Pending Remove the Discord #suggestions channel

i agree because it means i made the post that ended the channel but i disagree because that post wasnt worth making a forums post so it proved the channels purpose of an informal quick place to put small suggestions

+0

You listed all the strong arguments and I can't think of any downsides really, +1

Honestly, I'd be inclined to agree.
There is something that I think has not been pointed out, and that is pacing.


Suggestions on the forums are always quite slow to pick up traction with few exceptions, as that's just...the nature of forums. It's not fast and it's hard to have a proper conversation.

I think Discord has a specific edge here where it's a bit easier to just chat away on a suggestion for a while, if it's possible.

Neutral.

I support this, we did this on AHG and it made it much easier to triage and track suggestions

Agent Knockout said:

Honestly, I'd be inclined to agree.
There is something that I think has not been pointed out, and that is pacing.


Suggestions on the forums are always quite slow to pick up traction with few exceptions, as that's just...the nature of forums. It's not fast and it's hard to have a proper conversation.

I think Discord has a specific edge here where it's a bit easier to just chat away on a suggestion for a while, if it's possible.

Neutral.

Click to expand...

One problem is the Discord suggestions channel has no guidelines and no ability to create threads. People use it for suggestions of every nature. And because we can't create a thread for a suggestion, that "chatting away a suggestion" is quite literal. The more we chat, the more the suggestion gets buried.

I think both methods have flaws. I have mentioned before especially with things like playermodels, music and jihad sounds that the amount of feedback and votes those threads get are not reflective of the entire community, just the handful of forum regulars, and therefore its really hard to gauge the communities interest on most suggestions unless they are the rare suggestion that gains a lot of positive or negative traction where we can easily go "oh this is a good / bad one."

That said, the discord suggestions subforum on the website is completely dead. I think what should happen is that the suggestions channel on discord should be mainly focused on discord related suggestions; like community event ideas, channel suggestions and emotes. All other suggestions should be on the forums where they can easily be tracked, and if more feedback is needed for a suggestion we have other methods of getting it

CelDamage said:

[...] especially with things like playermodels, music and jihad sounds that the amount of feedback and votes those threads get are not reflective of the entire community, just the handful of forum regulars, and therefore its really hard to gauge the communities interest on most suggestions [...]

Click to expand...

A problem that we can help solve by pushing Discord users into the forums and encouraging forum engagement. This kind of brings up a secondary suggestion that I think might drive more engagement - what if we lock the Discord #suggestions channel and instead turn it into a feed of each new suggestion in any of the suggestions subforums? This would help drive engagement to the forums while still reminding those that don't check the forums of suggestions and giving them the opportunity to chime in.

CelDamage said:

That said, the discord suggestions subforum on the website is completely dead.

Click to expand...

I didn't even know we had a suggestions subforum for Discord suggestions, I had honestly thought that the #suggestions channel on Discord was the only place to make Discord suggestions until I checked.

The Discord #suggestions channel drives engagement away from the forums and contributes to the issue of being "completely dead".

CelDamage said:

[...] that the suggestions channel on discord should be mainly focused on discord related suggestions; like community event ideas, [...]

Click to expand...

I think our new community manager @Elvis should probably handle where community event suggestions should go.

CelDamage said:

[...] channel suggestions and emotes.

Click to expand...

Scrolling up to the start of history in #suggestions I see that it was originally used for this back before the forums and at the inception of the Discord. Going back to recent history and scrolling, the most recent channel suggestion is from a couple months ago. Aside from that there are alot of people using the channel to make TTT suggestions. Some people linking to their forum suggestion (good for them!) and alot of offtopic discussion.

Big +1. I feel like it might send the wrong message about the fact that it is the only place for suggestions, when in fact it should only be for Discord-related ones.

It also lacks meaningful organization; at the very least, it should be converted to a Discord "forum" channel which would let ideas be categorized, voted on, and closed out.

Zikeji said:

A problem that we can help solve by pushing Discord users into the forums and encouraging forum engagement. This kind of brings up a secondary suggestion that I think might drive more engagement - what if we lock the Discord #suggestions channel and instead turn it into a feed of each new suggestion in any of the suggestions subforums? This would help drive engagement to the forums while still reminding those that don't check the forums of suggestions and giving them the opportunity to chime in.

Click to expand...

I like this. The main thing holding me off +1ing this is that a significant portion of our discord users are not on the forums and would miss a chance of having a spot to interact with suggestions/give them. I think a fantastic middleground is keeping it visible so it isn't missed by people but directing traffic here so we can keep track of suggestions and reactions clearly. Best of both worlds type shit

anna said:

I like this. The main thing holding me off +1ing this is that a significant portion of our discord users are not on the forums and would miss a chance of having a spot to interact with suggestions/give them. I think a fantastic middleground is keeping it visible so it isn't missed by people but directing traffic here so we can keep track of suggestions and reactions clearly. Best of both worlds type shit

Click to expand...

I'm good with rolling out some sort of feature to the forum to facilitate that - that or we can use the RSS feeds as well, using a bot that supports RSS feeds.

Agreed, the forum is more organized anyways.

anna said:

I like this. The main thing holding me off +1ing this is that a significant portion of our discord users are not on the forums and would miss a chance of having a spot to interact with suggestions/give them. I think a fantastic middleground is keeping it visible so it isn't missed by people but directing traffic here so we can keep track of suggestions and reactions clearly. Best of both worlds type shit

Click to expand...

That is the answer to this one, atleast to me. I would hesitate to take any kind of functionality out of Discord, when Discord is really the central point of our community right now. I think suggestions are one of the most natural ways we have to incentivize people to use the forums, and I generally value things that make our community/offerings “sticky” so as not to lose members.

There could be some sort of bridge where posts created in one are created in the other, but the issue would be how to handle Discord users without a forum account.

If we did it where they could only vote from Discord and they all needed to be created from the forum, that could solve some of the issues, but we'd need to enforce Discord account linking on the forum to avoid duplicate votes.

I just don't know if it would be worth that much effort to build a solution like this, given the complexity.