[Discussion] A lore forum Discord chat channel!

[Theodric]

So, there's been talk about this very recently and it's an idea I've toyed with myself more than once in the past. I figured I'd go ahead and make a Discord chat for our little community here.

INVITE LINK:

https://discord.gg/43ySm2R

As you can see, there's been a lot of debate within this thread. Some people were all for it, others had concerns, yet others had no interest. Yet it's a thing that now exists and we'll see how it goes.

The rules are pretty simple - 'be excellent to each other'. I'd like to think that's fair and self explanatory. The intention of this chat isn't to replace this forum. It's there to offer a platform for more casual debate, to get to know fellow lore fans a bit better and to offer up a place to chat about the lore on the go for those who do a lot of traveling and can't easily access this forum on the move.

There may be growing pains. There might not be. We'll see!

As of this post, we have four sub-channels:

- Lore Discussion

A place to discuss the game's lore.

- Spoiler Discussion

A place to discuss the most recent spoilers. When 4.5 goes live, that's the place to be if you want to chat about specific plot revelations.

- Off Topic:

Casual socialising! Chat about the game, your day at work, your cat...your hobbies. That sort of thing.

- Role-play Discussion

A place to discuss role-play, character concepts and so on.

[Anonymoose]

Existence

As I said in the other thread(s), I occasionally get approached about making such a Discord hub for lore-minded people - and have, a few times - and currently have a (mostly) empty one that I repurpose every time someone wants to give it a shot. Though leaving the invite link in an open forum seems risky, lol.

Moderation

I appreciate all the thought that Theodric has put into it above. They'll hold if there are large numbers, but getting to large enough numbers to merit such bureaucracy is half the battle.

I also might argue the "don't boot unless strictly necessary" part. The Gamer Escape server has had a similar rule, and over the ages I've noticed that by the time someone who is a mild problem but perpetuates a constant mid-level unenjoyable atmosphere finally does something to merit action, they've driven numerous others to mute or leave the server, already. One in five only needs the one warning. At least three in five don't ever really improve and slowly escalate towards the kick.

Though I've had some success with using a bot to add strikes to records based even on making the atmosphere negative. Then any mod can just check the strike card and see, yeah, this isn't getting better.

Composition

One thing that makes me nervous is that there are so many people on the forums who've been here for years that I can imagine a dozen who'd think, "Obviously I'd be one of the showrunners." and I highly doubt those dozen have the same concept in mind.

Would it fracture the forums?

A little? I've never seen Discord kill a forum, just other VOIPs. We'd see a downturn in whimsy threads that are based on one simple question, but also a downturn in threads that accidentally become something deep after such a question is asked.

We'd also get back some of the people who were banned from the forums. Though if reddit is any indicator for every one that was banned by a heavy-handed mod, one of them really ... really deserved it.

[Theodric]

Fair points!

I'm not entirely opposed to a zero tolerance policy being implemented towards users that ruffle feathers needlessly. We should encourage people to sort out any issues they have in private, rather than have them seep into the chat itself. In other words, anyone joining the chat should - ideally - put any potential conflict behind them.

On the other hand, there needs to be some wriggle room. We have people from all over the world posting here. Some of whom don't speak language as a first language and some who do, but come from cultures that are more 'blunt' than others...if that makes any sense. In short, sometimes the best way to avert conflict isn't to assume the worst but rather the best...if that makes any sense.

To speak of the advantages, a major benefit of Discord is that it's so easy to just post images there - more than once I've found myself just not bothering to attach screenshots or photos of lore book extracts to my posts simply because it's more tedious to do it here than it is over Discord.

The issues with leaving the invite link out in the open definitely have merit. I'll have to think how best we could get around that. We don't want to be obscure enough to never take on fresh blood, but we definitely don't want to just...throw the invite link onto Reddit and let anyone and everyone join.

I don't want us to become a 'clique' so much as a group of people who share an interest - and that interest being FFXIV and its ongoing story.

[Iscah]

Moderation would need to be fair and free of bias, though loose enough that people aren't booted out unless strictly necessary. I'm very much in favour of pushing for civil debate and the concept of agreeing to disagree when it comes to controversial aspects of the lore; especially things that are subjective.

While you've put a lot of thought into this and it all sounds reasonable, I have to be mean and blunt here.

You seem to be putting yourself forward as moderator, and I don't feel like it's a good idea.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but it gives me a bad gut feeling.

You know you have controversial views compared to many of the posters here. You seem to think you're "free of bias", yet so many arguments come from what others perceive as your bias in the opposite direction, and it feels to me like the least pleasant parts of forum discussions happen when you stick to an idea regardless of everyone else disagreeing with you - and then you say "let's agree to disagree".

Saying that doesn't automatically make someone fair and balanced. It can be used to just shut down a debate when they don't want to change their position.



As a general principle, it doesn't seem right to put someone with controversial, opposite-to-mainstream views about a subject in charge of the debate about that subject.

Moderators aren't quite the same thing as directing the course of discussion, but I feel like they need to be impartial, not pushing a strong opinion one way or the other.

[Iscah]

As I said in the other thread, I still don't like the overall proposal of a Discord channel because it will pull debate and information away from the forum, and while the immediacy would be nice in some ways, it's a very different atmosphere to the longer, thought-out posts here.

