Do we need that separation?
I donāt mind either way. That particular part comes from the OP, so youād have to ask HumanSanity what their reasoning was for the separation.
Another bump. Iām curious to know what exactly is required before the reorganization is undertaken, and/or what else is needed from us.
Final proposal:
Other private channels for government institutions are left to their determination, and everything else outside of the government ought to be archived.
Bump.
Iām afraid I have no admin or mod privileges whatsoever in the server, so youāll need to ping Glen or someone else who does.
I guess Iāll give an obligatory grumble about #executive-planning 
but our Discord could use some revamping. Hoping the Discord moderation/administration team can see some value in this proposal!
Whatās the grumble about executive planning?
Oh, I missed that you cut a #government channel out of your proposal too. I just havenāt felt that the discussion weāve had in #executive-planning couldnāt take place in #government-discussion (or #government).
But honestly Iād also prefer we keep a general government discussion channel visible to all citizens, because not all government business is Assembly- or Cabinet-related. (For example if we decouple legislator status from voter eligibility, #government would be a natural place to discuss an election)
I might not have specified in that proposal but I saw executive-planning as the citizens-available channel, so to speak, but I can see the confusion in not just calling it government-discussion or government.
Some specific thoughts
- #nationstates-corner would be culled. Itās not dead, though not as active as #lampshade-bar and sometimes overlapping. I have mixed feelings about this but am okay with culling.
- #world-assembly and #card-trading are both dead and should be fine to archive. I can see the draw of having a cards channel when/if we have a cards program, but we can unarchive it then if the need arises.
- As I see it, in this proposal, #drama-llama-palooza and #games would in spirit go into #lampshade-bar. Thatās fine.
- #conlangs-and-linguistics would be culled. Thatās fine, I think. In my ideal world, the separate TSP RP server wouldnāt exist and weād have an additional channel or two on the main Discord which would cover conlang stuff too, but our RP people have refused this for years.
- #meme-island would be āmergedā into the new spam channel under this proposal. This is a bad idea, imho, because the spam channel has people doing all the !payday stuff, and we created a meme channel deliberately because those kept going on in other places, either being buried (when in coconut-grove) or being distracting (when elsewhere).
- What about #wa-updates? Itās still being used.
- #cake-tower is meant to spiritually merge into the government/citizens channel, I presume?
- Iām not going to get into the internal channels (court, Cabinet, CRS etc.) because honestly, those institutions should just tell us what they want and weāll accomodate.
So, long story short, this is fine imho sans #meme-island, but I can be convinced otherwise.
Iāve archived #world-assembly, #card-trading, and #coronavirus-pandemic now, since those are āobviousā. For the rest, Iāll wait for Henn/HS to reply to the above.
I donāt think itās fine . Nation corner is where they spam with Coco to check stats on their nations and other peoples nations. I donāt want that in lampshade. same with drama llama. And games - I donāt want that everywhere either.
Those channels get used. Leave them be.
#nationstates-corner would be wrapped into Lampshade Bar and Grill.
Yes to both.
We can have a discussion offline about this part in particular, but I broadly agree in spirit that we ought to have a category for them.
Mmm. Fair enough, I can see the utility in keeping these two as separate channels, but Iāll put in a brief plug about threads (and/or forums?) too.
#wa-updates turns into #world-assembly. Itās just a renaming of the channel for now.
Correct. Everything that goes into #cake-tower should go into #government.
At least for the Cabinet, Iāll discuss and get back to you on what in particular weāre requesting but I do think most of the channels I have access to can be archived off the bat.
That can go into #coconut-grove/spam, along with the rest of the majority of Coconutās command usage.
In this case, I can see the argument and/or use case for creating a forum or threads under channels so people can create threads and run with it while keeping the count of channels much smaller for everyone else.
The intent of this was to simplify our channel layout for the government side of things, and potentially curate the experience for non-govt things if thatās a direction youāre comfortable with taking. I donāt have any particulars on that, but letās discuss it with hopefully more people.
Honestly Iād want to keep #drama-llama-palooza. Maybe sometimes I want to share a song or fun video occasionally but Iām not a fan of dumping it in the main bar itself for any reason. Especially since people are free to ignore the separate channel if they wish. Plus itās just out of the blue to do this, like going into the main channel and sharing something. Itās just unexpected and random I feel like.
