Or do you frequent a creative writing discord server that you'd recommend? I googled "creative writing discord" and found about 74 on the disboard but I can't decide on one and I already belong to like 5 discord's and don't want to be swamped every time I go on discord (I usually like to keep up with everything that people are saying so that I don't miss anything).
our general feeling is that it would take traffic away from the boards - also discord servers like chat boxes are a pain in the arse to moderate
For the benefit of us dinosaurs, would someone explain just what a discord server is, and how it's different from an Internet forum? I have encountered the term before, but it's another term that seems to have materialized out of nowhere, the meaning of which is known only to certain of the cognoscenti.
I've used it for collaboration and beta readings. But for that I just created my own channel and invited the participants into it. For those purposes its awesome. For general writing and such I much prefer this forum system. Plus as @big soft moose noted...moderating a discord is a huge pain in the posterior, especially if added to their duties on here.
Isn't the prospect of becoming a discord moderator all too tempting though? It's a free software where you can create "servers". Within a server, you can create "channels" that can be voice channels (imagine teamspeak, ventrilo, zoom, etc) or text channels (basically IRC / chat). The server owner can assign each channel dedicated rules, and can assign each user that "joins" the server a rank that determines how they can interact with the server or specific channels. Furthermore, as "server ownership" is not central but is in the hands of users, they can moderate however they want to. In essence, you could create a "writing discord server" with channels like "resources", "fiction writing", "genre writing". You could restrict people from putting messages into "resources" except for a few you trust will only post valid ones. You can also assign each user with a multitude of writing-related roles. EG, give me "fantasy", "literary" and "historical, and then create channels for those genres that only assigned people can see. I adore it, largely because I've followed discord from the early days of its development. It was born as a project from the need to create something superior to skype (which is horrible + not updated much + lacking in functionality), which was the go-to community chat/call software beforehands.
Anything with the intention of allowing people to chat that has "Discord" as its name has got to be bad news.
Look at it this way - interacting with people through forum posts forces you to write... which is a good thing for a erm, writing forum.
If "discord" connotes chaos, I'd say from the description that it's well-named. It doesn't sound like anything I could tolerate for more than about 14.3 nanoseconds. This forum seems to work very nicely, and it's well organized. I can't imagine what you described as in any way being an improvement.
It was originally designed for gaming. Its voice chat function is very useful for that. I don't know why you'd want to discuss writing on Discord though.
Well, I do intend on making actual games out of my short stories, either as a collection of loosely tied stories all happening in the same world, or as separate games. RPG maker is a great engine designed for just such an endeavor. And I am also a music composer (and participate in a composing forum similar to this one which also has a discord server) so I hope to write music for my own stories.
Also, from my experience with other forums, a discord server only allows the community to expand and grow rather than taking away activity from the forum. I could see maybe the lounge being less active because discord seems like a better venue for less serious stuff, but I'm sure people wouldn't just start dropping walls of text (their stories) into the chat on discord. Instead, they'd probably link to their story posted on this forum (which is what happens when I write a musical composition and ask people on the discord server to listen to it). Besides that there are lots of fun things that you can do on discord servers that you can't do on a forum. Just this last Saturday, the composing discord server I frequent hosted a Q&A with a composer/interviewer (he interviews famous composers on his vlog/show). There's also occasional virtual concerts where composers share their music live and comment on each other's music. Then of course there's the "Question of the Day" channel which is self-explanatory and stimulates all kinds of interesting discussions about music and the composing process. There are already plenty of creative writing discord servers out there I was just hoping to get some advice from people on here about which one I should join (and if this forum had an official one dedicated to it that would probably be my #1 choice).
I don't think it's a good idea. Discord is so ripe for abuse too, of social power especially. I'm in the Latin-speaking community on there, and I've seen some horrible examples of it over the last few years.
^Speaking of abuse of social power... I've thought about creating my own little private Discord server and inviting some fellow members here and there to join it. @big soft moose would be the first to be invited, so I could lord over him. Then @Friedrich Kugelschreiber, @Xoic, @Not the Territory and a couple others, because I like them. It'd be a speakeasy sort of thing. A hangout with some of the same people from this forum but with its own set of rules and with a totally different name. A clique, if you will. That being said, if these forums were to host an official Discord server, then the moderation and rules of said server would need to be consistent with how things are ran here on the main site. And it is quite a task just to keep this site running smoothly. Maybe it depends on the person, but as a gamer and long-time Discord user, I find that Discord is more user friendly for *some* things, like general chatting, sharing. You can also get notifications to your phone with Discord, whereas a forum is something you have to actively decide to check. However, I feel like a forum's design is better suited to serious critique, feedback, etc. If a Discord server cannot fulfill those roles just as well, then there's really no point for the staff behind a writing forum like this to invest in a dedicated Discord server.
