Why is tower chat still IRC?

[Jaryd Kosari]

Something to add to the Discord commentary:

If you represent a 501(c) non-profit, we automatically partner you as well because you rock. For verification, include your EIN.

This would mean personalized server imagery, better voice chat services, fun badges, a hoodie to give to someone, and access to other premium features.


Did I mention it's free to use as well as ad-free, synced across every known computer/phone platform, and can be customized on a personal and server level to a completely ridiculous degree? Plus, in the almost year I've been using it, downtime has been absolutely minimal.

I realize this is basically beating a dead horse, but....*shrug* In terms of features and flexibility Discord cannot be beat.


/rolls way

 

[Jeryn Lekar]

*Smug face* It's dodgy now and IRC isn't. ;D

 

[Jaryd Kosari]

Irony abounds.

Given I have seen ONE major outage in a year of constant usage, however, that's...pretty phenomenal.

 

[Mejjad Martnandi]

I wouldn't mind if we got Discord. I'll still stay around on IRC though. But Discord sounds fun.

 

[Ty al'Djinn]

*Smug face* It's dodgy now and IRC isn't. ;D

Our irc server is blacklisted at the moment...

 

[Elania al'Manir]

No, just the web client we chose to use, and they're working on getting it un-listed. The sorcery.net server is still accessible by other means, like IRC Cloud or mIRC.

 

[Ty al'Djinn]

It's still a mark against it

 

[Jaryd Kosari]

The entire point of Discord is that you don't have to have a half a million clients in order to allow everyone to access it. You have one client, that syncs across every device you install it on...and that *one* client has had *one* major outage (defined as: I could not access my server for more than an hour) that I am aware of since last February. :P

You also don't have to worry about getting banned because someone else was a bad person and you got caught up in their net.


You also don't have to remember a server name, or chatroom names, or random obscure commands. You just register an account, click a link, and voila.

 

[Jeryn Lekar]

or random obscure commands. You just register an account, click a link, and voila.

Now, now. 'Obscure' commands is what makes Discord fun. Text to Speech. :shifty

 

[Jaryd Kosari]

I have a friend who "listens" to chat with text to speech and he periodically cracks up at how it reads the emojis. :P

 

[Mendo Cath]

/tts wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub

 

[Jeryn Lekar]

/tts wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub wub

<3

Writing things in Swedish makes it rather funny, too.

 

[Zandera Sommers]

I am all for Discord. Would be OK with both Discord and IRC. I'm sad to see that there is no voice option. I've long wanted a more Tower-based arena for voice chat for gaming purposes and just hanging. It's a function that completely does not exist for the Tower for those of us who game daily and are fans of voice chat.

 

[Elania al'Manir]

I think a voice chat would be great, but I do understand the issue of moderation. Would it be possible to have one with a warning that there's no active moderation, so enter at your own risk? Or maybe someone could set up an unofficial voice server somewhere.

 

[Ty al'Djinn]

Moderating voice chat isn't hard. I don't know why we make out like it is.

 

[Elania al'Manir]

Because someone has to be in there all the time and listening. With chat, we tend to have mods who can occasionally go AFK but are available if someone mentions or messages them. Plus, there are logs of everything that's said.

 

[Jaryd Kosari]

I don't understand the hang up around voice chat, either. Mods do not have to be present 24/7 by any means and our average user base is 25-35- more than old enough to be honest about a verbal confrontation if need be (and that's assuming there are no witnesses for said confrontation).
Plus...in my experience people tend to be LESS dickish in voice chat* than they are in text chat. There's a different level of personal contact there, you know? AND....also in my experience, people tend to go in droves. Very few people enjoy being the one who initiates a VC session, so it can go for long periods without any activity at all, then spike, then drop again.


*This applies to communities only. MMO are an ENTIRELY different animal.

 

[Ty al'Djinn]

Indeed. There's almost never just two people in a voice chat.

I don't think we'd be any more likely to need to moderate voice chat than we are to need to moderate our RL gatherings.

That said, I think the voice channel would need to be something that is free of the "no profanity" rule, for obvious reasons.

 

[Elania al'Manir]

If I were using it to game, I'd probably slip up a few times.

 

[Ty al'Djinn]

It'd probably be the hang out for people gaming, yeah.