The discord server need changes too.

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A bit of context

I’m making a post separate from the main thread because it seems important enough that i think that i should have more visibility.
As everyone should already know, the forum will go through drastic changes in order to overcome problems with operating costs and laws. I won’t go into if I like these choices or not, but I understand and respect the decisions made here.

Just so we are all on the same page, the main changes that the site will get are:

  • The projects and curated projects disappear and migrate over to the wiki
  • The main site becomes invite only
  • Mods stay

The problem

Now, the main issue I see with the changes is that with the projects being migrated to the wiki, we lose 2 things. The first is the ability to keep up with game updates and new releases of smaller projects only visible from the wiki. The second one is that we are no longer able to discuss and talk about said projects. Of course, the second reason is one of the changes made on purpose to reduce moderation costs so is not so much of a problem but an inconvenience.

The solution?

Wiki suggestions

First, the wiki is still in development. If we want to be able to keep up with the development of games and be aware of new releases, the wiki needs to support changelogs or version tracking. Similar to how itch.io or steam work, where you can see the different version’s changelogs, the game pages could have a section where the author can list the game versions. This serves 2 purposes. First, is being able to document a game better by allowing the user to see the history of versions that it went through. Second, if implemented, it could allow users to sort by last updated. Because only the page creator can post there, it would be relatively easy to moderate and, as opposed to how the forum currently works, the updated won’t get buried under hundreds of comments.

Discord

If the forum is changing so drastically, it doesn’t make sense that the discord sever stays like it is. A direct solution to one of the problems, specifically the loos of the ability to discuss games, is to create a Chanel dedicated to game discussion on the forum.
My proposition for this is as follows. A new channel gets added to the discord server. The channel would be a forum chanel where each post will be about an specific game. Each post would allow people to freely discuss about the game the post is about.
When creating a new post, a template should be forced to use. That way it can be pinned and any user can know exactly what the post game is about. An example template:

  • name: Lorem Ipsum
  • Desctiption: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec vel lacus ante. Praesent at maximus justo. In vel tincidunt diam. Quisque nec leo dui. Pellentesque mattis diam elit, eget semper purus porta a. Fusce pellentesque vehicula elit quis posuere. Vivamus consequat luctus gravida. Ut nec lobortis massa. Fusce vestibulum gravida elit, a pretium leo euismod non.
  • kinks: WG, stufing, etc
  • link to wiki/itchio: itch.io
  • Progress: WIP

Notice how i included a link to the wiki/itchio. Because the message with the template is pinned, if someone finds a discussion about a game they are interested in, they can just go to the pinned comment and go to the game page directly.
I don’t know much about discord moderation, but afaik, the discord automod does a fairly good job so it wouldn’t be nearly as hard to moderate as moderating the website. Besides, separating the game page and updates from the description makes for a much cleaner user experience, in my opinion.

Conclusion / TL:DR

So, to sum up. In my honest opinion, moving the games discussions over to discord and allowing the wiki to track versions are 2 measures that i believe that the community will appreciate greatly and wouldn’t be too impactful economically speaking.

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im making a poll for whoever ecounters this post, shares if they agree with me.

Do you agree with me?

  • I agree
  • I dont agree
0 voters
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That sounds perfect and honestly I’m surprised that’s not a thing already…but I also had no idea there was a discord in the first place? I can’t find anything about it anywhere.

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image
I’m gonna be honest it took me too long to notice too

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I mean, it sounds like a great solution.
If running the discussions here is to expensive, move it to a place where it would be free. The only problem would still be moderation, but maybe the discord moderation bots could help a bit.

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Continuing the discussion from The Future of Weight Gaming:

I’m not interested in the Discord at all, the forum format here being easily searchable and threaded by default, with notifications I can respond to at my pace is where I want to be. I find Discord can be exhausting where it’s just an endless stream of content is hard to stay current on.

Plus the Discord Forum channels are hard to navigate, hard to search, hard to participate in, and aren’t easily bookmarked. Compared to me just leaving a tab open for a game in my browser I want to track or bookmarking it or setting a notification preference for that topic.