I appreciate the slower pace of a forum. I can spend ages typing out a thoughtful response, rather than rushing to get a sentence in before the conversation carries past it.

What would this do to, say, our "initial reactions to patch X" threads? Would those reactions get posted in Discord instead, and lost forever?

As forum threads, they make fantastic time capsules of what we were thinking at the time.

Browsing back and quoting posts also gets messier.


Basically, I don't like it. I'll join if it happens, because I'll 'have' to to keep track of the discussion, but I don't like the proposal at all.

[Kusanagi7]

can u imagine if theo was a moderator and somehow the topic/subject of garlemald came up im sure i dont have to say how that would play out and as iscah has said the agree to disagree isnt a fair and balanced thing to say really and u have that as your mantra when you run into things that dont agree with your veiws. if you wanted a reasonable moderator moose comes to mind and you would need others who are balanced and reasonable when dealing with things.

[Fenral]

Pros: I'd have somewhere to talk to Cilia about mobage without cluttering unrelated posts.

Cons: The possibility of moving relevant discussion off of the official forums, for the reasons Iscah posted above, but also because I think it's important to keep the discussion where devs can see it.

[Theodric]

Did people miss the part where I suggested a moderator team? I already outlined that it wouldn't be a good idea for any one person to be the sole leader. For what it's worth, I already have experience moderating and my job in the real world requires me to be objective given that I review restaurants for a living these days.

Disagreements over the lore are to be expected. It's not a big deal. There's really no need for anybody to make it personal though, because it's such a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. It also has no real bearing on moderation - I wouldn't ban anyone for disagreeing with me on Garlemald unless they resorted to insults and personal attacks over it, which would only occur after established warnings...and be well deserved given the circumstances.

For what it's worth, I agree that Anonymoose would be a good moderator - if he so desired the position. To be blunt myself, though...I feel like he wouldn't work well as a sole moderator either. A handful of posters actively suck up to him. He may also very well also have his hands full at times.

This is a community effort. We need to work together on this. Therefore it makes sense to have a team that represents different parts of our little community. You'll need someone capable of 'tough love'. You'll need someone capable of a more delicate approach. It's just a matter of applying the tools correctly.

Of course, not everybody here is going to join. That's to be expected. Some people don't use Discord. Some people don't want to discuss the lore outside of this board. That's fine, though so far opinions seem to be mixed enough that going ahead seems wise. If it works out, it works out - if it doesn't, at least an effort was made.

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Name:

I've tentatively settled on 'The Lore Corner' for now. This is subject to change though it seems fitting as a temporary server name.

Server Avatar:

This, too, is something that will need to be debated. Obviously it'll need to be something relevant to FFXIV. I'll stick with something temporary in the meanwhile.

Invites:

If someone is interested in joining, let me know! Bear in mind, this is entirely experimental at this stage. The lack of a PM system on this board is a real pain, though I'm willing to try and catch people in-game depending on their server to send them an invite link.

I'm not opposed to throwing a link up here - perhaps a temporary one - for ease of access if people think that's a better idea for now. I know they can be tweaked to expire after a certain point.

This Board:

Again, it isn't going anywhere. I highly doubt that people will stop posting here altogether. There's also a fair number of people who like to discuss the game's lore who simply do not post here. How, exactly, we reach those people is up for debate.

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Update:

The server has been created!

[ObsidianFire]

To be blunt Theodoric, if you were on the mod team I would avoid discussing certain topics on the Discord. Mostly because I'd find myself self-censoring myself so as not step on what everyone on the Lore Forums knows to be a hot button topic for you. The last thing I'd ever want to do is join a Server where I know going in I'll always be walking around on eggshells whenever a specific topic comes up. And given what the expansion is going to be about, that topic will be everywhere...

As it is, I've already got enough people to bounce lore questions off of in the Reddit and Balance discords even if they aren't "lore" specific Discords (and there's people on there that aren't on this forum). That said, the nature of Discord makes it really hard for in-depth discussion though, since everyone talks over each other (and it's impossible to find posts again unless they're pinned). Making a place for the "need to know" or heavily referenced information is a lot harder to set-up on Discord than in a forum. Given the nature of lore, referencing past discussions and threads is really useful and I have a hard time seeing how that would work on Discord.

[Theodric]

Nobody needs to avoid discussing any lore related topics. Is Garlemald a controversial issue? To a degree, but that is solely based on the refusal for some to agree to disagree. It isn't real. It's a fictional organisation. Nobody needs to get overly invested in it. It's the equivalent of someone liking pineapple on a pizza or not.

Nothing is really set in stone in this point. More moderators other than myself will be added to the team. Again, I want at least three - though that involves people stepping up and volunteering. The closest so far has been Anonymoose, so if he wishes to take on the role he is more than welcome to. As established, any decisions made by the moderation team will be discussed both internally and externally.

As far as the likes of the Reddit Discord is concerned, I don't exactly want to bash it but...it also has thousands of members, the lore channel is often based around off-topic discussion and it lacks the 'small community' feel that I think we could establish here. This project is intended to be much more niche in other words. Since it's possible for people to join multiple servers, it also shouldn't be treading on the toes of any other established servers.