In recent times, more and more forums have shut down in favor of discord servers; GamingSteve is dead while most of the community is on a Discord server, KITO outright shut down and encouraged people to join discord, and many other communities, though not explicitly replaced, have little forum activity while they're bustling on Discord. Sagan 4's forum probably isn't going anywhere, as Discord-based submission and review is objectively inferior to using forum threads (trust me, we tried it once), not to mention text-heavy stuff isn't very discord-friendly, but it seems much of the community agrees that discord seems to be better for casual discussion. However, I think there's room to discuss the possibility that some other types of discussion may be better done on the forum as well.
For example, discussing theories, major retcons, and anything else that it's reasonably likely it will need to be searched up and referenced later. Discord search is really bad, you know? Not to mention, it's too easy to permanently delete all message logs.
Also, organism ideas. God, the channel on the discord server suffers from idea burial all the time because if an idea is too cursed it sparks a massive load of discussion.
Outside of that, there's also off-topic discussion. Though Discord has a threads feature now that somewhat alleviates the problem, it's really hard to get granular discussion that doesn't get buried by the next topic. Forums keep it all contained in forum threads that don't have any considerable impact on navigation in comparison, while allowing members to quickly find out who in the community shares interests with them.
There are some things that I think it isn't a big deal that it's done on Discord, like wip feedback; art can be done in a day or two, so there's not much need for ongoing discussion, just post a wip, get feedback if desired, and done. It doesn't really need the formality of forum use, and it probably won't need to be searched later.
Also: If Alpha had originally been Discord-based instead of Forum-based (but the limbo still occurred), all the archives we have of the old forum would not exist. Discord servers cannot be backed up nor can they be accessed on the wayback machine.
Thoughts?
For example, discussing theories, major retcons, and anything else that it's reasonably likely it will need to be searched up and referenced later. Discord search is really bad, you know? Not to mention, it's too easy to permanently delete all message logs.
Also, organism ideas. God, the channel on the discord server suffers from idea burial all the time because if an idea is too cursed it sparks a massive load of discussion.
Outside of that, there's also off-topic discussion. Though Discord has a threads feature now that somewhat alleviates the problem, it's really hard to get granular discussion that doesn't get buried by the next topic. Forums keep it all contained in forum threads that don't have any considerable impact on navigation in comparison, while allowing members to quickly find out who in the community shares interests with them.
There are some things that I think it isn't a big deal that it's done on Discord, like wip feedback; art can be done in a day or two, so there's not much need for ongoing discussion, just post a wip, get feedback if desired, and done. It doesn't really need the formality of forum use, and it probably won't need to be searched later.
Also: If Alpha had originally been Discord-based instead of Forum-based (but the limbo still occurred), all the archives we have of the old forum would not exist. Discord servers cannot be backed up nor can they be accessed on the wayback machine.
Thoughts?
Are there any actual examples of Discord spec projects old enough that they ended up unrecoverable due to an incident? Not that I think it can't happen, it is why I archived every single submission in (the abomination that is) 2s2t using a literal google doc.
Regarding the organism inspiration thing, on a forum, wouldn't most of the middle stuff get kind of buried too? Or is the forum-y system of "pages" (which Discord also has but only in the discord search function) that much better?
Regarding the organism inspiration thing, on a forum, wouldn't most of the middle stuff get kind of buried too? Or is the forum-y system of "pages" (which Discord also has but only in the discord search function) that much better?
There's a project I forgot the name of that's completely gone because a staff member had a mental breakdown and deleted the entire submission and archive categories on the discord server. It wasn't even an old project, it was made in 2019.
The forums vs discord thing is well beyond just an issue of the spec community. It is affecting all forums of all media types. People are trading public, easily navigated and searchable, and completely wayback machine-compatible websites for chatrooms that can vanish from the internet permanently with no hope of backup without warning.
The forums vs discord thing is well beyond just an issue of the spec community. It is affecting all forums of all media types. People are trading public, easily navigated and searchable, and completely wayback machine-compatible websites for chatrooms that can vanish from the internet permanently with no hope of backup without warning.
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