before, and have no idea how it even works. And I feel like there'd be a ton of people on here in a similar boat. Migrating an entire forum over to a completely different format sounds like a bad plan when you'd lose a chunk of people just to an inability to adapt.

Practically, would Discord even have the capabilities for something like that? For real-time chatting I could see it working fine, but not the games. Would you....what, scroll back up and look for updates? Can you check people's post history? And what about searching archives for past stuff, like the name of that NPC you met years ago IRL? Is that all possible in Discord?

Note that I'd test this all myself, but I literally can't seem to access anything other than the "#Instructions" channel. Which is another thing - if you have to make an account AND be approved by an Admin(?) before you can even view anything, what happens with lurkers?

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 5:11 pm
by Dlover
It... Could work? It's not the literal worst idea. That would be just getting rid of everything. But doing anything fancy would require people actually know the coding for it. I only learned just the other day how to italicise in Discord, making sure I can get all the colours right? That'd be hell.

As for some of the doubts... It seems to keep a pretty solid log of the messages, but I'm not sure it would keep all of them, and it will even mark channels which have new messages, and there's a search function too. Buuut looking back at old posts is a hassle, even if it keeps them all. In a normal thread where it's just discussion? Sure, that's fine. In game threads like these? Hey, I want to look at the first post, check the homerules posted there. But now I have to scroll forever because there's no quick way to do that.

So, while it's not the worst idea, it's still a terrible one.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 5:12 pm
by Arch Lich Burns
Nooooo.... It doesn't save like a forum does, and when going into the link wears put you can't even send messages, so there is a whole lot of nothing going on.... I don't think us going into that sort of thing would be good.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 5:38 pm
by Dlover
Technically you just need a moderator to give you permissions before you can post, but yeah, it's no good.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 6:17 pm
by WearsHats
You'd need a separate channel for every single game. Otherwise, the threads would get all muddled. So you'd end up with a huge mess of a channels list.

It's good for chat. It's searchable and keeps a full archive. But I don't think the format works for games.

Not great for comic updates, either. We'd either have to merge the entire Discussion section into a single channel instead of having a thread for each update or we'd have to have a new channel for every update. Neither really works. Not unless we moved all update discussion to Disqus directly on the comic page.

There are also no sig lines, no fancy links, limited markup for formatting, no way to place images anywhere but the end of a message... We'd be losing a lot.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 6:50 pm
by SuperVaderMan
Discord is for voice chat and instant messaging. It isn't a forum, so trying to use it like one wouldn't work.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2018 10:17 pm
by Theis2
As above, I Think the idea is fine I just don't think it will work very well with certain parts of the forum, especially the games, unless they are run like real games which would require all to be present at the same time. A really tough feat when we are located all over the globe.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 12:38 am
by M0rtimer
Yeah, this is about the response I was expecting. :lol:

Don't worry, I'm largely on the same boat, and the forums are here to stay, in one way or another. I'm gonna try and help along in finalizing that soon so we actually have some peace of mind on what's gonna happen with the forums or not. I think right now we're just going to keep things as they are, but we'll have to see...

With that said, I do like to play devil's advocate a little bit, so allow me to state why I hesitantly brought it up rather than shooting it down completely in the first place. :P

You guys are right that it's primarily built for instant messaging, but at it's core, it's not really "that" different from post by post messaging- And it does keep everything logged forever, so barring that the channel would be deleted, (admittedly, archiving purposes is another reason I don't like it) one could scroll all the way back to the start and everything would still be there. Not exactly super handy if one wants to find something specific back and needs to scroll through a bunch of stuff rather than go to page X... But this can for a part be mitigated by the fact discord has a GREAT search function. (compared to the forums, at least. :P) And if the DM were to tag each of his updates, those could (theoretically) be used to easily navigate updates using the search function. Updates could also be pinned, and one could also use pins on their OOC threads to keep reference sheets linked through that.

