I don't know that it's the pace as much as the organization. Discord is great for communication/jumping in but it's atrocious for having a conversation thread/deep topic like a forum can
We can host your forum in the United States (Washington D.C.) or in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany). We use ISO27001 certified data centers. Our EU hosting is GDPR compliant.
What is the actual question here? I think it is out of question that a forum can have some advantages over discord, especially when it comes to finding information about things that have already been discussed before. So the questions might rather be:
When PP offers a new forum, do we get enough activity in there? (I have no clue but I think it does not hurt to give it a try)
Can we re-use the old forum or migrate the data to keep the information that were already stored in there?
What forum software should be used? (there is also enough free or cheap software out there, so pricing should not be a blocker to start a new forum)
Imagine a world with a dozen mail slots- everything that is posted gets dropped into one of those slots... and piles up. If you are there when the post drops, you can catch a glimpse of what falls in before it is buried. If not, finding what may-or-may-not be in the pile requires excessive time and effort.
"But think of all the time we save by not sorting mail- it's so much faster now."
No, it isn't.
This is an important topic for us, so a bit of background information.
We used the have forums. Loved/hated them. They gathered useful information, but also a lot of mess and daily disposable conversations with endless threads.
We set out to build our own platform taking out the most valuable things from the forum.
https://platform.onearmy.earth/
Aiming to get useful longterm information like R&D and final documentation properly stored in our online platform. Disposable day to day conversations in Discord.
That said reflecting on the previous years we noticed it's been quite a complex undertaking to develop this software/platform. To make it in a way that it's bugfree, works smooth and has all the features users need.
And till this date it feels many of the useful Precious Plastic knowledge is not harvested and scattered on the web. Not optimal..
We will have a meetup about this in June defining the next steps for our online tools. (last time we did this was 3 years ago) So good moment to share your feedback and wishes for the coming years (edited)
Thanks a lot, looking forward to hear what the conclusion will be after that meetup
davehakkens
This is an important topic for us, so a bit of background information.
We used the have forums. Loved/hated them. They gathered useful information, but also a lot of mess and daily disposable conversations with endless threads.
We set out to build our own platform taking out the most valuable things from the forum.
https://platform.onearmy.earth/
Aiming to get useful longterm information like R&D and final documentation properly stored in our online platform. Disposable day to day conversations in Discord.
That said reflecting on the previous years we noticed it's been quite a complex undertaking to develop this software/platform. To make it in a way that it's bugfree, works smooth and has all the features users need.
And till this date it feels many of the useful Precious Plastic knowledge is not harvested and scattered on the web. Not optimal..
We will have a meetup about this in June defining the next steps for our online tools. (last time we did this was 3 years ago) So good moment to share your feedback and wishes for the coming years (edited)
Forums wasn't best for the job either since things where missing/annoying there. And the downside of using too many tools is things get more scattered and messy.
Not sure whether you really understand what's at stake but Forums, especially Discourse does and did a great job, better by every release - at least for whom are involved on a daily basis. Let it be announcements, long-term discussions, process documentation, etc...
Discord is known for degrading projects, at certain scale. PreciousPlastic lost many good folks, seniors, decision makers since Discord.
10:04 AM
Btw. Discourse can easily replace parts of OA platform, no need to reinvent the wheel. I am sure it will attract professionals again.
"Discourse can easily replace parts of OA platform" <Thats part of the problem.
It doesn't help to add a competing tool to our existing toolset, which is still under development.
We need to have it clear what is the role of Discord vs Discourse vs the Platform before introducing a new tool to the community.
'Which is still under development', well you just said it. We need a good tool, now - if it benefits the project and the people working in here, I won't wait a second.
Agree. We thought the development of our online tools would be faster. It’s catching up but not fast enough.
Using another tool could be a short term fix. But migrating users from one tool to another brings other downsides.
Other than technical debates, it's also a matter who can interact with the content, and how. Investors as said will have it easy to discover people, projects, ... Discord won't.
