Screeps Discord?



  • Ok, so this conversation is going to crap both here and on slack, so I'd like to point out the following-

    Right now, we're arguing blind. I'm seeing a lot of opinions being voiced, but to my knowledge no one has polled the admins, the community, etc. and asked what features people want, need, use, etc. I'm seeing arguments like "We're a game, so we should use discord." that are so categorically incorrect I'm not going to bother to refute them.

    We're considering only two options. Seriously. We're taking a considerable hit to organization, group unity, etc. by moving regardless. The last thing I want is six months after a discord move to start hearing people talk about how shinzen.io or happychat.ru (I have no idea if those are actual links don't click them) is so much better and we need to move to that instead.

    Both of these are mistakes.



  • @gankdalf said in Screeps Discord?:

    @daboross said in Screeps Discord?:

    In discord, these discussions wouldn't be able to exist outside of large all-encompassing channels.

    Why exactly? Have you opened the template discord?

    Outside of some role-bot related shenanigans, discord doesn't allow optional channels, which will likely cause some havoc given that slack has some 150+ channels. I don't know if everyone wants to be joined to, say #operating-systems, and I doubt people want complex operating systems implementation details filling a help channel.



  • @daboross said in Screeps Discord?:

    In discord, these discussions wouldn't be able to exist outside of large all-encompassing channels.

    Why exactly? Have you opened the template discord?

    In most discord servers I've been in, there have been <10 channels. Any more than ~20 would be uneasonable to manage in the side-bar, with the layout they have.

    I don't believe this discussions would exist because they require two or more people with specific, shared interests sharing a channel with low clutter. In #operatingsystems, people talk about implementing operating-system-style screeps AI, for example. However, there are 163 other of these channels, and I know at least ~15 of them are irregularly-active.

    If any of those 15 channels were merged, it would be that much harder to find the people who are talking about things you're interested in talking about. I mean, I have 15 that I subscribe to and am interested in, but as previously mentioned there are a ton more out there. If you merge any two channels, you're going to have some people interested in one of them but not the other.

    The other point I'd make is that a lot of these discussions happen over the course of hours, or days. In the sparsely-populated channels, people can talk back and forth without things happening in the meantime. If they were always active, this wouldn't be able to happen.

    If you merge all 163 into the fewer than 20 that discord would allow, the discussions will be extremely diluted. It wouldn't be possible to find interesting discussions because:

    • too many other, possibly uninteresting conversations will have happened between the ones one is interested in
    • people who are having these discussions won't be able to meet and talk over a period of days, as they do in slack

    Alright, hopefully that clarifies my argument for having tons of different channels. Slack isn't the best, still, because of history, but I find it better than discord's channel situation.


    For the "template discord": could you clarify what you mean by this?



  • @knightshade said in Screeps Discord?:

    @gankdalf said in Screeps Discord?:

    @daboross said in Screeps Discord?:

    In discord, these discussions wouldn't be able to exist outside of large all-encompassing channels.

    Why exactly? Have you opened the template discord?

    Outside of some role-bot related shenanigans, discord doesn't allow optional channels, which will likely cause some havoc given that slack has some 150+ channels. I don't know if everyone wants to be joined to, say #operating-systems, and I doubt people want complex operating systems implementation details filling a help channel.

    Indeed. The template has said "role-bot related shenanigans" which is why I asked.



  • The template is also not visible in the root post.



  • @daboross said in Screeps Discord?:

    For the "template discord": could you clarify what you mean by this?

    The one I linked in the original post as an example. It has been admin hidden behind a spoiler warning though, so you will have to click that to see it now.



  • I love slack because it's simple, allowed on work and it looks way more organised then discord.

    And i think the team should do a poll. This is just a small selection of the community that is commenting now.



  • @gimmecookies My point exactly. Until we actually have some (or literally any, at this point) data, this is just a bunch of really shouty people in a room arguing over what color to paint the walls and whether to have regular conversations in Russian or Portuguese.



  • The one I linked in the original post as an example. It has been admin hidden behind a spoiler warning though, so you will have to click that to see it now.

    Ah, cool!

    If it has effective channels which can be joined/left and created by users, that solves my main objection.

    Side note: I'm going to head to sleep, but I'll be back tomorrow. Hope the discussion goes well till then.



  • Observed issue with template: Doesn't appear to be a way to list joinable channels without joining them.



  • @knightshade You could try reading the list of channels. You must first accept the rules, and then you can join the listed channels.



  • @daboross said in Screeps Discord?:

    If it has effective channels which can be joined/left and created by users, that solves my main objection.

