Redoing Discord Channels Discussion

[Pronoun]

@ProfessorHenn

My primary concern with this is the viability of adding yet another piece of tech to maintain

Cross-posting to Discord is supported by an official Discourse plugin, so I wouldn’t be too concerned about that.

[Roavin]

@HumanSanity

I actually kind of like this. It means that #lampshade-lounge is for casual chatter, #drama-llama-palooza is for putting “stuff” other people might thing is interesting (memes, articles, game tidbits, videos, banana bread recipes, etc.), and #coconut-grove still exists for botspam. I think it’s closer to actually dividing up how activity works - i.e. “I want to have a conversation with someone”, “I want to show something neat to someone”, and “!payday”.

So, if I understand correctly in this proposal, meme-island would spiritually merge with drama-llama?

I actually like this, and especially how you phrased it wrt the three activities.

@ProfessorHenn

Maybe we could find ways to link nations to forum accounts that can then vote.

This is something that can probably be set up with a few evening’s worth of coding work. As I’ve mentioned before, I work best when annoyed, so don’t hesitate to annoy me about this (but separately from this effort).

@ProfessorHenn

This would depend a lot on the type of community we want to encourage, and this is the point where I’d absolutely want to drive the ship into “Community Development” as a whole since we have many, many, many avenues open for us in that regard if we’re willing to go there. Having both Discord and a forum gives us a great deal of flexibility.

I guess I’m lacking the imagination - can you give some examples of how that would work for us?

[ProfessorHenn]

@Roavin

This is something that can probably be set up with a few evening’s worth of coding work.

If you think it’ll be worthwhile, I’ll absolutely poke you about it. I know Europeia has something similar where you need to create a forum account over there before getting access to their Discord, so the trick is just connecting NS to the forum (and maybe Discord? We should talk about it some more )

@Roavin

I guess I’m lacking the imagination - can you give some examples of how that would work for us?

This might be much more rambling than I would have liked, and I’m also stuck to my phone, so let me know if you want to see two specific ideas of how we can organize the community platforms.

I feel it broadly comes down to whether you would want to foster a Discord community in addition to a forum community, how you want the two to interact, if at all, and the specifics of the communities being developed. Are we going to lean into strategy games like what Paradox comes up with, or games in general, and host multiplayer games/discussions/dedicated channel(s) for this category? Maybe we’d want to harness the power of this as a political game and encourage political discussions (to a reasonable degree) about both real and fictional politics. On the flip side, should the Discord server’s primary purpose be as a small place to chat while we (government and longstanding members) push for more forum engagement and discussions? Maybe I’m just trying to reinvent the wheel though. I’d appreciate being told to stop overthinking it if I am.

[ProfessorHenn]

I am formally requesting that the following channel structure be implemented for use on our server.

#welcome
#announcements
#getting-help

Chat
#lampshade-lounge
#international-airport
#drama-llama-palooza
#current-events
#coconut-grove
The Patio (voice channel)
Coconut Pavilion (stage channel, renamed from movie-night)

Government
#government (renamed from executive-planning)
#legislator-lounge
#world-assembly (renamed from wa-updates)
#cabinet-office

Institution specific shall be left to their leadership’s discretion.

[Pronoun]

@ProfessorHenn

Other private channels for government institutions are left to their determination, and everything else outside of the government ought to be archived.

@Roavin

I’m not going to get into the internal channels (court, Cabinet, CRS etc.) because honestly, those institutions should just tell us what they want and we’ll accomodate.

Is this, uh, still the case? Because I’m fine with the proposed structure otherwise, but personally, I’d honestly prefer that we not reduce the SPSF to just two channels, nor that we get rid of the High Court’s private channel >_>

[ProfessorHenn]

I’ll amend the original post but I don’t see a strong case for at least 3 SPSF channels when we’re slimming down the rest so drastically. A thread can be used for some things, as an example.

[Pronoun]

It’s more than three

I checked again, and out of the three channels that I think you’re in, I’m fine with axing #spsf-orders (as HS also listed in their original post here). I’m more inclined to keep the other internal military channels that we have — these are channels that aren’t even visible to most users (nor most SPSFers) and I don’t really see them as clogging up the channels list.

More generally, though, I think we’d be better off continuing to let different government institutions find the structure that works for them. I mean, in this case, you’re part of the SPSF’s leadership structure too and I think we agree. But if we’re all gone a year from now, I do think it’s better to let our successors find a structure that works for them.

[Roavin]

The Chat section looks good. Might have to experiment with channel order (e.g. do we want current events sandwiched there?), but that’s a minor detail.

Re: the Government section, where did the citizen’s channel (currently “government-discussion”) go in that proposal?

Also, are we actually winning anything by merging the Citizen’s Court category with the Government Halls category?

[ProfessorHenn]

@Roavin

Might have to experiment with channel order

Let’s move current-events to below international-airport.

@Roavin

where did the citizen’s channel

Goes to government, a merger of government-discussion and executive-planning.

@Roavin

are we actually winning anything by merging the Citizen’s Court category with the Government Halls category?

Yes. At least for executive channels, we’re slimming down to one, and we’re getting rid of 3 channels from the Citizen’s Court category (VC, cake-tower, government-discussion). Makes sense to me to just merge the two categories to serve as a general “government” category, especially if we want to host roleplay on the main server at some point, or something else fairly significant.

[Roavin]

I’ve now implemented the chat part.

Regarding the Government part, the way I see it (conceptually) is rather that the dead executive-planning is archived, while cake-tower is merged into the (not dead) government-discussion. So, the Citizen’s Court category would still have 3 channels. That’s not a lot, but also not nothing. Meanwhile, Government Halls will still have swan-lake, cabinet-office, and at least FAC (I assume (and hope) that FAC is still being used these days). Unless you want to yeet FAC too (which would be ill-advised in my opinion, but up to you).

I’m not going to die on the hill of keeping the categories separate, but I always liked having the separation between “this is my normal citizen/legislator stuff” and “this is inner working stuff because i have an actual role”. It also makes it clearer who’s responsible for the setup - anything in the Gov’t category is up to the individual institution (with us just facilitating), while anything in the other category is a community thing ultimately up to us with input from culture people.