10:20 AM
Anyway, it's all said. Normally we chose whats best.
Yeh. for sure Discord isnt the tool for it.
We hope it's the Platform, but will critically have a look at it in June to see if we should have another solution in between.
at some level you chose a platform and what fits sticks and what doesn't doesn't. I use e-mail as a primary means of communication for my business, people choose to reach me via text/phone/etc and I answer but push them to the resource that I use. This is very similar, there isn't a "right" answer, there's preferences but it's up to the organization to choose how to communicate and the users/participants either comply or not
2:09 AM
I've never used Discord before I saw One Army was on it, so I installed it and hunted for other interesting communities. I also have my e-mail, Slack, IRC open for other communities(edited)
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A series of tools for the Precious Plastic community to collaborate around the world. Connect, share and meet each other to tackle plastic waste.
4:25 PM
forums can provide social connection and how-tos, they're just split here the Discord is the social function and the website how-tos/build plans/etc are the content
4:27 PM
how to get to the how-to's from the main website and not randomly throwing search terms at DuckDuckGo is still a mystery though
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Agree discourse has many features. But what makes you think Discourse fixes all the current problems?
You have it installed, run forums, even copied the entire PP database + users. But it's not that there is a lot of activity there?
Okay, rewriting this from scratch...
I had been thinking about Discourse earlier because of the issue where if one wants to provide feedback for a documentation module with, for example, sketches, there isn't really a good way of doing so, since comments on the One Army platform are plain-text only, and Discord doesn't do threaded topics particularly well.
Discourse in particular has substantial integration with GitHub (and GitHub Issues), and there is I think an official Discourse plugin for WordPress comments, where the comment section on each post is also a Discourse forum thread. While I don't imagine you'd want to use WordPress, I imagine a similar integration with comments on One Army documentation modules could be relatively straightforward.
There is also something to be said for organizations (and individuals) "owning their own data", and the licensing model of Discourse is conducive to that in a way that, say, Discord generally is not. If we look at the histories of API access at Facebook and now Twitter, platform lockin can become a serious problem.
I'd also like to mention an open protocol that corresponds roughly with Discord and Slack (as an IRC replacement of sorts) called Matrix (or Element). While Matrix similarly lets you own your own data (even without self-hosting), the Element client is a bit more free-form, so implementing something analogous to a Discord "server" may not be immediately straightforward.
(It should go without saying that both Discourse and Matrix have all the major SSO integrations.)
1:19 AM
Honestly the main advantages with Discord seem to be that (a) it's better for casual chit-chat (though not great for much else), (b) it's a very "buzzy" platform, so a lot of people are already on it and wouldn't find joining another server particularly intimidating, and (c) it's free to use and extremely low-maintenance.
As far as something like forums goes, some other things that could be worth mentioning are GitHub Discussions (which are more or less exactly like Discourse) and Gitlab (the open-source, optionally self-hosted competitor to GitHub, though Gitlab uses Discourse for discussions instead of rolling their own).
GitHub Discussions have the advantage of being free and low-mainenance (and piggy-backing off of an existing GitHub organization), but they have the disadvantage of higher platform lock-in. I don't know how easy it is to migrate between Gitlab.com and self-hosted Gitlab, but it almost certainly has less platform lock-in than GitHub.
Also, for whatever it's worth, Matrix/Element is primarily written React/TypeScript (like the One Army community platform), while Discourse and Gitlab are primarily written in Ruby (so, for instance, building extensions to Discourse might be more difficult than building them into the One Army community platform itself and calling the Discourse API).
1:23 AM
One last thing to mention with Discord (and Matrix) is that Discord is by default completely private, which is to say that it's kind of a black hole when it comes to knowledge production. By contrast, Discourse is designed to be fully indexed (though there are private DMs), so it's more conducive to building a corpus of knowledge (as are GitHub and Gitlab).
WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog - GitHub - discourse/wp-discourse: WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for...
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