    I'm not sure I know a way for users to create channels that won't become very messy very quickly. Actually, I consider the number of channels in Slack to be very messy though, so I am not sure that opinion amounts to much.



  • You don't seem to understand the issue. I'm not failing to understand how to read.

    I'm saying that I'm not convinced that the welcome page will be kept up to date.

    EDIT: Since we're being snarky, you could try reading my comment rather than assuming I'm illiterate.

    BONUS EDIT: .leaveall also doesn't appear to leave all. Not sure if deliberate or not.



  • @knightshade said in Screeps Discord?:

    You don't seem to understand the issue. I'm not failing to understand how to read.

    I'm saying that I'm not convinced that the welcome page will be kept up to date.

    EDIT: Since we're being snarky, you could try reading my comment rather than assuming I'm illiterate.

    By "list" you mean what exactly? I am a little confused why a list of joinable channels couldn't be kept up to date.

    And sorry 😉



  • @gankdalf You can always leave channels you dont like. Actually, you only see the channels you selected yourself. All other channels are hidden behind a button. So this is not really a issue.....



  • @gimmecookies By "messy" I meant I wasn't sure which channels to join and often seemed like there were multiple channels for each topic, which just ended up with 50 channels that nobody uses. I ended up subscribing to like half the channels just to see where the main activity on the server was.



  • @gankdalf said in Screeps Discord?:

    @gimmecookies By "messy" I meant I wasn't sure which channels to join and often seemed like there were multiple channels for each topic, which just ended up with 50 channels that nobody uses. I ended up subscribing to like half the channels just to see where the main activity on the server was.

    There is a indicator of the active members for each channel, and you can always take a look before you join a channel. The messy channel list is just something the discord likers will pull out of context. How is discord solving this issue?



  • @gimmecookies The indicator only displays the number of people in the channel, not how often it is used from what I can tell. It proved only useful for finding the obvious channels like #help and #general, which seems to be where most of the activity is anyways.

    From what I can tell, most discord servers don't try to handle it at all, and simply leave all their channels enabled for everyone. Due to this (as others have stated), discord servers mostly have fewer channels.

    There is also no default functionality that allows users (aka not the server owner or admins) to create more channels. They can create a new server, but not channels within a server. From what I have seen in other games, they tend to have one main server with around 10-20 general channels, and the alliances/guilds make their own servers and post them in a bulletin board channel in the main server.



  • @gankdalf said in Screeps Discord?:

    @gimmecookies The indicator only displays the number of people in the channel, not how often it is used from what I can tell. It proved only useful for finding the obvious channels like #help and #general, which seems to be where most of the activity is anyways.

    From what I can tell, most discord servers don't try to handle it at all, and simply leave all their channels enabled for everyone. Due to this (as others have stated), discord servers mostly have fewer channels.

    There is also no default functionality that allows users (aka not the server owner or admins) to create more channels. They can create a new server, but not channels within a server. From what I have seen in other games, they tend to have one main server with around 10-20 general channels, and the alliances/guilds make their own servers and post them in a bulletin board channel in the main server.

    So we get multiple servers with multiple channels. Looks like more mess to me?



  • Please, let's not fix what isn't broken.
    Discord would be a step backwards.

    Let me be another shouty person in the room while we're waiting for a full fledged poll, survey or other data gathering.

     

    #help: Discord is extremely unsuitable for the large code sharing that happens in, say, #help - by far the largest channel.
    No line numbers, no expanding, no highlighting. Slack has all of these. #help constitutes about a third of all monthly messages. Let's not break that.
    While Discord might be more accessible to join for new players, consider the net threshold for actually sticking with the game will probably go up because of the damage it does to #help.

    Voice: Discord's voice chat isn't a big advantage. Not only is the implementation terrible, reading out code isn't quite the best way to converse.
    Voice chat also fragments the community in its own way (voice vs. no voice), for example the people joining the conversation during work downtime or non-natives who're not confident in their pronunciation. Voice chat's also aren't archived, while archiving is one of Discord's advantages people bring up.

    Archive: Speaking of archiving: when was the last time you really read back old messages? There's rarely ever anything I need to find back later, and in those rare occurrences you can just star the message for later. I doubt the archive is of much use. Especially given that a lot of the timeless data is on GitHub and the likes. Let the chat be timely and use other channels for timeless data.

    There are many more reasons not to move to Discord, but I especially like to stress the impact on #help. I would absolutely loathe a move there, personally.

     

    Finally, regarding @artch his point of integrating with Arena mode: if that's in 2019, there's no rush to move now. In a year, a lot can change, and Discord could be beaten by a better alternative. By the time those features actually have a visible impact for players they might become relevant, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

    👍🏻