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[PMC] Community Chat Experiment - DISCORD


Silversunset01
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Community Chat Experiment - DISCORD  

15 members have voted

  1. 1. Should we allow voice chat in discord?

    • Allow discord and mumble
    • Only allow mumble.
    • I have no preference either way


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Alright guys, after a bunch of discussions and thinking we've decided we're going to give Discord a shot.

The group will be open to anyone, whether they play on our minecraft servers or not. So bring your friends for other games, and encourage others to do the same - we are a gaming community after all!

Some ground rules:

  • CHAT MODERATION - should be extremely light. It's like clanchat - it's all opt-in and people can block anyone they don't want to see so the need for us to step in should be relatively small. THAT DOESN'T MEAN DON'T - if someone comes to you and asks for assistance or a user is being overly trolly/spammy/troublesome we can still hop in and moderate.
  • CHANNELS - for now I've set channel creation to staff-only. Go ahead and create any channel people want to have made - the reason is because the "manage channels" permission also allows users to *delete* channels and that's bad.
  • ANNOUNCEMENTS CHANNEL - I've created an "Announcements" channel - all users will be able to read this, but only staff will be able to post. This is to be used to post ... you guessed it, ANNOUNCEMENTS. This should be used sparingly,
  • HELP CHANNEL - I've also created a help channel. If people are having trouble (connecting, using discord, with a game, etc) that would be the best place to go to separate it out from the regular chatter. If it becomes confusing or unused we can delete it later.
  • OTHER RANDOM THINGS YOU MAY WANT TO KNOW:
    • Staff can change the server nickname of a user (it is disabled for normal players) - only use this if someone has a really inappropriate username, and this should really be used sparingly as it's local to the server (dm's still show your true username since it's outside of the server)
    • Staff can delete messages other people type - again, this is only to be used in certain cases but it's an option if needed.
    • People can ping usergroups, so you can ping @Moderators, @Head Admin etc. I'll be adding all the admin groups as well for any staff who joins.
    • Feel free to use user "goldbeam" as a test subject for any sort of staff testing. It's just my fake play account. Good for testing bans, kicks, etc
    • If you do end up banning or kicking someone please let didy and myself know. We'll probably come up with some sort of system for tracking (forum post, spreadsheet, something) since there's no notes in discord.

Couple of things i know will be asked:
WHY NOW?? We spoke about it, and with the minigames server pending we thought it would be a great place for people to ping for games ("@everyone anyone up for some KOTH???) so why not leverage the two together and see if they work well.
WHAT ABOUT SLACK?? Staff slack is not going anywhere, and you'll still want to make sure you're connected to ping other staff for help/issues/tech reqs/admin stuff. It's the best place for us to collaborate and do our staff things and after doing quite a bit of digging it really doesn't do what we'd want for a community chat program; there are too many hidden limits and too few options to be useful. And most of the slack clones we've tested are almost identical - they're designed for group collaboration not so much open chat.
WHAT IF IT FLOPS?? If it flops it flops. But we'll never learn if we don't at least try and see how it goes. Lets take the risk and see if it does any good.
WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO?? You always have the option to ping didy or myself in slack (or discord if we're in while you are) for guidance or help. Since this really doesn't belong to a single server it falls under our area of responsibility to make sure you all know what you're doing and that it's used properly, so ping away!


I'd really like your support on this - it has the potential to help grow our community and engage better with the users if it's used well.

To join: just click this link and follow the instructions. We'll be putting something out later with the minigames post to the public so pleasepleaseplease go generate some chatter for people :)


***POLL QUESTION RE: VOICE CHAT*** should we allow voice chat in discord knowing that not everyone can use it and it may be buggy, AND that mumble is still the official nerd voice chat *or* should we leave it disabled for now and see what happens?The fear is that having a second voice chat may fracture the mumble user base, and not everyone *can* use the discord voice chat (due to high ping or other reasons). I will be leaving this disabled for now until sufficient votes/opinions can be gathered.

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Guest Former Staff

I've missed the discussions that led to considering discord over mumble or alongside it as per this poll, where can I catch up on those thoughts?

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Guest Former Staff

Mostly the July staff meeting and this thread, I think.

