The Pulse: Community Catch Up | 2WC 16 Oct

[Doctor Internet]

Hello hello, my apologies for the delay in this Pulse, we've moved the forums to a new server across the weekend and today, so we're no longer paying exorbitant amounts for hardware.

For CityRP, we've had nothing new merged, but we have 3 new pull requests opened, closing some minor bugs.
We've also had more work on the inventory refactor.

For the Forums, we've updated the forum version, fixed a couple of bugs (such as blanking any post with images), and as I said prior, moved to new hardware.

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Overall, we've had 25k lines changed over 95 files in 10 commits by 3 authors.

[Rossi]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

[Doctor Internet]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

An interesting and important question. Let’s go over it.

• Firstly, the forums don’t really cost extra to run. We need to run our admin and game panels, so having the forums alongside that isn’t really a big issue cost-wise.
  
• Secondly, there’s a huge amount of history on the forums, going back so many years, we wouldn’t want to just delete that.
  
• Lastly, we’ve seen that discord doesn’t really work well for longer-lasting “discussions”, such as suggestions, bug or appeals.
  

With all of this, we wouldn't really be able to integrate a discord to the same level, we'd still need a site for a variety of things, ban listings, changelogs, steamid looks, character / dupes management.

[Rossi]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

An interesting and important question. Let’s go over it.

• Firstly, the forums don’t really cost extra to run. We need to run our admin and game panels, so having the forums alongside that isn’t really a big issue cost-wise.
  
• Secondly, there’s a huge amount of history on the forums, going back so many years, we wouldn’t want to just delete that.
  
• Lastly, we’ve seen that discord doesn’t really work well for longer-lasting “discussions”, such as suggestions, bug or appeals.
  

With all of this, we wouldn't really be able to integrate a discord to the same level, we'd still need a site for a variety of things, ban listings, changelogs, steamid looks, character / dupes management.

Fair enough. So what would be the benefit of using the forums as opposed to Discord?  

They're two different platforms intended for player interaction. It's essentially splitting up the community into the ones who love to use the forums and the ones who will only use Discord. You have discussions on both platforms. 

I remember when the lowering player count was an issue in the community, and the solution was to remove a server and have everyone on one which caused an increase for a period of time. Why not do the same thing now? Don't delete the website or Discord, but make one or the other very limited so there is a clear option on what to use for everyday use, and what is only for essential items.

[Doctor Internet]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

An interesting and important question. Let’s go over it.

• Firstly, the forums don’t really cost extra to run. We need to run our admin and game panels, so having the forums alongside that isn’t really a big issue cost-wise.
  
• Secondly, there’s a huge amount of history on the forums, going back so many years, we wouldn’t want to just delete that.
  
• Lastly, we’ve seen that discord doesn’t really work well for longer-lasting “discussions”, such as suggestions, bug or appeals.
  

With all of this, we wouldn't really be able to integrate a discord to the same level, we'd still need a site for a variety of things, ban listings, changelogs, steamid looks, character / dupes management.

Fair enough. So what would be the benefit of using the forums as opposed to Discord?  

They're two different platforms intended for player interaction. It's essentially splitting up the community into the ones who love to use the forums and the ones who will only use Discord. You have discussions on both platforms. 

I remember when the lowering player count was an issue in the community, and the solution was to remove a server and have everyone on one which caused an increase for a period of time. Why not do the same thing now? Don't delete the website or Discord, but make one or the other very limited so there is a clear option on what to use for everyday use, and what is only for essential items.

It is. Announcements, Suggestions, Bug Reports, Discussions, Appeals, etc etc are all on the forums. Discord only has a general channel, and a couple of off-topic channels.

[Rowan13]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

An interesting and important question. Let’s go over it.

• Firstly, the forums don’t really cost extra to run. We need to run our admin and game panels, so having the forums alongside that isn’t really a big issue cost-wise.
  
• Secondly, there’s a huge amount of history on the forums, going back so many years, we wouldn’t want to just delete that.
  
• Lastly, we’ve seen that discord doesn’t really work well for longer-lasting “discussions”, such as suggestions, bug or appeals.
  

