Site Management Using Discord For a Community Based Around Research Over a Forum

[Ravenfreak]

I've been meaning to make this thread for a bit now, anyways with the Sonic Hacking Contest going on this week it reminded me of a Twitter post that the SHC Twitter account quote replied to. Another member on Twitter mentioned that you can't have a community for research purposes on Discord, though the SHC Twitter disagreed. However, I completely agree with the other person, you really cannot have a community based around research just on Discord alone. I'm sure the majority of us here would agree with me on this. Discord is great for communities that just want to interact with other members in real time, and work well for Youtubers but for research purposes it really cannot be the only platform a community is on. Going with my example, the Sonic Hacking Community relies on guides to help people modify the Sonic games, and these guides are hosted on websites that usually have forums. In fact, most of these guides are posted on forums before being added to a wiki. Discord just isn't organized enough for this, plus servers are never crawled like websites are. Plus Discord can pull the plug on their services at any time, they won't now of course since it's popular but in the future when people want to go back and look at their old conversations they'll be lost to time in a server. So I ask, can you really use Discord alone for a community based around research?

 

[Aussie]

You can but:

Discord can shut it down anytime for any reason potentially, and you could lose everything.
Can be hard to manage if you have a lot of documents and guides that people need access to.
Information can get lost easily in discord, so for more heavy discussions it can be difficult to follow.
Information can be hard to find and search for on discord.

 

[Arantor]

The threads feature (their take on forums, I guess) might get you somewhere but long and short is that it’s just not designed for historical content, neither finding nor displaying. It would help if their search feature were less rubbish, too.

 

[Empire]

It takes a bit of time to setup and add any bots you want and set all your permissions etc. but once it's setup it's pretty low effort to maintain. It's an easy way to ping your viewers when your live, or if you've posted something on another platform. It's also great for updating people if you have to cancel/move a stream outside your normal stream times. It also allows you to further connect with your viewers which helps viewer retention. You can on and off chit chat through out the day/week. If something new comes out for the game you play you can throw it in your discord and start a convo about how everyone feels about it. Overall I'd say it's worth it and once the initial setup is done it's very easy to maintain and keep track of

 

[Arantor]

That's not the same as the OP though. For transient stuff where time is critical and it's about people being in a place together concurrently (like a streamer streaming content and you all want to watch together), Discord is ideal. But for anything where you're going back in time, it's... somewhat less so.