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)

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I'll probably share some more thoughts later (and here on the forums, maybe, instead of on Discord ), but a couple brief thoughts —

Flarum is its development lifecycle, having only recently released a stable version, and is not used by any large communities yet compared to Discourse.

I think Forest uses it on their forums. I haven't personally, so I can't say how well it works... but maybe there's somebody here with some insight into that.

They’re more streamlined, discouraging category nesting which obscures content and makes forums less accessible.

The category nesting aspect seems like the big jump to me, not just in terms of the number of categories but the more streamlined approach to thread organization in general. Not to say that's a bad thing — it actually sounds quite appealing to me — but my initial impressions are that this would strike me as the biggest change to get used to.

Esfalsa | NationStates | Wiki | Roleplay | Discord

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I think Forest uses it on their forums. I haven't personally, so I can't say how well it works... but maybe there's somebody here with some insight into that.

The problem with Flarum is that there is no built-in permissions system. Roles exist, but they are exclusively for access to the interface (i.e. no closed forums - actually no divided forums at all without an add-on).

Spoiler

Republic of Lansoon (Pacifica)

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While I have no issues with looking to newer, bigger, better, I do have issues with "what's next". The decision to go to MYBB at the time was absolutely the right decision at the time and I do agree there are way too many sub forums and discord channels, I do have an issue with what technology is "next". Things like javascript support, flash and others are having support removed from browsers everyday due to their insecurity. I have no preference on a BBS, but would prefer one that limits the tech to what browsers actually support. As for self hosting vs cloud, there is always the trust factor of either platform as to if it is backed up properly and who can say what. If it was self hosted, I do feel  making it only accessible thru Cloudflare or equivalent makes it that much more secure.

Real-life Girls

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Observations:

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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.

Additionally, real-time chat is ripe for emotional decision-making

It’s not all downsides, of course. Discord is an amazing platform for socializing.

Agree, except for IRC. The TSP RMB is more akin to TSP IRC.

However, community administrators and regional governments should discourage using Discord as the primary infrastructure for their region.

Disagree, two reasons. Discord is an instant-messaging platform, with benefits outside of socializing.
The possibility of discussing less-formal government matters - Less-formal government matters could be discussed in discord. (Drafting of proposal, Discussions, debates over it, etcetc).
As for the encouragement to move into discord, reform the LC/DC channel (where members are: citizens and the RMB community). From there, the LC/DC members can point citizens to the government.

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The asynchronous discussion that happens on forums is far more inclusive and accessible. The debate that happens on forums is more thoughtful

They really aren't.

1. Use modern forum software

This is the most ambitious endeavor with the least discussion on it. I can't as well, because I don't known forum/site design.

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The maximize the benefits of Discord, communities should try to limit channels to a handful at most.

Drafted agree. As stated in my first response. The 7 bare-minimum channels should be ''General'', ''Spam'', ''Voice/music channel'', ''World Affairs'', the mentioned LC/DC, a ''Guide'' channel as well as a (better) bot which provides links to various | The one Restricted channel should include ''Governance'', where each branch (Assembly, LegCommission, OWL) has it's own threads. 

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For these to work at all, the forums themselves must be restructured to be more explicit about 'what' is 'where'.

The Orange Records | Viliakmon (Pacifica) | NationStates Account Main | Discord: genericsequencealias#0990

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Personally, I use discord far more than the forums. This is largely due to I find it easier to use but also because of of how I engage with the community. As you can probably tell I rarely talk the forums, I do however read anything important posted on the forums.

Personally, I use Discoid for socialising.

                     

             Militant Radical Centrist from British Texas who dislikes communist dragons.

                                                     

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After taking some time to mull this over, I think Glen really hit the nail on head. While it's easy to think of this as a discussion about where to hold which discussions, the bigger question here is what conversations we are most interested in having as a community, and what the most suitable venue for those discussions would be. Critically, suitability is not necessarily equivalent only to convenience. The most suitable platform to host our discussions and the most suitable manner to organize that platform won't always be the ones we reach for habitually, nor the ones we instinctively think is the simplest. Facilitating effective conversations requires collective effort and careful thought about more than what feels the most natural; it requires us to think carefully about how we create an environment that fosters discussions that are both engaging in the present and beneficial to the long-term health and development of our community.

It's easy to become attached to become attached to particular venues for discussion — a particular Discord channel or a certain subforum, for instance. It's similarly easy to become attached to our existing notions about the roles of different venues. I think most of us would agree that Discord is designed around instant messaging and forums are designed around asynchronous communication. What structures or practices should follow from that, however, are less clear. Different people can find vastly different uses for the same set of core features. Speaking from a personal perspective here, especially among a younger generation, instant messaging can feel incredibly powerful and versatile. I use it in real life for, texting aside, everything from announcements to mirrors of Twitter feeds to posting Wordle scores. On the other hand, I'm sure there are those of us here who are accustomed to the UX of forum software and who might find it easy and natural to use.

Saying goodbye to a channel or subforum can feel difficult. It's not always easy to leap into something new, and it's harder when doing so also means leaving behind something more familiar. That said, thinking of this as a comparison or debate between platforms doesn't capture the full picture. Just because our usage of Discord or the forums might shift, or because our channels or subforums might be arranged, doesn't mean that the conversations we value right now will be lost simply because they take place in a more broadly defined channel or involve the forums more heavily than the status quo. Rather than ruminating over losses, I do think there are clear benefits here as well — Glen's point about 'institutional memory' is of particular relevance in this regard.

If we see this through, I'm sure it won't always feel simple. It won't always feel natural. It won't always feel like things just work. It almost certainly isn't going to be a silver bullet. While there's sure to be a learning curve for all of us in adapting, it's also important to note that there is a learning curve for new members of our community as well, a curve that we already overcame ourselves. These forums intimidated me when I first created an account, but I have no regrets about taking the time to understand how to use them. If we decide, as a community, that we do want to have better, more meaningful conversations, and we find a path forward towards that goal, then I'm sure we can find reason to look towards changes like these with excitement rather than apprehension and tackle the challenges we encounter rather than settle for the status quo and call it a day.

Esfalsa | NationStates | Wiki | Roleplay | Discord

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How has discussion of implementation of possible changes to the Discord side of things been going?

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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This was an op-ed I hoped would get the community as a whole thinking. I don’t believe the admin or mod teams ever formally discussed any changes to Discord.

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Gotcha, makes sense - thanks for clarifying

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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