Discord does forums

Mendalla

Mendalla

Well-known member
From one of the tech news sources that I follow. Interesting to see Discord recognizing the need for a more forum-like interface. I see the point since it is part of what I like about forums and forum-like sites, but it is a bit of a new direction for Discord I think. Others with more Discord experience might be able to shed more light?

techcrunch.com

Discord is testing forums, new mod tools and homepages that surface hot topics in some servers | TechCrunch

Discord will start testing a handful of new features in some of its biggest communities this week. The social audio and chat platform got its start
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
 
It won't replace forums; even if the new forum-esque feature solves some of the issues Discord has for long-term content, it will still not be enough to replace a forum entirely.
 
Forsaken said:
It won't replace forums; even if the new forum-esque feature solves some of the issues Discord has for long-term content, it will still not be enough to replace a forum entirely.
Click to expand...
A database migration tool away it would appear tho (for most). Cannot ignore how impactful this is regardless.
 
Agree with Mike. Yes, it's not the same, but it sure closes the gap a lot. Discord has taken over as the primary threat for many forum niches.
 
It's almost like forums are not dead and are actually required for organization and long-term view of searching for information that was posted in the past in an easy-to-digest manner.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Forums are not dead. Dead are the days of people who think they can start a forum casually and either have it be a quick get rich scheme or have it explode with little to no work.
 
sbj said:
Big yikes for us all. I wouldn't ever start a gaming forum seeing that.

All other niches are still a bit safe but please, can we start getting improvements a bit faster than what we got now? We are so much behind and they are moving faster and faster.
Click to expand...

Excactly. For gaming related this is pretty bad. Of course for those areas that don't get competition from discord today either, then this doesn't change much.

1.5 years between XF feature releases is a long time. Too long.
 
I have two larger Discord servers: 1.8k+ members (niche gaming) and 10k+ members (broader subject). Both are active for voice and text chat, and both are part of websites that are still very much active.

My experience so far has been that the only topic loss we have loss has been low-content or general topics, neither of which causes any harm as we still retain our long-form content and discussions.

For Discord to truly replace forums with this feature, they will need to solve several issues:
  • Discoverability: it is much easier to discover content on a forum than it is to Discover content on a Discord. Hell I have literally spent hours searching for a specific message in a 1-2 person chat when I could have found it on a forum in seconds 🤷‍♂️.
    • Things such as widgets that bring attention to related or important content are also something we will not see from Discord any time soon, and even if we do it probably still won't replace a forum.
  • Content: Discord itself does not lend itself to long-form content or long-form discussion. There will also always be a large signal-to-noise ratio that will detract from the long-form content. Threads/forums for Discord may help to alleviate this somewhat, but I do not see it being enough to replace a proper forum.
  • Structure: Discord only offers a simplistic way of structuring a community, and does not lend itself to nested topics much. I have 6 primary topics open to users with ~20 text channels for the 1.8k+ member community; of those only 5 channels are used enough to be considered active in comparison to the forum.
  • Moderation: This is a huge one for me. We have had a huge issue on both my Discord with people creating new accounts to cause issues when they have been banned for bad behavior, to the extent I had to personally get a friend who worked at Discord involve to get a permanent ban for that user. In comparison with Xon's plugin I have been able to block over a thousand duplicate accounts of people who have been banned for behavior or attempted fraud 🤷‍♂️.
This may kill general discussion or low-quality content forums, but that has been dying for a while regardless.

Frode789 said:
Excactly. For gaming related this is pretty bad. Of course for those areas that don't get competition from discord today either, then this doesn't change much.

1.5 years between XF feature releases is a long time. Too long.
Click to expand...

Both my Discords and the two websites are gaming related.
 
The point you are missing is that your gamer audience sit in those discord chat rooms. They don't idle in your forums. Yes, the points you are bringing are good points, however, they are bringing more features to make them stay more in discord. Their advantages are overweighing more and more.

What we forums have is the static content but in that regard XF is lacking a lot. No Wiki, no database features, no graphs, no filtering, etc. All we have are threads and posts. We need tons of addons to make it more than that and even those addons do lack.

Discord has the audience and the voice chat. Very poweful tool. Now they are adding a light version of our threads. That is hugely alarming.
 
sbj said:
The point you are missing is that your gamer audience sit in those discord chat rooms. They don't idle in your forums. Yes, the points you are bringing are good points, however, they are bringing more features to make them stay more in discord. Their advantages are overweighing more and more.

