Discord as a Forum
Many developers and businesses already use Discord for their communication. However, as a timeline-oriented platform, useful messages move up the timeline and disappear causing questions to be asked over-and-over. This is fine for everyday messaging, but user FAQ's, user-feedback and bug reports tends to get lost.
It is easy to loose track of things, especially as servers get bigger:
- which feature was requested most?
- which bug was reported most?
- where to post a FAQ or announcement?
- what does the community want?
But now that Discord has released the "threaded messaging" feature, it would be very nice if selected conversations could be selected as useful and published to a webpage where they could be available for other users, similar to forum post:
- these ideas/bugs should be indexed by google (for others to find through google searches, SEO);
- the posts and answers could be upvoted/downvoted to show mods what their communities want/need most (like reddit or stackexchange)
- and the saved messages could be recommended to users by bot's whent hey ask similar questions in Discord (saving Mod's the time of answering FAQ over-and-over again)
Discord already has the best chat app out there, most developers already use it to stay in touch with their communities. Also, Discord has launched it’s own App Store which is in competition with Steam's game store which offers its developers a very basic forum. It feels only natural for Discord, who's main target is to handle communities and communication, to also offer mods a forum solution to help manage their communities.
It would be a full product covering:
- Default discord: A full solution for communities where small-talk, voice chat etc;
- A forum, FAQ, knowledge-base structure for gathering feedback (how many users have requested/suggested/reported something, reports etc) and for announcements;
- And the app-store for companies to sell their games/apps through.
And just as a bonus: can you imagine being able to use the power of Discord Bots to manage forum Communities?
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How has this gotten so little attention? I need a good way to have, and retain, discussions in a searchable forum-like experience in my community. Discord is great but also ephemeral: if I want long-term discussion or a sense of history, I have to fragment the community with any number of forum solutions. And so, I see servers with PHPBB forums, Discourse, reddit, or at best some bot which sorta solves the issue but not really.
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+1 to this idea. I would love a way to back up some data to a more permanent source.
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Thanks guys, i had completely forgotten about this submission since it never got any feedback xD
I think it didn't gain traction because I keep mentioning reddit, while it could be any forum solution or even a product owned by discord (which would be better).
Would love to see some more opinions here, this idea can probably be improved A LOT.
this could easily be sold at 50-100 USD per month for startups etc.
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this idea can probably be improved A LOT.
this could easily be sold at 50-100 USD per month for startups etc
Yes, it does sound like you're rather clueless about it. I'm talking about a tab in the app itself which would facilitate ongoing discussion forum-style. There are already bots that can integrate forum posts and similar into Discord.
It might be time to allow for a tab above the channel list that lets you switch between Chat and Forum style, should the server desire it. I think it would be fair to require a level 1 server boost for this.
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it does sound like you're rather clueless about it
re-wrote the text, hope it sounds better now.
It might be time to allow for a tab above the channel list that lets you switch between Chat and Forum style, should the server desire it. I think it would be fair to require a level 1 server boost for this.
It might not be that simple. Discord conversations in servers are only separated by channels, not by topics. But Discord already did the first step to support this, which is to allow users to reply to original messages. This is needed to know which chat message is related to which other "original post".
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Can someone suggest a better title for this post?
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I really need something like this so i can integrate discord with my clan gaming forum. Forums are a good resource but people are getting too lazy to post and are quite happy to throw things in discord. But to have them things thrown into discord then teleported to our forum would be the icing on the cake for discord to forums and forums to discord
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Hello, I am looking for a private forum solution and existing solutions are bad and don't meet my need. I think it is a powerful idea to integrate discord with a forum ! It would meet many needs of many private groups and communities.
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It would be a great addition, there is a soft called Guilded that does this and integrate many more, it would be perfect on Discord.
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Yessss guilded is a nice example! I am looking for a way to be in direct touch with customers/players/users (like on discord) while at the same time being able to "re-use" answers for repeated questions (like on a forum).
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Yes would love this
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On a side note I'm in favor of forums for the purpose of having that online society, to teach and learn from one another, to roasting one another, it's literally a whole new society and as much as some people hate or love it, everyone still does it and I say we should have a forum but the support section like this one should be separated from the public forums.
Just make it known to the public that any support questions and important messages are on here while we can have fun on there :)
That's my opinion and suggestion :)
Comniption
P.S. Gaming has been part of my life since I was 2 years old and I always loved the forums when I was 10 years and up. check out atwar's forums it's a great community lol
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Hey everyone, I'm a software developer and I'm curious if there is a solution here that I can build. I'm considering creating a tool to convert a discord channel into a forum website either as a one time conversion "snapshot" for SEO purposes or as a monthly service to periodically update the forums as new messages come in. Please let me know if you'd be interested in this and if so what are the specific features you'd like to see.
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JohnG that would be awesome maybe setup a trello board so you could create a roadmap
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JohnG that sounds good, I really think this could be a good product! A few thoughts:
It would be bad to convert EVERYTHING, since this would create spam and also because of user privacy: people don't want EVERYTHING they say on discord to be published.
