Proposal for an Official Aquarium Co-Op Discord

[BillyJBryant]

Hey everyone,

I hope you're all doing well! I didn't want to revive a zombie post (see below); however, I did want to resurface the topic of having an Official Aquarium Co-Op Discord for the community. 

For those unfamiliar, Discord is this great chat app that allows for real-time discussion on all sorts of topics. It's like the forum, but live and with different channels where we could dive into specific subjects, in addition to the added ability to have voice chat, video streaming, and community hosted events. 

I honestly think it could be a really cool addition to the community. I it is also my opinion that a Discord server wouldn't take away from the forum. Instead, it could give us another place to connect, share, and learn from one another.

Discord's gotten really good at moderation tools, too, which means we can make sure our server stays just as friendly and positive as this forum.

I'd be more than happy to help get this set up and keep things running smoothly. I've done some work with Discord moderation before and really value having respectful and inclusive spaces where we can all contribute and learn.

Before anything moves forward, I wanted to touch base with all of you and the Aquarium Co-Op team. I think it's really important that any steps we take are in line with what the community wants.

What do you all think? And Aquarium Co-Op team, would this be something you'd be open to?

Thanks for considering this idea, and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Cheers,

 

[nabokovfan87]

On 6/13/2023 at 8:11 PM, BillyJBryant said:

I'd be more than happy to help get this set up and keep things running smoothly. I've done some work with Discord moderation before and really value having respectful and inclusive spaces where we can all contribute and learn.

I've made a discord for a massive community, Marvel Strike Force Recruitment Discord (it's an online game) for a few thousand people, as well and I know there's quite a few ways to make a successful discord.

I think it would be awesome if we had one for the forums, just to make it easier to chat with one another and talk a bit more directly if people choose to!  It would be a fun project and hopefully a fruitful one.  Green aqua has a great discord as well as Bentley, Simply Betta, and so many others.

I did hear on the stream Cory was discussing this and said they are researching how to get this done.  Thankfully in the past couple of months Discord has added a lot of great community tools and there is a lot of things in process.  Community servers are now a thing as well as stuff like auto-mods, live presentations, and so on. 

Having a server for the forums would be great.  Having a server as an option for members (and the attached fish club) would be awesome as well.

Happy to help, as always with anything I can.

Welcome to the forums @BillyJBryant!

[Guppysnail]

@Zenzo @Streetwise

[TimHipp]

Soooo this is a great idea! As a long time gamer, hobbyist  of modding, 3d modeling, physics and gaining knowledge from others online to learn all this, discord has been a great platform for this or to just hang out with people.  I have friends i have known for years and years threw discord and gaming. Live text chat, Live voice chat, Live video feed.  I was about to make a post about a discord and found this thread.  We 100% need a discord channel!!! 

[Maximus]

I support the idea, but I do have concerns around message retention. I'm not experienced running discord servers, but if messages get culled after a year (or whatever it may be), then that somewhat goes against the idea of trying to make this community more of a long-lived knowledge base.

[Reformed1133]

I would love to have a place where people actually use VC. Most fish discords are just text. 

[mrPickles]

I'm on a bunch of different Discords, but I wouldn't say I'm a fan. Their app runs like crap and I worry about their free model going away since they've taken so much VC money. Also, message retention and searchability aren't as good as a forum. I assume Cory is running Flarum or something similar as the forum software, therefore has more control.

[Cory]

4 hours ago, mrPickles said:

I'm on a bunch of different Discords, but I wouldn't say I'm a fan. Their app runs like crap and I worry about their free model going away since they've taken so much VC money. Also, message retention and searchability aren't as good as a forum. I assume Cory is running Flarum or something similar as the forum software, therefore has more control.

While I use discord for gaming. I don't think it's great for information honestly. I also don't think slack is amazing either. Add in barriers with apps to use them and you'll lose 50% of people right off the bat. I do believe a forum while people have to get over the "ugh" factor and actually come to a forum daily. Is the best. I know you can highly mod discord to do what you want, but you can highly mod a forum as well 😉 

[Lonkley]

Honestly it's an audience demographic thing. Older will feel more comfortable on a forum. Younger on discord, and even then, most people don't know what either is.

 

Even that, discord is getting long in the tooth, wouldn't be surprised if something new is not far off.

 

Retention, I've never seen anything age out of discord short of deleting the channel. I have channels going back 6 or 7 years on a free plan let alone paid. Searchability is really horrific though. Discord is a conversation, not a library.

 

There's already Facebook and here, and truthfully Facebook seems to get more moderation. Adding another, well que xkcd 927.

 

Me, I'm too antisocial for voice chat until I'm comfortable with people. Then I won't shut up.

[Lonkley]

Another thing, from a business point of view, there's a record to conversations.. voice chat would be a nightmare for business. Almost worse because pretty sure you could record channels if you had infinite space

[Surreal]

I really do wish ACO had a discord! The reasons for not having one are totally valid, but I think it would be a cool experiment to see if a discord community could work out. I am really not a fan of the other aquarium discords I've been a part of.

 

On 11/28/2024 at 9:10 PM, Maximus said:

I support the idea, but I do have concerns around message retention. I'm not experienced running discord servers, but if messages get culled after a year (or whatever it may be), then that somewhat goes against the idea of trying to make this community more of a long-lived knowledge base.

Not sure if there is any difference between between larger discord servers and the smaller ones, but I've had a discord server with a group of my friends since 2016 and all of the messages are still there. I think any sort of message culling would come from the moderation team of the discord.

 

On 11/29/2024 at 1:05 PM, Cory said:

While I use discord for gaming. I don't think it's great for information honestly. I also don't think slack is amazing either. Add in barriers with apps to use them and you'll lose 50% of people right off the bat. I do believe a forum while people have to get over the "ugh" factor and actually come to a forum daily. Is the best. I know you can highly mod discord to do what you want, but you can highly mod a forum as well 😉 

I do agree that forums are way better for spreading information, but discord in my mind serves its own purpose of just providing a simple chatroom for people in the hobby. Just a way to get to know other hobbyists on a more casual level.

[TimHipp]

so i have been apart of forums and discord for about a decade and i can say they both have a place.  Discord is great for the now and talking in the moment. forums are great for keeping records and keeping convo on the same subject and being able to look back.   i could just imagine a chat going with like 5 people live streaming there tanks or talking real time over problems and subjects. those subject could then be brought into the forum for more in depth talk as more of a collective to reach those people who where not there for that conversation. 

Edited Saturday at 09:45 PM by TimHipp

[TheFishCellar]

In my experience, I went to a good number of discord servers (big and small) about fish keeping and sadly there's always the same problem : people doesn't or rarely answers.

I promise you that 8 time out of 10 when I would ask for help or advices, I would not get any messages and if so, sometimes weeks after the questions. I've got some answers on Reddit, but the best and the most consistent ones to be answered were on this forum. I believe it is the thread aspect of forums maybe that does the trick, it is easier to answer. On Discord, your questions can get lost in the waves of messages that get sent in a channel. I believe people on Discord are more there to talk and make friends than to help eachother on the server's topic. Fish keeping discord servers were always a pretty big irritation for me because of the lack of answers (even when I'd ask in the good channel and there wasn't any conversation going on.) But maybe this forum's community is just better ! 🙂

[ArthurLK11]

I don't see any benefit. What can be done on Discord that can't already be done here?

[Basrive]

A discord would be fun to just say hello in, but the quality of discussion would drop significantly. The threads feature is nowhere close to as useful as a subforum, and you could only realistically pull active users from the forums. Certainly do not want a discoverable Co Op server.