Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently. They have to put a flashy animated GIF at the top of every update notification, change the name of the game’s Steam forum to “Join Our Discord!”, and even reply to posts in the Steam forum saying “You should join our discord so we can chat about it!” as if a forum isn’t a good place to chat about the thing that’s already being discussed.
Bitch please, if I wanted to be in the hell that is Discord I’d already be there, you can stop asking.
I fucking hate Discord and how it’s absorbed what should be forums.
When I’m creating a discussion online about a particular game or project, I’m looking to hear from the broader community over a longer term; not just limited to whomever happens to be online on this one specific platform at the time of posting.
People have different schedules, we’re not all online together at the same times; especially when you factor in timezones. Discord however makes it massively frustrating if not impossible to hold a discussion unless everyone you want to talk to is present and ready to read and reply now. Otherwise your conversation gets burried in the mess of other people having their own conversations and nobody wants to scroll through thousands of messages in the history of when they last logged on.
You can break out conversations into their own rooms, but that only goes so far and at that point you may as well just have a damn forum; that’s what they are for.
Then you get into the problem of repetition and searchability. People often run into common problems or ask the same questions; but with Discord, you’ve got to re-explain the same things every time they’re brought up, instead of just pointing the user to an old forum post that already solves their problem (they may have even found it themselves through a web search, saving them from even having to ask and waste people’s time. Discord isn’t indexed by search engines so old conversations/solutions are lost).
A group chat platform is not an acceptable replacement for a forum and I will die on that god damn hill.
You just listed every reason why I have never liked Discord but couldn’t really begin to explain why. Thanks for putting into words so clearly!
and none of it is indeed by search engines. No one else will ever be able to Google their problem and find the answer. All the useful knowledge put into a box and buried. It’s just awful.
Grosses me out
Discord is good for live chatting and messaging only. Unless you are actively playing a game it’s horrible. We use the voice and chat for DnD but even for 5 people we can’t find anything in the text channel
Does Discord have something similar to Slack threads? That’s more or less helps to group related discussion together. Still, even threads eventually get lost in the chat history.
Discord literally has forums. Most official game servers that I’ve seen tend to make use of them.
I’ve not seen one of those in use in the half dozen servers I’d looked at; but I’ve barely used that shit show of a platform.
Regardless, it’s not publicly accessible/indexable and I’m not willing to enter into their new binding arbitration agreement just to look around. (the new ToS)
Discord can go fuck themselves.
My pet peeve is when the go to response in those exact same forums and chat is “we have an answerflow” followed by a link. I know you have an answer flow, and its indexing and search is shit under ideal circumstances. If you don’t discuss the thing and make a modicum of effort to organize the server then answer flow is even worse and even less useful.
Not good ones. It’s not a good format for actual forums
What exactly is wrong with them, in your opinion? A game I play uses a Discord forum channel for their bug reports, and it seems to support all the features I’d need out of a forum: sorting options (date posted vs most recent/“bumped” threads), search, chronological comments, tags, media support…
The only real issue I see with Discord forums is that they’re not public, so you can’t view them without having a Discord account and joining the server. But as far as functioning as a traditional web forum, they seem to check all the boxes.
This is a huge issue, honestly. Discord’s search function is awful and you have to find the right server before you can even try to find the information. Any standard search engine can find a post in a classic forum.
Also, scrolling through giant pages of constantly updating chatter is a miserable interface. Split it up into pages!
ALSO, Discord has poor tools for managing everything. You can’t merge topics or move posts, that should be day 1 stuff.