Also meme-island should be kept separate too imo. As for the bot channel, that should be were almost ALL bot commands are taken, including nation stats and the like. Obviously, this ignores when people leave behind their lampshade, so. Both of them being combined would mean that the meme posts would get buried under over 9000 bot commands.
NationStates Corner, I feel like this could be kept but indeed it ended up being where people spammed nation commands. Mixed feelings on this one and I lean slightly towards wanting to keep it, as there can be discussions within. But bot spam again goes where bot spam deserves to be (Coconut grove).
I donāt really care about any of the other channels outside of those so Iām not going to comment on them, and donāt care what happens with them either.
While I do support narrowing down the chat channels, this is not the way to do it. Iād keep #lampshade-lounge, #drama-llama-palooza, and #coconut-grove. Lampshade bar would get ns corner and current events, while drama llama palooza would receive games, conlangs (although preferably this would go to the conlanging channel in TSPRP) and linguistics, and meme island. Coconut grove would serve the same purpose as it does now. While it does sound nice to only have one main channel for chat, you can tell Glenās main motivation is to get people to come over and use the Lampshade Bar and Grill here on the forums. While that is a reasonable goal, itās much easier to spend an hour having a meaningful discussion about something instead of trying to use the forums over a much longer period of time to discuss something like itās the dark ages.
If #current-events was to make it, then Iād recommend keeping it as-is instead of having it become a general politics debate channel. NSG is there for that.
Glenās motivation is to get people to use the forums in general but especially the political side, since thatās how you can much more easily maintain clear records and institutional knowledge of the happenings of the government. Lampshade Bar forum posting is not my concern, although I would have liked to see that continue on from the previous forums.
Easier, sure, but at the cost of the thought process for long form posts and more in-depth deliberation that you might otherwise see accomplished through forum posting. Using a new and updated forum software is also not the dark ages. That would be something like email chains, hitting reply all constantly.
Iām not necessarily opposed to this, I guess, especially in consideration of Kotohaās earlier post.
Iāll make a plug here that Discordās community onboarding function, as well as ability to hide channels from your sidebar, make curating the non-government channels very easily accomplished if you put in the work to set that up and create the right set of channels. Thatās more Discord community development and not forum, though, and also dependent on the willingness of an admin/senior moderator to set it up right.
As a general note, most of these things are things that can be non-destructively trialed, so we could say āokay letās try nixing ns-cornerā and see how it works for 2 weeks, and if it sucks, we bring it back.
More than happy to put in the legwork to set up all of that, though I think for our specific community the entire breadth of features that Discord (now) offers in that regard arenāt going to be helpful. Specifically, I doubt that weāll end up having so many channels that masking them behind opt-in roles is going to help.
In that case, and given that more forum use is a goal, wouldnāt it be better if the threads there are posted to the forum normatively, with some automated mechanism cross-posting them to Discord?
Not sure of the best way to go about it, but it would be ideal if any new server structure could make use of Discordās new onboarding system:
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/11074987197975-Community-Onboarding-FAQ
I havenāt read this thread entirely, so possible itās already been mentioned
I actually kind of like this. It means that #lampshade-lounge is for casual chatter, #drama-llama-palooza is for putting āstuffā other people might thing is interesting (memes, articles, game tidbits, videos, banana bread recipes, etc.), and #coconut-grove still exists for botspam. I think itās closer to actually dividing up how activity works - i.e. āI want to have a conversation with someoneā, āI want to show something neat to someoneā, and ā!paydayā.
I also like this suggestion big picture, especially as post-Discourse transition I feel like our forum usage has genuinely increased + the proof of concept via the Assembly cross-posts that we can post forum polls on Discord. The forum would be better long-term documentation, foster more substantive discussion where relevant, etc.
The only (maybe) issue is our requirement that only WA Members can vote, but thatās also an issue on Discord where people can vote and weād have to go through and check if theyāre WA Members or not.
2 Likes
My primary concern with this is the viability of adding yet another piece of tech to maintain, but we can have that discussion in more depth elsewhere, I think. I do like the idea, for what itās worth. Maybe we could find ways to link nations to forum accounts that can then vote. My good idea fairy is very productive.
This would depend a lot on the type of community we want to encourage, and this is the point where Iād absolutely want to drive the ship into āCommunity Developmentā as a whole since we have many, many, many avenues open for us in that regard if weāre willing to go there. Having both Discord and a forum gives us a great deal of flexibility.