Hi everyone,
Welcome to the new Discourse forums. We’ve been working on customizing and tweaking this Community to give you maximum features and conversational opportunities.
We’re still tweaking things, and if you have any suggestions, please feel free to reply to this topic.
Short Version
- It was a difficult decision to move away from Discord. But privacy and safety issues made it necessary.
- The new forums have both classic topics and live chat, so you will still get to enjoy a Discord-like experience whenever you want, while also having access to longer conversations.
- The nature of the forums will allow for the QuadSpinner Staff to interact frequently, unlike Discord which would get overwhelming timewise. We’d rather be writing new code for you!
- See Gaea Community Features - Run as app, Discord-style chats, and more
Longer Version
The most important part was the new privacy concerns over Discord’s new Face ID, privacy leaks, and all the ugly stuff attached to it. We know many of you were unhappy with our decision and we truly wish we could keep the Discord Server open without security or ethical risks, but it just wasn’t possible.
The second part was the constant-flow nature of Discord. As a chat, it kept moving on and if you were busy for a while, it could become difficult to catch up. Important answers get buried, repeated, and are hard to discover later—especially for people who can’t be online all the time.
It was also quite difficult to serious, long-term conversations about a specific feature or something else.
With the forums, we can have bookmarked topics, pinned conversations, more elegantly described and presented resources, file and image sharing in a new consistent way (including a new WIP Feedback gallery to get suggestions and critique from your peers!).
Live Chat
You’ll find a little chat icon in the top right of the window. Explore it a bit. The UX may not be as powerful as Discord, but all your common features are present. You can have public conversations in the channels, private DMs to individuals or to a group of your friends and keep interacting in a familiar way.
You can even convert chat messages into a new forum topic.
More Features
Additional community features we’ll actively use:
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Run the forum as an app (via your browser) with desktop notifications
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Push notifications
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Gallery and User Portfolios on your profile (just tag your post with
portfolio) -
Polls, topic voting, and user contributed solutions.
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Bookmarks to save posts as reminders
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Solutions for Help/Feedback threads: mark the best reply, highlight it, and track issue state with tags like
backlog,investigation,development,fixed -
Email Digests for those who want to catch up on the hot topics of the week.
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See Gaea Community Features - Run as app, Discord-style chats, and more