 

Yeah... thought so too. That topic did have some pretty heavy criticism for Discord and our latest staff meeting noted. Just wondering what I missed since last weekend. :-P

 

Head Admins: Community chat programs - after a lot of discussion we’re still undecided and looking at options. Each option has strengths and weaknesses but nothing currently does exactly what we want and we’re still figuring out the best option.
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  • 1 month later...

Regardless of what we as staff think, though most of us seem to be for or indifferent toward it, there's been a ton of people who have said something along the lines of "No voice enabled on discord? Then what's the point of having it." If its something users want and would possibly actually use, I think we should at least give it a go. Preferably sooner than later, before people just associate discord with being "useless."

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We only originally started a discord channel for the community to text chat; how would that be perceived as useless without voice functionality in which we already provide. If anything letting discord voice channel will just split the community between this and mumble.

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My original post is below this paragraph, but I wanted to clear up what I think may be a misconception. The way I interpret allowing both Discord and Mumble for voice is that we would try both at the same time, see which people like more, then fully go with that one whichever it is. Its like when we switched staff stuff from IRC to Slack. A lot more people used Slack than IRC, so we officially switched. If we had the same low usage on Slack that we had on IRC then it wouldn't have been worth it to switch. In this situation if more people use Discord than use Mumble currently (which honestly is pretty dead most of the time) then we'd switch. If we have similar numbers then we won't switch. I agree that having both on long term is a bad idea that would split the community.

 

It's perceived as useless because, from the point of view of someone not on staff, we've disabled what's pretty much the core functionality of Discord for seemingly no reason.  I think this might be one of those things that staff is out of touch with the playerbase on. I've never heard a player say "I'm glad voice is disabled on Discord because I really love mumble," just responses somewhere between "That's dumb" and "I guess that makes sense."

 

Here are the three reasons main I've heard other staff telling players why we're not trying Discord voice:

1. There's no Linux app, so they can't use global PTT

2. Discord has no long-term financial plan and could just disappear one day

3. Older players get on mumble sometimes

 

3 honestly isn't worth talking about because we should be focusing on our current and future players, not waiting around for the twenty minutes a year some old staff member decides to show up again.

2 is a legitimate concern, but couldn't we always just boot up the mumble server again if Discord goes away? IT's not like mumble stops existing if we try discord.

1 is also a legitimate concern, though I'm assuming the percentage of players that use Linux is small, and there is a Discord Linux app in the works. I don't use Linux so I couldn't say how well it works. If someone who does wanted to try it out and let us know (specifically about global PTT) that'd be great.

 

I don't see why we wouldn't at least try Discord to see what kind of engagement we get. Letting our boners for "the way things have always been" get in the way of potentially increased player interaction (keeping in mind that more player interaction leads to more player retention) would be stupid.

 

 

One other note. If we really want people to use discord for text then we as staff need to stop using Slack for general talk and use Discord. We should get rid of #genera, and use Slack for staff questions/comments/discussions that shouldn't be public.

 

EDIT: Another thing that was mentioned in the staff meeting (I think) was that we have a ton of channels on Discord and the discussion is really spread out. Maybe we could do a cleanup?

Edited by torteela
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We only migrated from IRC to Slack because IRC is an outdated hard to use piece of software.

 

It's not just Linux users that may have problems with Discord chat; from my experience chatting with people outside of America on a different Discord server, most of them have a shit time trying to talk because of connection issues.

 

Personally I think Slack chat looks/flows better and I also like having a general channel where I can just talk in Slack, it's a lot lighter on mobile data for me compared to Discord; so considering I run on 50mb/month I'd be pretty pissed if I couldn't just chat there anymore.

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I expect discord voice chat will significantly increase the number of people talkig vs the current numbers in mumble. I also share the perception that slack general channel is kind of a "special secret staff clubroom", which doesn't mesh all that well with the idea that staff is not a promotion.

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i'd be more apt to get onto voice chat (at least during the week when i'm travelling) if we enabled discord - just because I use it for other purposes as well, so it's an easy switch back and forth, much like i do with work/nerd in Slack.

 

that being said, i fucking hate the mobile client because of this: https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/10313193-allow-me-to-adjust-the-font-size  .. i still don't understand why they don't have basic ui scaling options in there

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