Hey All,
So I've been trying to write this for a little while now and it has been difficult because it involves two major topics.
So the first topic, the removal of Discord is something that we have been thinking about for a while now as a staff and something that finally got pushed over the edge when Mordecai resigned, which I will talk about first.
Mordecai's Resignation
I want to go ahead and personally thank @Mordecai for everything shes done for us as a community over the past year and just ...wow. Due to some health concerns that have sprung up, shes taking a back seat and instead has opted to become a helper where she can.
@Mordecai you will be in my prayers and I'm sure in that of the rest of the staff and many of the people you have touched
. We all hope you feel better and that you can continue to hang out with all of us regularly. We look forward to see what you can do as a helper(you did start as a Fellow after all 
). You are always welcomed to return.
The State of Discord
So while our decrease in admin and staff power as a whole contributed to Discord being phased out, here are all the major reasons why it is happening:
Some of our oldest members know that myself and @The Administration have been trying for years to find the perfect chat that meets certain quotas. Discord seemed like that perfect solution because it merged the unused TS server we had for years, site chats and skype among other things while allowing users to download it or even use it in the browser (something that TS can't do and why it never picked up for our site over the years). However, It just didn't work. It was more of an experiment of something new and cool and to see if it could be used for us. Like I said above, due to staff presence, all the user harassment and users reporting each other is not something we wanted to deal with as a responsibility.
We'd rather focus on more on the site, we are a post by post forum after all and we have many new features and site expansions coming soon. Wasting the staff's limited resources and focus on a dying offsite chat.
This does not mean that I and the rest of the staff won't continue the eternal quest to find the best chat solution for us and trial them as more come out in the future. Things that we'd honestly need though are:
Since those things don't exist in any chat that currently exists, we will obviously be taking a break as a staff from running another chat project again for a while. Anyone who actually wants to keep in touch with their friends uses PMs, their own servers or the millions of IM programs like Skype.
If you have any questions/feedback/concerns please post below and as usual you can see the latest version of the staff list here.
So I've been trying to write this for a little while now and it has been difficult because it involves two major topics.
- The removal of Discord
- The resignation of one of our Administrators, Mordecai.
So the first topic, the removal of Discord is something that we have been thinking about for a while now as a staff and something that finally got pushed over the edge when Mordecai resigned, which I will talk about first.
Mordecai's Resignation
I want to go ahead and personally thank @Mordecai for everything shes done for us as a community over the past year and just ...wow. Due to some health concerns that have sprung up, shes taking a back seat and instead has opted to become a helper where she can.
@Mordecai you will be in my prayers and I'm sure in that of the rest of the staff and many of the people you have touched
. We all hope you feel better and that you can continue to hang out with all of us regularly. We look forward to see what you can do as a helper(you did start as a Fellow after all ). You are always welcomed to return.The State of Discord
So while our decrease in admin and staff power as a whole contributed to Discord being phased out, here are all the major reasons why it is happening:
- Most users who actually wants to get in touch with friends for roleplaying, discussions, etc., use their own Discord servers, Skype, Steam, IM, and what have you.
- Extremely small chat population (caused by the first point)
- Due to lack of staff presence, the chat (like other chats in the past) has become toxic to newer users and does not meet the standard of friendliness and good community that we exhibit on the site.
Some of our oldest members know that myself and @The Administration have been trying for years to find the perfect chat that meets certain quotas. Discord seemed like that perfect solution because it merged the unused TS server we had for years, site chats and skype among other things while allowing users to download it or even use it in the browser (something that TS can't do and why it never picked up for our site over the years). However, It just didn't work. It was more of an experiment of something new and cool and to see if it could be used for us. Like I said above, due to staff presence, all the user harassment and users reporting each other is not something we wanted to deal with as a responsibility.
We'd rather focus on more on the site, we are a post by post forum after all and we have many new features and site expansions coming soon. Wasting the staff's limited resources and focus on a dying offsite chat.
This does not mean that I and the rest of the staff won't continue the eternal quest to find the best chat solution for us and trial them as more come out in the future. Things that we'd honestly need though are:
- Incentive to use on the site over just adding someone on Skype or other IM service. Perhaps like it being every where (maybe threads?) in a non intrusive way.
- Can't slow down the site/be poorly coded.
- Can't be off the site (Defeats any purpose of being on RpN).
- Must have some sort of collaborative feature for posts.
- Maybe some sort of character limit like 140 (like twitter?) for messages that way not everyone runs off to RP on it and the forum dies.
- Much more.
Since those things don't exist in any chat that currently exists, we will obviously be taking a break as a staff from running another chat project again for a while. Anyone who actually wants to keep in touch with their friends uses PMs, their own servers or the millions of IM programs like Skype.
If you have any questions/feedback/concerns please post below and as usual you can see the latest version of the staff list here.