It would be better to only convert the best/most-useful content. So you should check if you have access through the API to know:
- Which messages have replies (no sense publishing stuff that has no replies, normally);
- Which messages have reactions;
That way, you could make some formula that considers those 2 metrics and does something like:
- Messages that have above-average number of replies and/or reactions are automatically converted;
- And channel moderators can also select messages manually to be added to the forum (for example by copying the link to the message and posting in the platform);
- Messages are converted to a post, and every reply is also imported;
- Messages are posted into categories that have the same name as the channel they were posted into, and they can have custom 'tags' based on which reactions they got (moderators would have to configure this manually);
Personally, I think this should work like a "web version of discord" with extra features that make all of this easier. So users can chat/talk like normally but have extra stuff like:
- having access to forum content 'inside' discord (custom web version of discord, of course);
- when starting to write a new message, check if similar posts already exist in the forum and suggest them to the user, to help reduce support effort, reduce repeated questions in the channels and to help users find what they are looking for faster;
- right-click + convert to post feature, so that no one has to copy links manually to the forum. For moderators to use or for users to 'suggest' content to be converted to mods;
Does this direction make sense to you? what do the others in here think?
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Mr_Nobody thanks for the input and I agree with what you're saying. I thought their might be a forum tool in existence that could handle Importing the threads. I looked heavily into discourse and a little at a few other open source projects.
The more I think about this the more it seems like it will need to be it's own forum platform built from the ground up. I'll need to do more research before committing to such a big undertaking. But I'd love to get any feedback you can think of here. Also, for anyone that wants to see this happen please continue to like and comment to give me a sense of how much desire there is for this.
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I suppose I'm obligated to say I'm completely uninterested in paying for the service you describe, JohnG, and would much rather Discord just figures out how to have more permanent conversations built in to the service itself. By the time you're done building the 100th forum software no one wants to use, Discord will likely have figured it out.
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Thanks for letting me know Vael Victus. I hope they do figure it out as well but there may still may be a need for users to get their discord channels into a true online forum. Most likely there will be a free version of whatever I develop assuming I move forward with the project. I would love to hear what that free version should look like to you.
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Hello,
I'm wondering, have there anything been made?
Becouse i'm highly interested in forum options on discord.1 -
Mr_Nobody I have been thinking about this even before the threads feature rolled out and have thought maybe it would be easier to implement with Microsoft Teams. Now that Discord threads are released and I've poked around with them, I notice people won't always start a thread from when the conversation topic actually started which is annoying and confusing because it leaves out the original question/topic, and then I have to go hunt it down through replies. Because of this, there is definitely a need for a channel moderator to add the missing messages to the top of the thread which I don't even know if this is possible, just a necessary feature if it isn't. Problem with that being the need to have a moderator correct threads that have missing messages. That problem aside, let's imagine a thread is solid from the get go, I would like to see a button where either the thread creator or a moderator, or just simply an auto-create forum thread function occurs once a thread is created, and all replies auto-tracked to the corresponding forum thread.
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Mr_Nobody BTW, this conversation would probably get the correct attention if it was under "Text Chat" category and not the "Account and Server Management" category.
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A good idea. Perhaps it could be more easily done. A bot that traces all replies and arranges them in a timely manner and posts it to the desired forum.
Discourse could be alright. Or a button that just create a text file of the traced content with forming and post it in the wordpress page where comments are allowed.
Just my two cents. Awesome work so far, keep up!
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drwbns moved it, thanks for the suggestion.
Yes, the ability for the moderator to attach messages (or add a custom message to the top of the conversation, with a better phrased description) would be important.
And no matter the approach, I would not want EVERY thread to become a forum post, just the important ones.
I would also want discord to recommend existing similar threads when users start writing a new question, to get them to info sooner and avoid duplicate questions popping up over and over again.
Virulane Rando yes, this was posted before the threads feature existed. I will try to simplify the description.
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Updated the description to make things a bit shorter and adapt to the new "threaded conversations" feature.
Virulane Rando
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Went looking for options to tie a Forums platform to Discord with login and Discord privileges etc, found this. But something that occurred to me while I was looking, is why doesn't Discord *do* this itself.
- A new section of Discord, like channels and voice channels, for Posts.
- Instead of just chatting, initial entries in this section would be a "Post" which can exceed the 2000 character limit and be endlessly editable.
- All main entries would have to be a new post. No general 'chatting'.
- Replies to the post can be made, like threaded conversations.
- Initial view of the section would be simply the list of different Posts.
- Pinning would keep certain Posts at the top of the list.
It would eliminate any need to have an external platform for long-form posts, or any integration needs, and the privileges would all be there for use. Essentially a permanent form of 'threaded conversations only' but with a topmost longform post.
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Thanks for letting me in.
I am owner of intelcom tracking and i am here to learn new thing as i believe learning should never be stopped.-2 -
@perringaiden yes that was the reason i posted that here. the post got a bit side-tracked, but if the post got enough votes that would be the priority.
All you have to do to help is share the post so it gets more votes.
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You are saying right. Many communities of developers are using Discord. But my community is also using this community. We are discussing many problems.
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Unbelieveable great thread ever here may be your solution is here https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360060842052-Add-a-forum-channel-type-reviews
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Bonjour quelqu'un peut m'aider pour me connecter a mon compte sa m'affiche sa :
Est-que quelqu'un pourrais m'aider car j'ai besoin de Discord 😟😢
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