Continuing the discussion from Can we have a "freer discussion" option with looser modding on hijacks?:
See, it’s easy to make a branching thread.
This may or may not be relevant to what you’re wanting to discuss, but I’d appreciate if you’d bear with me: I have a young person couch-surfing in my apartment right now who has a tablet with (either Discord or Discourse; I can’t be fussed to remember which is which. But I digress), but no phone/texting capability. Their e-communication with me takes place by means of a roundabout path involving contacting my nephew through [D*******], who then calls or texts me.
So which is which? Which one has Discobot? And how can I get the other one so they don’t have to go through my nephew when they want to reach me?
Discourse has Discobot. It’s the software this board runs on.
Discord, on the other hand, is a communication platform with a mix of text messaging (like an old school chat room from the old AOL days when the WWW was an infant), and also voice chat. It’s free software that can run in a web client but runs better in its own client (either desktop or mobile app).
You can find Discord here:
Does it have threads like Discourse does? Having discussions scroll off into oblivion won’t serve my upcoming purposes, but I am unaware of any other (free, hopefully) options.
Short answer: not really.
Discord is a platform for something like 28 million “servers,” or communities. Each of those servers is typically dedicated to a specific topic or group. I’m a member of several dozen Discord servers, each of them for a particular MMORPG group or tabletop RPG group, and most of them fairly small (i.e., between 3 and 50 users), but I’m also a member of a couple of servers with thousands of members.
A Discord server is typically segmented into “channels” within it, for different purposes. For example, one server that I set up for one of my D&D groups has a text channel for game play (mostly used to show the results of virtual dice rolls), a text channel for “useful stuff” (i.e., game resources), a channel for posting maps and other visuals, etc. But, each channel is just one long string of posts; there’s no such thing as threads.
We also have two voice channels, for use when we play together.
I’m not sure how (or even if) you could structure a Discord server to function like a traditional message board, with numerous discrete threads for specific topics.
No, it’s not a message board. It’s a chat platform. You connect to a server that generally has different channels categorized, but those are either going to be news items for the server or places for people to endlessly chat in a scrolling fashion. Again, just like an old pre-WWW chat room.
“Discussions scrolling off into oblivion” is a great description of your standard Discord chat.
If that sounds shitty it’s because it is. There’s a reason I’m usually here and not there.
ETA: I’ve found three good uses for Discord.
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As a place to communicate with a small group of friends and stay in touch it is great.
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As a place to get announcements for a game or find posted guides for a game it works pretty well.
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As a place for a larger structured discussion it’s okay. I am a beta/alpha tester for games and many game companies use it to handle a structured discussion for testers. It’s competent for that sort of thing if participants follow directions.
Otherwise it’s kind of shitty, I use the analogy of trying to have a good discussion in the middle of a loud and packed auditorium where everyone is yelling at each other.
So, what options do I have for such a formatted set of discussions? Note this is for a wargaming mod with a small private group of playtesters; I’d prefer topics remain visible and segregated (organized) like they are here.
I’m not sure, but I truly don’t think Discord is what you want, unless you (as admin) are willing to create a new channel for every single discussion topic.
As @Atamasama says, Discord isn’t message board software; it’s chat software.
For a small group (like 20 or less) it’s probably fine. I had a group of about a dozen friends who met in an online game and regularly chatted there, it wasn’t hard to keep track of discussions with a small group. There was less than a dozen of us.
It’s when you have dozens or even hundreds of people in a channel (which isn’t rare) that it’s a shitshow. You could not run the SDMB community on Discord and have anything like the discussions we have here.
Yes, but, I think it’s important for @John_DiFool to realize that:
…is not a feature which Discord is constructed to easily enable.
Yes, you are correct.
@John_DiFool, imagine that the way this board worked was that each category (P&E, ATMB, the Pit) was one long omnibus thread instead of a collection of threads. That’s probably the closest I can imagine you getting Discord to behave like this board. That is if you made each category into its own channel.
You can’t organize it any better than that really.
And you create the channels as the admin/owner/whatever. Participants can’t do anything but make a post, and each one has a 2,000 character limit (so it’s not tiny but it is limited).
OK, so again what other options are available, gang?
No, but discord now supports threads, which can help. And it’s free.
Zulip and slack have more features, but zulip is not widely known and slack charges if your want to retain your content, iirc.
You actually CAN had discrete topics on Discord. Right click on a message and select “Create Thread”. Then people can click on the Threads icon on the top bar and see a list of Threads. We use it for stuff like people who want to discuss that days Wordle without annoying the rest of the channel.
That said, it’s still a terrible substitute for a traditional message board and should be treated more like a modern Internet Relay Chat.
I learned something today! That said, I haven’t ever seen that feature used in any of the servers in which I participate.
If you want to run a message board, run a message board.
I haven’t run my own message board in decades, but there’s a site called ProBoards that has an option to run one for free. I can’t vouch for how good they are because I’ve never used it; it might suck.
Here is a page saying what they offer:
Again, I’m not advocating for it specifically because I haven’t used it. It’s just the first thing I found that might work.
It’s not used much. I think that, since you need to click on the Threads icon to even see the list, people forget to use it and/or don’t bother because others aren’t using it.
Ok will check out those options mateys, thanks. Proboards looks to be more my speed on first glance.
I’m not sure that this was worth a pitting, but so be it.
Yo mama.
It’s a somewhat new option to create threads in discord servers.