With all of this, we wouldn't really be able to integrate a discord to the same level, we'd still need a site for a variety of things, ban listings, changelogs, steamid looks, character / dupes management.

Fair enough. So what would be the benefit of using the forums as opposed to Discord?  

They're two different platforms intended for player interaction. It's essentially splitting up the community into the ones who love to use the forums and the ones who will only use Discord. You have discussions on both platforms. 

I remember when the lowering player count was an issue in the community, and the solution was to remove a server and have everyone on one which caused an increase for a period of time. Why not do the same thing now? Don't delete the website or Discord, but make one or the other very limited so there is a clear option on what to use for everyday use, and what is only for essential items.

Discord as a million limitations that forums simply do not have.
Fearless owns their forums. Discord is a 3rd party chat/voip platform. FL is able to format and moderate its content however they wish to without the hassle and dangers of someone else's brand/corporate interests hanging over their head. Discord accounts and servers can be terminated for a great number reasons, which endangers FL's sovereignty as an organic community that has in the past succeeded just fine without giving away its balls to someone else to hold. 

There are 15 years worth of history and content, as well as account profiles and their post history, interaction history, and so on. Users who use Discord extensively may use it for business or many other personal endeavors. Here, in the FL forums, accounts are made specifically to partake in- and contribute to- the FL community exclusively. Not only does this allow users to partition their online time and online images/personas to their liking, but also offers the community a healthy degree of separation and independence from the pseudo-social-media character that Discord holds to a sizeable chunk to its userbase. 

Historically speaking, FL has never needed a 3rd party chat platform. Well before Discord the FL users resorted to Ventrillo, Teamspeak, and Skype- which, by the way, didn't harbor anywhere near as many problems as Discord or Discord-like platforms tend to offer nowdays. Those avenues more resembled the wild west in regards to moderation and restriction, and were by their very nature a more decentralized- and therefore more sovereign and secure- means to gather and talk shit, organize, etc.  That served FL's interests as a dynamic, living, breathing community, in the long run.

Wanting to move to Discord just because "everyone uses it" is reflexive and ignorant at best, and positively destructive & restrictive at worst. I am very happy to see that the current Administration of Fearless has shown no particular interest in such suicidal trends.

[Haarek]

I am very happy to see that the current Administration of Fearless has shown no particular interest in such suicidal trends.

Doctor Internet genuinely holding it all together.

[Rossi]

I've always loved the forums, however, is there a point in using this anymore?

I know scripts are used or hooks that tie some functions to them or something like that. I feel the old gaming community relied heavily on a website, but now everyone uses discord.

Why spend money to keep this running rather than a seriously integrated discord that can mimic a website?

An interesting and important question. Let’s go over it.

• Firstly, the forums don’t really cost extra to run. We need to run our admin and game panels, so having the forums alongside that isn’t really a big issue cost-wise.
  
• Secondly, there’s a huge amount of history on the forums, going back so many years, we wouldn’t want to just delete that.
  
• Lastly, we’ve seen that discord doesn’t really work well for longer-lasting “discussions”, such as suggestions, bug or appeals.
  

With all of this, we wouldn't really be able to integrate a discord to the same level, we'd still need a site for a variety of things, ban listings, changelogs, steamid looks, character / dupes management.

Fair enough. So what would be the benefit of using the forums as opposed to Discord?  

They're two different platforms intended for player interaction. It's essentially splitting up the community into the ones who love to use the forums and the ones who will only use Discord. You have discussions on both platforms. 

I remember when the lowering player count was an issue in the community, and the solution was to remove a server and have everyone on one which caused an increase for a period of time. Why not do the same thing now? Don't delete the website or Discord, but make one or the other very limited so there is a clear option on what to use for everyday use, and what is only for essential items.

Discord as a million limitations that forums simply do not have.
Fearless owns their forums. Discord is a 3rd party chat/voip platform. FL is able to format and moderate its content however they wish to without the hassle and dangers of someone else's brand/corporate interests hanging over their head. Discord accounts and servers can be terminated for a great number reasons, which endangers FL's sovereignty as an organic community that has in the past succeeded just fine without giving away its balls to someone else to hold. 

