Updates to the Forum and Discord [July 2017]

Hey all,

After talking with a few of our members and trainees, I have gone ahead and made some changes to the setup of the forums and Discord and wanted to give all of you a quick rundown on what they are and what they mean to you.

Forums
Due to how Discord has changed how we interact as a community I have refocused the forums so that they encompass three things: Permanency, accessibility, and compartmentalization.

Discord seems to have a focus on spur-of-the-moment conversations, so I have made it so that topics that need to be found and read by members are easy to find. These include event announcement, community announcements, tactical discussions, and record keeping. As a result, we will continue to have events, important announcements, suggestions, and hopefully tactics in the near future posted on the forums. In the event that we begin running game servers (something I would like to beginning considering), we would also need to utilize the forum as a means of reporting rule breakers to offline mods.

While many of you have no issues putting Discord's app on your personal phones, some of our current and future members only have business phones that are locked down for security reasons. While they are able to access Discord on their personal PCs, their only access to the Phantoms on the go may well be in the form of the forums. Again, this is why we will continue to post events and announcements on both Discord and the forums, so that all of our members can be involved.

The biggest issue I have with Discord is the inability to quickly find old postings. While the search function works, it doesn't perform well in environments where I need to find specific information or a old conversation. For moderation in particular, we utilize the forums to be able to keep conversations on topic and undiluted with information from a different case. This is why we need to use the forums for things like tactics, as it will be easier to search and read one coherent map strategy then have to find multiple strategies in a Discord channel and have to piece it all together yourself.

Discord
Discord has grown substantially since we first adopted it over a year ago and unfortunately, I have not done as well as I could about keeping it as clean as possible. We had many channels that just went underutilized (Star Citizen, Events, Music, Streaming) and have removed to make Discord easier to navigate. I have changed the old events channel into the looking_to_play channel. This channel is designed to find people to play games that may not be on our officially supported list of games, for the DisCal bot to post events to, and for people to subscribe to those events for notifications. We moved what was in the old event's channels into a new hidden channel for using the DisCal bot top create events and only those who request/need access can see that channel.

Upon talking with some of our members, two issues arose: the first is that they did not know how to set up notifications so they could be informed about posts in channels that were important to them and the second was confusion about how to use the bot to self-assign a role upon joining (which is a major problem for recruitment). I will be addressing both of these this weekend by creating a .gif for the welcome channel for how to gain permissions and by making a short guide on how to set notifications on Discord on the forums.

These changes were made because members took the time to speak with me about issues they saw and were willing to be frank with me about them. I continue to encourage all of you to talk to any member of the mod staff about ideas or issues you see so we can make this community better!

-Fire