Discord server?

[SpaceFrog]

Will there ever be a discord server for swl in the future?  You can upload up to 25mb for free and you can make a forum inside discord along with the regular channels. I'm sure you can find trusted users here who can mod

[Jesterface23]

That seems like a SWL Community Supporters thing if that ever does happen? (https://community.spaceweatherlive.com/subscriptions/)

The staff had to temporarily disable to forums in May due to the amount traffic on the website, to get a good view on how many people there are.

[SteamedHams]

Throwing my nomination of IRC or Matrix into the ring.

[Tomo]

To be honest discord would be worth a shot as long as we keep some stuff on here. On the flip side it would be much quicker to communicate via discord, a lot easier to get young people into ( forums tend to be off putting for some people in my generation), probably less costly for spaceweatherlive to maintain, and we’d also get to know eachother a bit better because you can put off topic stuff and similar hobbies into their own channels. Only downside is that it would be harder to access previous topics. So it seems like a good idea.

[Marcel de Bont]

I use Discord a lot and like it a lot as well but it would drive traffic away from the forums which means less revenue. However, it would be yet another place we'd have to moderate and keep an eye on which is already a lot of work for just the forums. The forums do not cost a lot more for us to maintain if there is more content being posted or more people visit it but the financial income hit would be noticeable. The forums can and are accessible by anyone trough Google or the website while Discord would not be. I really like Discord like I said but I do not think it would make sense for us.

15 uren geleden, Jesterface23 zei:

The staff had to temporarily disable to forums in May due to the amount traffic on the website, to get a good view on how many people there are.

Yeah the forums are very database intensive and did cause a large portion of the server load we experienced. We disabled it to free up server power when insane amount of visitors flocked to both the site and forums but paying members can still see and post the forums like admins and mods do even if it's disabled for everyone else.

[Arman Sargsyan]

4 minutes ago, Marcel de Bont said:

I use Discord a lot and like it a lot as well but it would drive traffic away from the forums which means less revenue. However, it would be yet another place we'd have to moderate and keep an eye on which is already a lot of work for just the forums. The forums do not cost a lot more for us to maintain if there is more content being posted or more people visit it but the financial income hit would be noticeable. The forums can and are accessible by anyone trough Google or the website while Discord would not be. I really like Discord like I said but I do not think it would make sense for us.

Yeah the forums are very database intensive and did cause a large portion of the server load we experienced. We disabled it to free up server power when insane amount of visitors flocked to both the site and forums but paying members can still see and post the forums like admins and mods do even if it's disabled for everyone else.

What about donation for Discord server maintenance, I would be double-hand up on this

[Sunshine]

I'm an avid discord user too. I would love to have the ability to have more realtime discussions, especially when something big happens. However, I have to agree with @Marcel de Bont, it will require moderation, right around those times. Even more work for the mods, if they have to look at both forum and discord at the same time.

[SteamedHams]

Discord would also limit even read-only access to those with an account, I lurked here for a few months before signing up and found the discussions very insightful.

While real-time discussions are nice, I think that context could easily be lost or go off-topic.
How could that be mitigated? Wouldn't a new channel/room for each new AR, for example, get quite messy?

[Sunshine]

On 8/11/2024 at 11:36 PM, SteamedHams said:

While real-time discussions are nice, I think that context could easily be lost or go off-topic.
How could that be mitigated? Wouldn't a new channel/room for each new AR, for example, get quite messy?

I have a feeling it wouldn't do well if discord replicated the structure of our forums here. I also don't think that having the same discussions as here would work. I'm more inclined to believe, that discord could serve well as a place to offload discussions during interesting weather events. Having to refresh the forum every few minutes is rather unwieldy. I see discord more as an addition, allowing us to quickly exchange information and photos .

However, having said all that, we still have the issue of moderating two places, which with a realtime medium as discord is even more difficult.  Would I love to have a discord server in addition to the SWL forums, Of course! Do I think our mods could manage it? Probably not. Maybe if we had more, knowledgable people coming forward to act as mods, that would help. I would most certainly do so, if I had enough knowledge already, but I do not and I also have a day job, which doesn't allow me to watch discord or space weather closely enough now.