What we forums have is the static content but in that regard XF is lacking a lot. No Wiki, no database features, no graphs, no filtering, etc. All we have are threads and posts. We need tons of addons to make it more than that and even those addons do lack.

Discord has the audience and the voice chat. Very poweful tool. Now they are adding a light version of our threads. That is hugely alarming.
Click to expand...
Threads have been available on Discord for a while now, they're just terrible. Guilded has a better implementation, but still do not see much traction even on their larger development-focused communities.

Idling in a Discord or lurking in a Discord does not take away from a forum, if anything it gives you another avenue to push important information to pull people to the forum. You can also work on adding gamification features to encourage activity on the forum such as daily login, posting content or interacting with the community.

My smaller Discord/site is not a good representation of what most forums would have as the activity of users is overall very high because we encourage daily login and posting content. It also has a pretty wide age range with the average age being higher than 25+.

The larger Discord is more representative of what everyone is doomsaying over, as it is a more general gaming community attached to a larger forum. Again, the only real lose we have ever seen has been the loss of general topics, or people asking the same questions over and over again.
 
Please shoot me a pm, if it is okay with you @Forsaken . Maybe I can learn something from you then. I am in a cultural niche focused on music, but if you can get gaming to work, there is definitely something to learn from. (Except if your forums are 10+ year olds, then it can be explained by being already established before doomsday ;)). In any case, please let me have a look if you don't mind.
 
I take this information as good news, the forum interface has qualities that others do not have, and this allows it to survive internet times. On the other hand, I agree with some on the fact that forums must adapt to new audiences and not the other way around.
 
So talked to someone who has already had a previewed of the new forum feature, and it is essentially a similar implementation as Guilded (https://www.guilded.gg/Guilded-Offi...a75-601f-4ea2-80d4-5fa7067dab4e/announcements).

Depending on how they set up the API (when they update the API for it), it may be possible to cross-post content from a Discord forum to a community forum. If you can limit it to a summary, you could just use that to feed users to reading the full news on your site 🤷‍♂️. I know this is somewhat possible with Discord threads, but not sure if thread message content is retrievable for cross-posting, though I think their forum implementation will be similar.

This was something I did when we were trying out Guilded, and we didn't see much change in how we do things now (which is posting a summary of important announcements or certain topics to our Discord).
 
Discord is working on a new feature as they wrote on their blog: https://discord.com/blog/a-note-on-upcoming-community-experiments

Below is a sneak peek at one of the new features we’re experimenting with: a channel that acts as a home for more organized conversations within your community, kinda like a forum
Click to expand...

lOHI5Tj.jpg


And apparently a "news feed" type of channel:

The ability for members to get the skinny on what your community’s about without having to dig through dozens of channels.
Click to expand...

What do you think? I'm really fascinated how Discord is trying to be an all rounded solution for web communication.

Still a walled garden approach, everything can't be crawled or searched or discovered by a Search Engine.

But eventually they will came up with a solution.
 
xenforo.com

Discord does forums

From one of the tech news sources that I follow. Interesting to see Discord recognizing the need for a more forum-like interface. I see the point since it is part of what I like about forums and forum-like sites, but it is a bit of a new direction for Discord I think. Others with more Discord...
xenforo.com xenforo.com
 
Forsaken said:
I have two larger Discord servers: 1.8k+ members (niche gaming) and 10k+ members (broader subject). Both are active for voice and text chat, and both are part of websites that are still very much active.

My experience so far has been that the only topic loss we have loss has been low-content or general topics, neither of which causes any harm as we still retain our long-form content and discussions.
Click to expand...

Can you link me your site in PM i'd like to take a look for science purposes :D

Sorry for the repost i didn't saw this thread.
 
Discord forums are now available to all channels today!

Forum Channels are designed to allow conversations to coexist without people talking over each other.

When you enter a Forum Channel, you don’t see every message that’s being shared across every conversation. Instead, you see an easy-to-navigate list of conversations where you have full control of which you’d like to jump into.
Click to expand...

It ships with "tagging", reactions, notifications per-thread, real-time replies, and split-screen thread browsing. Not as many features as XF or Discourse, but still a good spin on forums and the features should suffice for most use cases.

discord.com

Creating Value with Conversation

The bigger your community grows, the harder it becomes to keep track of all the ongoing discussions. Forum Channels keep everyone heard. Learn more.
discord.com discord.com

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