Rethinking Communities: Forums and Discord

It’s no secret that the use of the forum is The South Pacific, and likely across NationStates, is in decline as more interac-tion moved to Discord over the last several years. Discord has been a boon for many communities, thanks to the platform being widely popular across the internet. But it’s not an entirely positive force for the kinds of communities we create in NationStates.

Discord is a great tool for real-time discussions and quick decision-making. Sharing memes, joking, debating, arguing, fighting, all these things are easier on Discord, just as they were on IRC. Ease shouldn’t be mistaken for accessibility, though. When all decisions are made in Discord channels, that favors those who have the time and energy to stay on Dis-cord, sometimes for debates that last several hours. The long-term effect is those people will accumulate power and influ-ence, but not necessarily have the best ideas or be representative of the much larger part of the community that only logs on every other day. The inaccessibility of Discord (ironic as it is, being a cross-platform widely used product) means lacks of inclusivity and diversity of ideas and contributions.

Additionally, real-time chat is ripe for emotional decision-making, rather than thoughtful and moderated discussion. We see all of the time that those who take 5 minutes to type out a long response on Discord are jokingly derided for writing “Onderwalls.” In real-time chat, an Onderwall is anything more than a few sentences, instead of the 15 paragraph essays that originated the nickname. If a debate doesn’t last hours, it’s more likely filled with pithy one-liners or devolves into trolling, joking, and memeing among a handful of people.

It’s not all downsides, of course. Discord is an amazing platform for socializing. Because it’s cross-platform with Android and iOS apps, communities can use it to ping or notify people of important events, like votes and elections. Push notifica-tions are more visible than emails, telegrams, or forum PMs. Discord (or real-time chat in general) is going to be around for a long time. We used IRC before, after all.

However, community administrators and regional governments should discourage using Discord as the primary infrastruc-ture for their regions. The asynchronous discussion that happens on forums is far more inclusive and accessible. The debate that happens on forums is more thoughtful, since people have time to think about and edit their responses. Most important-ly, forums are important knowledge banks. Chat platforms like Discord will never be able to beat out the way traditional forums store records of debate and political and cultural history. Chat channels aren’t a suitable replacement for forum cate-gories, pinned threads, and archives. Discussions that happens on Discord are non-linear and tend to spread throughout mul-tiple channels, making it difficult to find information and follow along with historical debates. Forums are simply superior here.

As Rishabh Nambiar, community lead at Discourse, puts it: “Discord is great as your short term memory, and [forums are] great as your long term memory. You can use either tool for all of these things, but it’s not ideal.” Communities should use both Discord and forums. They should try to make the two as seamless as possible. In a game like NationStates, history is paramount. Without forums to store debates, electoral records, laws, etc., we lose institutional memory whenever long-term community members leave the game. Years of tradition and progress are wiped out, with the community unable to re-member what happened in the past in order to inform the present.

In order to have the best of both Discord and forums, community administrators and regional governments should follow some basic best practices. This isn’t exhaustive and each community in NationStates will have different needs. But the over-all guidelines below should provide a foundation for successful long-term communities.

1. Use modern forum software
Many legacy regions in NationStates founded their communities in the early 2000s. The South Pacific’s original forums date to 2003, around a year after the game began. The software used nearly 20 years ago is roughly the same that’s still used today in many regions, including The South Pacific. phpBB, MyBB, and their free counterparts Tapatalk (formerly Invision-free and Zetaboards), all follow the same basic template of forums that’s existed since the original threaded forum technology was created. In other words, the software is severely dated. Not in the technical sense (phpBB and MyBB are still regularly updated), but visually and in user experience. Somebody born after Barack Obama’s election goes to our forums and thinks, “Wow, this is what the internet looked like?”

