The only negative aspect I’ve noticed has been that more and more people seem to be using Discord for support/help/troubleshooting with things they are working on. I get that the real-time back and forth can be very appealing for this, but there are several good reasons for us to favor using the forums for those types of topics:
- New questions/topics in the forum stay visible for much longer, whereas with Discord they get pushed up in the chat pretty quickly (sometimes prompting the same person to re-ask the same question a few times)
- Topics are threaded on the forums, so it’s much more organized and better-suited for long term discussion (when you ask a question on Discord it is invariably mixed in with whatever other people are talking about as well)
- Having longer-running threads allows other people who may have the same question or problem later on to see it (or find it through searching) and jump in
- Forum threads show up in Google search results, which is very handy (I’ve even run across threads on our forums I missed when googling for a solution to a problem)
- The real-time nature of people direct-messaging you on Discord can quite frankly be a little stressful. There’s the expectation from people that they will receive an answer immediately and I’ve had multiple experiences where a user was obviously getting irritated with me for not answering them quickly enough. The forums are much more relaxed in this regard (like emailing vs. text messaging).
So with the above in mind we’re going to start trying to steer people toward using the forums for support/questions/troubleshooting, and using Discord more for general chat/banter. It’s a fine line (we don’t want to ban ALL questions, that would be silly), and so will largely be up to the discretion of the mods on Discord.
Any questions/concerns/feedback please post them here!