Discord has its benefits for more real-time communication and collaboration for sure, but I’m just coming here every few days and want to check on what’s new with projects I follow or what’s new. It’s much much easier to do here.

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I mean I’m in a lot of mod servers where they have a system where a project will have its own thread in a separate page,just like one on a forum,inside of a channel, with a main message at the top,and comments under it.
It doesnt have to be posted like a normal message. Its the same thing the forums we have now do?

Like there’s the main discord,you click on a channel called mods,and inside theres a list of projects,like here,and clicking on a project opens a page,just like this one.

Admittedly I have no idea how that’s set up but clearly its possible.

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Its an interesting suggestion, but I am not sure how it might work practically speaking. Not trying to shoot this down, more from my lack of knowledge with some of the more advanced features on discord in general.

I know discord offers forum channels which sound like they do exactly what you are suggesting and more. For example here is a forum channel on the Appwrite discord:

image
image1529×984 219 KB

The main issue there is a lot of those tools are dependent on enabling community mode on the discord, but discord doesn’t allow NSFW servers to enable it (trust me I tried with WG already).

I also don’t think MEE6 suports tools like that at least with the version I got us and the auto mod features in discord I think are fairly sparse if I remember.

The only feasible way I think we can do this atm would require me rolling something custom to handle it, and while I am not against it I would prefer on finally getting the main site out of the door first.

I do want to say though since I can not run the main site as open as I wanted to originally, your suggestion could work as a fair compromise assuming the community fails to hit the funding goals I will be setting latter this/early next week.

[EDIT] It actually looks like I can make forum channels without community enabled so this may be more feasible then I originally thought. I will have to keep it in mind as an option.

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I have enabled community mode on a number of Discord servers that are NSFW. You just can’t make it public (aka discoverable) is the only real restriction. But invite links work the same as before.

Edit: you can’t enable Discover Mode and you can’t enable monetization. The other community features are largely available.

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Good to know! I think what confused me was needing to enable the content scan feature. I didn’t see the ignores nsfw channels part of it when I was looking at it originally

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Yeah, it’s definitely an adjustment for adjusting permissions etc when it comes to enabling it, but then making all the channels (or the appropriate ones, whatever is your best judgment) marked as 18+ solves a lot of it :joy:

It’s really not bad, so I’m glad my little comment helped! :blue_heart:

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I just find Discord’s interface very clunky for that and it doesn’t scale. There’s limits on numbers of channels and things too.

It becomes hard to find things trying to scroll through massive lists of projects and threads and such. The forum thread mode has the same issue. There’s a lot of more conversational chatter, so it is hard to wade through and find content and “catch up” on a thread. And I can’t easily bookmark and save off specific ways to get to channels or threads I care about and am forced to view them in the specific way Discord provides.

Flat forum threads I can bookmark and monitor independently is what I’m here for, I’m old school that way I guess. I just find the environment in Discord social very different than I do a forum like this one. They both have good use cases and abilities to do great things, but I appreciate the slow drip I can get and stay atop of here.

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Hey, many-year lurker here. I was inspired to finally make an account after reading the recent “future of Weight Gaming” thread, and I’ll absolutely be donating when the funding goal drops.

I had to say on this thread, though - discussion on Discord is NOT a replacement for web forum discourse. I’ve been a part of other communities that shut down their web forums since their Discord saw more activity and because the admins didn’t want to moderate the forums. The immediate effect was that productive discussion dropped by around 90%, and new active-user acquisition dropped by around 70% (armchair estimates). I mourn those web forums.

I imagine almost everyone here originally found this site via a search engine, and to me, it makes no sense to move it into a walled garden where it can’t be found. It’s true that Discord has some community-finding features, but (in my opinion) they are nothing compared to search engines.

If we can’t hit the funding goal then some Discord channels are certainly better than nothing, but the sad truth is that I (and perhaps others) would never consider Weight Gaming a viable place to find discussion for those projects again.

P.S. Grotlover2 is the best administrator I have ever seen on a web forum

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