Discord, and not wanting to depend on any Discord-specific features

Discussion of MUD clients, plugins, the website, and other technical stuff.
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Rias
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Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 4:06 pm
Location: Wandering Temicotli

Discord, and not wanting to depend on any Discord-specific features

Post by Rias »

Discord has helped our community become a strong community, and that's awesome. Discord is a fantastic and effective tool to that effect. That said, I don't want us to get to a point where COGG is reliant specifically on Discord for anything. Our chat also bridges over to IRC and Matrix as well, for instance (not sure about the Slack integration, it seemed pretty janky). I've started doing the weekly roundtables in-game more often because I like the feeling of getting everyone together in the actual game, but not requiring people to use Discord to get in on it is certainly a plus to that as well.

To help prevent a sort of "get Discord or get out" feeling, I've disabled the use of threads in the COGG Discord server. That's something that doesn't bridge to the other chat platforms, and I don't want people to feel they're missing out on actual content and conversation because they prefer something other than Discord. This is also the reason a lot of other Discord features are disabled on the COGG channels: We want it to be as vanilla an experience as possible when it comes to significant content, which is why most things are pretty locked down to just text or stuff that's fairly insignificant and won't be missed when lost in translation to the other chat platforms (like reactions).

Secondly, we've had some generous members who have "boosted" the Discord server, but the COGG Discord server isn't utilizing anything from these boosts as far as I'm aware, and I don't want to end up relying on something that either requires member donations or is specific to Discord. Even with the custom emoji I believe we're below the default 50 available for free. Because of this I'd recommend that Discord users use their boosts on other servers that will actually benefit from them. If someone wants to show some kind of monetary appreciation for COGG, that's very generous but direct donations are not being accepted at this time. However, the FAQ page has a section listing charities I support and I encourage people to donate to one of those and then send me a photo or screenshot or something of the donation so I can know it was made thanks to COGG and we can all feel warm fuzzies.

Thank you all for being such an awesome community! One of the compliments I see most often about COGG is that it has a very chill and supportive community, and that makes me incredibly happy and incredibly proud of what we've all managed to accomplish together.
<Rias> PUT ON PANTS
<Fellborn> NO
artus
Posts: 226
Joined: Sun Mar 28, 2021 7:43 am

Re: Discord, and not wanting to depend on any Discord-specific features

Post by artus »

The charity donation faq warmed my heart big time. That's our Rias!
tulpa
Posts: 118
Joined: Sat Sep 25, 2021 5:00 am

Re: Discord, and not wanting to depend on any Discord-specific features

Post by tulpa »

Just a couple of things Discord users might want to be aware of, especially when someone pops up in a channel with a Matrix/IRC tag:

* Quoted text in replies is not visible outside discord, so the thread of conversation may not be immediately clear if you're using those alone to refer to something said previously. You might want to mention the person you're referring to by name (which will flag up as a "mention") or use a @tag. The tags will PING the player in the in-game #question channel too, so that's always nice, and will also work for Matrix/IRC mentions.

* The same goes for emoticon responses that aren't in the body of a comment or reply: they're unfortunately lost in translation outside of Discord.

* Discord's spoiler tags *do not work for IRC or Matrix*, at all, by default. The spoilered text will be completely visible. I guess try to be circumspect about how you use these anyway.

Also, to my knowledge, the #wiki and #technical channels do not yet have Matrix rooms linked.
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