But yeah, in general I agree it's a bad idea. One could argue that the "extra" work needed to make use of the format wouldn't be worth it, and there's other limitations too. No real way to properly format text, for example.

Anyways, the short of it is that even if we COULD make it work, I also don't really see a benefit over using it when there's nothing that discord would bring to improve or fix issues with the current forums. Besides maybe better search functionality, and being more modern/secure. So in the end there's no point to it, really.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 1:37 am
by Theis2
I would say the search function is overrated as you could do the exact same thing on the forums. The worst with the search function on the forum is it refuses to search for certain words it deems too common. But tagging each update with special word would make it just as easy to find here.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 1:42 am
by M0rtimer
Except finding something using a combination of "common" words is often the best way to track something down you're looking for, and you often can't do that on here. Example: you're trying to find back information about a guy whose name you can't recall, but you remember he had a distinctive "red hat". Except you won't be able to find him using that, because the forum thinks those words together are too common... Disregarding that combining them, you'd likely only get like 5 posts containing the guy in question. :roll:

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 2:19 am
by spiderwrangler
I've had better luck using Google to probe the depths of forum threads before!

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 2:21 am
by M0rtimer
That doesn't surprise me, honestly. :lol:

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:07 am
by thinkslogically
So can I ask what the problem is with the forum that's prompted this discussion in the first place? Like the others said above, the invite to the discord chat doesn't get you anywhere except essentially a lock-screen so I don't know what's been going on over there.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:14 am
by M0rtimer
Security issues mostly. The admins actually stalled this update for over two years because they knew there were probably gonna be issues. (Pretty sure at some point it got to the whole "ignore it while you can" phase) At this point it was so outdated that it was just risky, as evident by all the bots, hence all this mess.

I'm trying to get Duke's attention over the whole discord thing, because it's no surprise people don't stick around on there if people get stuck on a "lock screen" as seems to be the case.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:35 am
by thinkslogically
Cheers :) security is a good reason!

I wish there was more open / advance communication though, and if there's going to be a discussion about the future of the forum, I feel like it should be happening here where actual forum users can see it, and not on discord... Just my 2p.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 5:46 am
by Dusk9
Agreed. At the very least some discussion in the Mod section of the forum would've been nice. The forum banner says "Please ask the Mods for more info if needed.", but I knew as much about it as anyone else :shrug:

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 6:05 am
by M0rtimer
Yeah, the global announcement I made was for the exact reason to try and communicate what exactly was going on. You're not missing a terrible lot, though- All we've "really" been discussing is options, and conversing about how to fix things and such... I've been relaying any realistic solutions to here.

Anyways, the discord is a bit more accessible now, so you can go and check it out if you really want to. The main bulk of discussion about it was in forum-games-chat, I'm pretty sure.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 8:47 am
by thinkslogically
Did the discord get reshuffled since yesterday? I don't have access to forum-games-chat and a couple of other areas any more...

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 8:50 am
by M0rtimer
Yeah it got changed. You can grant yourself the role to view those things, though- Instructions are on the instructions channel.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 9:01 am
by thinkslogically
Ah ok, cool :) I was wondering if I got bumped for being too complainy yesterday :lol:

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:09 pm
by Dlover
So, I have a feeling this isn't meant to happen.
► Show Spoiler

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:14 pm
by M0rtimer
Please refrain from panicking just yet, me and Duke (well, 99% duke, I can't change these things) are working on changing that editor so it looks better, after the text was previously barely readable.

On that note, does it look better/worse than before..?

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:24 pm
by Dlover
When it's black and I can't read most of the buttons? Worse.

Re: Random Thread 2: Social plane shifting?

Posted: Fri Apr 20, 2018 5:33 pm
by M0rtimer
Does it still look that way to you? This is what it looks like to me:

https://gyazo.com/40d95feec661bbd6b6b6aac63d81cff8

the icons could be better and there's an issue with highlighting, but Duke is looking at both those things right now.