Maybe it’s time to reassess having both a forum and a discord. There’s some traffic between the two platforms, but it’s pretty minimal; mostly just a bot posting in a single Discord channel that doesn’t really seem to get much activity. It seems to me that the Cauldron is duplicating its efforts by running two platforms, and for relatively little reward. One platform gets the majority of the attention; the other gets a post or two per week. The community could make things easier on itself and free up some resources by closing one or the other.
And, sure, purely looking at current traffic alone, it looks like closing the Discourse forums would be the logical choice. But I’d like to make the argument in favor of throwing all our weight behind these forums.
The three big points in favor of Discourse are openness, organization and ownership.
Openness
Discord is a walled garden. Sure, anyone can make an account, and once they have an account, they can get to the Cauldron server and see whatever’s there. The walls really assert themselves the moment they want to show a Cauldron post to anyone who isn’t already subscribed. And that’s inconvenient to the people involved, but it also means that the Cauldron’s utility as a resource for the larger TTRPG community is severely limited. It means, among other things, that outside search never points you to anything on the server.
Discourse, on the other hand, is public-facing. If you want to show your GM a thread that explains a particular prep technique, you can just give them a link. They don’t have to sign up for Discord, you don’t have to invite them to the channel, they don’t have to wade through an endless stream of banter. The forum works better as a community resource that people can benefit from without having to buy into the platform.
Organization
Both Discord and Discourse let admins divide the server up into categories and topics, but the basic categorical unit in Discord is an endless chat thread. You can scroll back up as far as you’d like, but unless you’re really committed to finding something, or remember exact phrases well enough to wade into Discord’s search function, conversations effectively fade into oblivion the farther up the scroll they get pushed.
Threads divide conversations into more easily digestible units. Discord has options for threads, both as a sidebars to the infinite feed, and as a forum-like alternative to those feeds, but they’re implemented as an afterthought, and tend to get lost in the mix. Their centrality to Discourse makes the whole site easier to navigate if you’re looking for specific discussions that aren’t top-level categories.
As I see it, the biggest advantage to Discord over Discourse is that not all conversations need to be permanently archived walls of text and are better handled with IRC-style real-time chat. But Discourse offers chat channels, and Discourse-based chat has the advantage of integration with forum threads: If something valuable is said in a Discourse chat, the participants can surface and preserve it by quoting it in a thread. That seems like the more advantageous order of features to me: threads first, then chats, rather than the other way around.
Ownership
Discord is a closed, centralized, proprietary, corporation-owned platform. Depending on it to sustain our communities sets us up for the same sort of closure that dispersed the G+ community. Even if they never sunset the entire product, decisions about the platform will always be decided by first and foremost by their financial demands. It’s safe to expect them to routinely make changes that allow them to convert user activity into profit. (Their recent incorporation of AI, for example, may be driven in part by fear of seeming to lag behind the technological edge, but it’s almost certainly also designed to monetize communities by using their interactions to train AI models.) When it makes decisions that run counter to the good of one of the communities it hosts, the community’s options are a) take it, or b) leave it. And odds are good that communities will have to make that decision sooner or later. The longer they take it, the more times they’ll face that decision.
Discourse, by contrast, offers hosting and services, but also maintains a FOSS version for self-hosting. That makes it possible for the community to exercise greater control over the direction of the services on which the community operates.
For all of those reasons, I think the long term health of the Cauldron is better served by throwing its weight behind this Discourse forum rather than relying on Discord. Of course, I realize that making the argument for closing one or the other, I run the risk of convincing the admins to choose the other. But even if they decide to shift all their resources to the Discord, I think concentrating on one place or the other is probably better than dividing our efforts and resources only to see one of those platforms languish.
). I worry about using that site’s code directly, as I personally do not have the know-how to keep it running (not webmaster-savvy enough) and don’t know if anyone else does.