Modern forum software follows different philosophies and UX frameworks. Discourse and Flarum are good examples. Both are built with modern Javascript and CSS design. Both are the kinds of single-page applications that are prevalent in modern and widely used websites. They’re more streamlined, discouraging category nesting which obscures content and makes forums less accessible. Both also allow have single sign-on features, allowing users to register and log in with their Discord accounts. They also retain the administrative and moderation capabilities that communities still need. They may not have deep pools of themes and plugins, but they’re updated more regularly, are built with third-party development in mind, and best of all they’re still free. XenForo is another option some NationStates communities have adopted, but it comes at a steep price of $120 (or more) and an extra $55 per year for support.

Discourse, while free and open-source, requires self-hosting. The server resource requirements will generally run communi-ties around $15 per month in virtual private server (VPS) costs through platforms like DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform, plus an annual domain registration fee. Some VPS providers include easy installation of Discourse, mean-ing community administrators don’t need to know the ins and outs of a Unix shell. But even without that, installing Dis-course requires running just one command. Discourse is used widely by small-to-medium communities as well as by large communities like BoingBoing, Twitter Developers, EVE Online, and Samsung.

Flarum can also be self-hosted, but because it’s less resource-heavy (and less feature-rich) than Discourse, there are free hosting providers like FreeFlarum that will take care of forum setup and maintenance. Choosing a free host versus self-hosting on a VPS comes with the drawbacks of less customization options, the inability to use a top-level domain (can only redirect to their server), and limitations on how many users a forum can have. These are all familiar downsides to those who used Invisionfree and Zetaboards. Flarum is its development lifecycle, having only recently released a stable version, and is not used by any large communities yet compared to Discourse.

2. Limit Discord channels
An easy to tell if Discord is being misused is with the proliferation of channels. In The South Pacific, for example, we have half a dozen channels for casual socializing, multiple channels for discussion government, and then each ministry of government has 3-5 channels for themselves. Not only does this disperse content and make it more inaccessible, it creates an incentive to use Discord for everything.

The maximize the benefits of Discord, communities should try to limit channels to a handful at most. A good guideline for public channel setup is a welcome channel for new users, one of our announcement, a general discussion channel, a spam channel (optionally), and perhaps a “members-only” channel for citizens. Limit the number of private channels for govern-ment, to encourage discussion to happen on the forums.

#welcome – Used for linking to forums & the game, informing new users about rules, and things like enrolling in other channels and pings
#announcements – Used by administrators and government to ping the server about important events
#lounge – General chat
#spam – Memes, games, and other “disruptive” types of chat
#citizens-only – Exclusive to regional citizens, legislators, government officials, etc.

3. Send people to the forums
Administrators, moderators, government officials, and other community members should actively encourage discussions to take place on the forums when appropriate. For information on the government, political participation, and similar, people should be sent to relevant forum topics. If they’re not registered on the forums, there should be a reminder when they visit that they should register. This is a common feature of modern forum software.

While it’s not necessary to redirect all debate to the forums, users should be reminded that substantive debates about laws, elections, and other things that have active forum threads should be debated in those forum threads. Emphasize the need for inclusive and accessible debate, as well as recording it for posterity.

4. Make the switch as seamless as possible
Remembering usernames and passwords is always a pain, and when people use different nicknames on different platforms, it gets hard to follow along. Whenever possible, allow people to log in to forums with their Discord account. Discourse and Flarum both offer single sign-on features, either natively or through plugins. Adding required profile fields for NationStates nations and Discord IDs can help as well. If there’s a developer in the community, look into setting up a plugin that uses the NationStates Authentication API to verify nation ownership.

5. Decrease barriers to entry
Lastly, none of the previous guidelines will do much to grow a community if the barriers to join it are high. While com-munities have different security needs, an onerous application process will certainly discourage people from joining. Region-al governments need to balance security and openness. Specific policy is beyond the scope of these guidelines, but overall communities should consider having a less front-loaded security regime in favor of a more back-loaded one. In other words, be less proactive in preventing bad faith players to joining and make reactively banning them easier, as a way to lessen the need of high barriers to entry.

Attached Files

  Rethinking Communities.pdf (Size: 175.55 KB / Downloads: 7)