There are 15 years worth of history and content, as well as account profiles and their post history, interaction history, and so on. Users who use Discord extensively may use it for business or many other personal endeavors. Here, in the FL forums, accounts are made specifically to partake in- and contribute to- the FL community exclusively. Not only does this allow users to partition their online time and online images/personas to their liking, but also offers the community a healthy degree of separation and independence from the pseudo-social-media character that Discord holds to a sizeable chunk to its userbase. 

Historically speaking, FL has never needed a 3rd party chat platform. Well before Discord the FL users resorted to Ventrillo, Teamspeak, and Skype- which, by the way, didn't harbor anywhere near as many problems as Discord or Discord-like platforms tend to offer nowdays. Those avenues more resembled the wild west in regards to moderation and restriction, and were by their very nature a more decentralized- and therefore more sovereign and secure- means to gather and talk shit, organize, etc.  That served FL's interests as a dynamic, living, breathing community, in the long run.

Wanting to move to Discord just because "everyone uses it" is reflexive and ignorant at best, and positively destructive & restrictive at worst. I am very happy to see that the current Administration of Fearless has shown no particular interest in such suicidal trends.

“Suicidal trends” ? As opposed to what? The community is dead, with very few forum members logging in and participating actively. Can’t fall down more when you’re already at the bottom. 

Can’t think of one scenario where big bad corporate discord inflicted on the operations of a CityRP community. Even if they have, there’s a reason I suggested not deleting either but making one more limited. 

Simply stating. The socializing aspect on the forums could go. If you want discussions and player interaction, leave it to discord as it’s done best, and yes, everyone uses it. Does that make me ignorant again? Oops. Leave the formal stuff (Applications, ban appeals, donations, and suggestions). Or don’t and keep it the same, doesn’t matter to me. Just voicing an opinion to consider. 

Gmod had 18,678 average players in October 2023. That’s the lowest numbers since December 2013. Just something to think about when trying to populate a forum website to a new generation of kids who use discord for everything they do.

[Pollux]

Gmod had 18,678 average players in October 2023. That’s the lowest numbers since December 2013. Just something to think about when trying to populate a forum website to a new generation of kids who use discord for everything they do.

Not too involved with the discord/forum debate, but I feel like this is slightly misleading towards the "gmod is dead" narrative. While the figure is correct, it isn't significantly different to previous. There was a drop at the end of summer, but there was also a large increase at the start. This is likely due to summer holidays, and is normal from what I can see. Average isn't even too important for us as the NA gmod population is significantly less than EU which isn't reflective of FLs target playerbase. FL has always primarily targeted EU players, so we can ignore the NA dip. While the hour-by-hour tracking is limited to the past few days, there's a clear trend of a strong EU peak followed by a large dip into US peak hours. Gmod is not as popular as it used to be, but it still gets more players than most other games.

Source: https://steamdb.info/app/4000/charts/

Either way I don't think what we use (forums or discord) matters too much as we have both options available. Things such as player reports and applications aren't well suited for discord, even communities that primarily use discord tend to have some other platform or system for these things such as google forms. There is definitely quite a bit more friction when it comes to the forums vs discord and that is likely why discord has slowly replaced it for more and more things; we allow steam logins but there's no much else we can do if people simply prefer the more convenient platform. I think the way we've used both platforms (forums for longer/formal stuff, discord for pings/quick stuff) is fine as the choice is up to players. You can definitely get away with only being on one platform if you wanted, as most things are posted on both. I know there have been plans recently to streamline the forums even more, with some categories already being removed/replaced due to inactivity (for example, we removed hobbies and a few other sections as they were never really used). For any further changes, we'll likely just monitor how both are being used and adjust accordingly. There isn't really any useful data we can get right now, as both inactive due to the server being down.

[Haarek]

Whenever I used Discord it felt like the person who refused to stop the discussion always "won".
The discussion is just lost and the text medium makes it hard to follow along with arguments or conversations.

If the staff team used the forum more instead of texting on Discord maybe they would actually start getting stuff done.
Oh, but we can't have that. Besides, peoples attention span nowadays is so low; forcing the staff to read a forum thread is the equivalent of torture.