Should I add a Discord Channel to my forum?

[CivilWarTalk]

So I’m looking at Discord, I’ve used it for Minecraft Gaming and understand it can be used for voice chat and such. It was suggested that we add it to our Xenforo forum, but we don’t do gaming, we are mostly doing historical discussions.

We do have a weekly chat about some YouTube videos, usually conference speaches on our favorite history topics, maybe Discord could be used for this purpose?

We already do a text based live chat that we later post to the forum so everyone can read it. Can discord be used this way?

I’m not sure if I’m missing something with this idea, I’m not convinced it would enhance our already successful forum.

The whole point in a forum is to share discussions, if the discussion is held in Discord, how is that sharing it with our viewers and generating traffic for the forum? Almost seems like it would hinder our goal of sharing information on the forum.

How do you use Discord? Can you leverage the advantages of this platform into more traffic for your forum?

Any thoughts or ideas about this?

 

[RobParker]

I've been wondering the same and I can see some use for our more 'chat' type forums which are fast flowing but I think we'd lose a significant amount of forum traffic (and hence advertising revenue). I'm assuming there's no way to monetise discord?

 

[Live Free]

I've been wondering the same and I can see some use for our more 'chat' type forums which are fast flowing but I think we'd lose a significant amount of forum traffic (and hence advertising revenue). I'm assuming there's no way to monetise discord?

Sticky / pinned posts with affiliate or paid membership links.

It could theoretically act as a funnel for new users and brining users back to the forum - it could also reduce forum discussion and move it to the discord.

It really depends on the nature of your forum, user demographics, and how you run the discord.

I’m considering it the same but only for thin / off-topic discussion.

 

[Penguinexpert1]

I use @NixFifty's Discord addon to essentially force people to sign up to our forum before they can do a lot of things on our Discord (Like play music, take part in giveaways and events etc). Although it doesn't yet encourage posting, it does encourage signup, and we have seen a benefit from it.