Reply To: Now that you're all here reading the forums again…..

[blinky465 17028xp 2]

A little while back, @warzan was asking the community how to handle having so many “channels” of communication – forum posts, DMs, Twitter, Facebook, emails, even old-school texting…. and then added Discord into the mix!

As @timchubb points out, forums and Discord are not mutually exclusive. But we can’t ignore the lived experience of watching forum posts go down, quite noticeably, since the introduction of Discord. And maybe the forums were just filled with “chatter” that has moved onto the Discord platform – but it’s undeniable that traffic has moved from the forums to Discord. The two may not be mutually exclusive; but the way they’re being used by members is treating them as if they are (“I won’t post that on the forum, as quite a few of us were already chatting about that on Discord, and who wants to read all that rubbish again?”)

Personally, I wouldn’t miss the Discord server if it disappeared, but I’ve certainly missed the forum activity in the last six months or so. @sundancer has put a lot of work into keeping the conversation going on the forum but I felt like even that was becoming a bit “clique-y” as it was the same half-a-dozen or so of us responding, which kind of put me off replying too often too – and as other members appear to have felt the same, the conversation on the forums slowly died away.

“Use it or lose it” seems to be the order of the day here.

The way to keep the forums alive and filled with chatter is to…. well, join in and fill them with chatter!

Everyone to date who has celebrated the Discord channels points out that they keep the channel open during the day (as work arrangements allow for this) and have it on as “background noise”. Which is fine. For everyone who is able to do this. For the rest of us, it’s easy to feel “left out” and not want to join in with an established conversation (since it’s hard to find out where in the conversation you’re jumping in).

But it feels like we’re just repeating conversations already had.

I guess the question this kind of thread really brings up is *where* is our community?