Discord now requires age verification, and why you should reconsider the age-old forum

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> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.

Thanks for commenting! I'd love to hear more about what kind of individualized support features Discord offered.

I am not a Discord power user, so I think many of the bot enhancements and customizations I am not at all familiar with.

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So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.

But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.

As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.

(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)

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@hemiechinuss ah! You're talking about nodebb-plugin-support-forum!

If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.

When you say...

> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community

What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

I'd want to make some inroads into providing something like this for NodeBB admins as well.

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Yes, that's the one. I would love for that to still be supported. It would meet my needs perfectly.

> @julian said:
>
> What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

The documentation was ok, it was decent enough if you wanted to create your own bots and webhooks. They did onboarding well. Agreeing to rules, prompting new users to visit a spot and post there, etc.

For community admin it doesn't really offer much more than NodeBB other than being more flexible in its capacity to service more types of community. Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.

One-on-one contact points were definitely a plus. Allowing individual users permissions to specific channels and threads was a really useful feature that I used a lot.

While it does lean on bots and webhooks for functionality, it is really easy to set up whatever you need on Discord and there are significantly less plugins on NodeBB that offer the same functionality that the various bots provide over on Discord. What I think is the biggest sore spot here is automation. Discord had a lot of that.

To be fair though I've only been using NodeBB this last week and I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. I'm really new to this specific forum software.

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I'm looking back on Discord though and really there were a few things I can say were easier for me over there knowing what little I do about NodeBB so far.

Automation - a lot of functions were automated by bots and webhooks
Permissions - permissions were a lot more flexible over there which allowed for more control
Support - as we talked about the capacity to provide support to individual users was better
Events - being able to easily push events to the community was nice I'm not sure if that functionality exists in NodeBB but Discord allows you to put a banner up on your server announcing an event
Onboarding - onboarding was quite nice to have with presenting users a list of rules, places to visit, and permissions based on answers they provided in a questionnaire
Announcements - announcements had a dedicated spot and could easily be pushed to either part of or the entire community where it was quite visible

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> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.

Oh actually NodeBB has fine-grained privileges. You're able to restrict categories by posting or viewing privileges. Privileges can be applied to user groups and individual users.

All of this is handled at the admin level in the admin control panel.

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I did not know it could be done individually. That's very useful.

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> @julian said:
>
> If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.

Would this be something you'd be willing to do? I would be really grateful.

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@hemiechinuss since it's my plugin at least it's easier to do. I'll make a point of looking into it Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday)

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Thank you so much!

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@julian NodeBB obviously doesn't have the full functionality of Discord, but unlike other federated solutions, it also has an excellent chat.
The problem, however, is that Discord users want Discord precisely because it's centralized and because its users suffer from Stockholm syndrome.
Discord users would probably only replace it if they found something worse, with stricter Terms of Service and more AI.

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I don't think that's really a helpful argument to make. I have expressed already a few reasons why they might be unwilling to make the change. However, I'll provide more:

Cost - Discord is free to host a community on.
Setup - You create a new community by pressing a few buttons this is preferable for people with little to no knowledge of self-hosting (You can pay for it but that's an additional cost and still not as simple as Discord makes it).
Data - You're not responsible for data handling on Discord such as PII.
Compliance - It's Discord's job to be compliant with certain laws and not yours as a user or even the operator of a community.
Volume - Discord took over and now it's safe to assume that most people are there or are willing to join it in order to interact with your community if that wasn't the case then it wouldn't have been adopted by companies like bohemia or jagex. This is exactly why we're in this position now because everyone from small projects, to youtubers, to large companies all spoke the same words "join our discord".

Yes, centralisation is a factor in it. But not in the way you present it. Discord has text chat, voice chat, private chat, group chats, video streaming, stages, threads, subscribing to channels on other servers, service integrations, bots for just about everything you could want, and webhooks, among a wide range of other features that make it king in this space. It's an unfortunate reality that a company such as Discord got such a large grip on this space because it is the best at what it does.

But you're talking about the users having stockholm syndrome not community operators. There obviously will be a lot of users unwilling to give up on the communities that they are a part of or the friends that they communicate with solely on Discord. Everyone is there and walking away from connections you've built over potentially years is difficult. The user is not at fault for this.

Users have the capacity to find other means to communicate with their friends on an individual level. One-on-one is easy. But what about a group of friends? Now it gets more difficult. What options are there? Plenty. The difficulty is meeting the needs of the group. Now you're back in corporate territory where they have the capacity to provide features that meet a group's needs and you're back where you started.

And on the communal level? The onus is on community operators to provide suitable alternatives that minimally impact the user. The user can't be blamed for community operators being unable or unwilling to move platform. They could create their own but they lose everything they had. Most importantly they lose the connections. And that's the killer, connections. It's what makes monopolies out of these companies like Discord.

Don't get me wrong I was around when forums were king and I'd prefer it that way but this is the reality of the situation. Forums are more difficult to setup, maintain, with less broad features, and a starting price that's not free. I see so many people celebrating this as a victory and that are hopeful for the return of forums but in this space forums no longer fulfill the needs of the user or the host in most situations. You could set up multiple seperate platforms in order to achieve this but that adds the need to spend more time, effort, and money to maintain as well as demanding moderation for now at least two seperate platforms. And again, most importantly, you lose the connections. You have to start all over again while trying to convince others that they won't be impacted by the change (which is just not true).

The issue is incredibly complex. I've said all this and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the complexity of the situation. And we are powerless observers to this change. We can have an impact in our own space but in the scheme of things it's insignificant. People will move to the platform that meets their needs, or they will stay where they are. The reality is that it will almost certainly be a corporate owned software because they have the means to provide the service. That is not the users fault they are as powerless as we are to effect change in this situation.

As for me, my community is slowly migrating away from Discord as we find and set up suitable alternatives but it's a difficult, time consuming, and slow process. That's why I'm here now. NodeBB seems a suitable solution to one of many problems we're facing. But we're looking at a multi-platform solution because there just aren't suitable solutions that meet all our needs in one place. Adding to the complexity of our situation. Alongside that, there are communities that I'm a part of that have decided they're staying on Discord so I have to also decide whether I'm willing to give up on them entirely. It's not an easy decision to make.

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@hemiechinuss I've updated the support-forum plugin for v4 compatibility, it didn't need much, just a light ACP page refresh.

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thank you so much

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It works! does the permissions also allow Global Moderators to see the posts or not?

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I still miss a deep integration with something like wordpress. keeps holding me back.

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@hemiechinuss v4.1.0 does, now.

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Discord now requires age verification, and why you should reconsider the age-old forum