Moving from taigachat to Discord: what do you think?

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Greetings!

Just by looking at the title of the thread I'm sure that you already understood where I'm getting at: the TBF Staff has been thinking since some time to move most of the "random talks" from the legendary taigachat of TBF to Discord, and we'd like to know what do you guys think about it.

The Reasons

Back on March 2017, TBF broke for few days: accessing the forum was impossible for almost everybody, and @Rydia had the great idea to open a temporary Discord Server to keep the community together for the whole period of the outage. From that episode the days have passed, people who used to meet there daily moved back on TBF and the server was left unmoderated, but this whole experience gave us a glance of what TBF could be.

As part of the forum, Taigachat is right now one of the best tools to stay informed about what's happening in TB and TBF, still it has some limitations as:

• Its use from some mobile devices/browsers is slow,
• Since few months, chat doesn't always scroll automatically to some users;

So, as not me nor Rydia are the Community, we'd like to hear your voice before making a definitive change: what do you guys think if we'd move the chat to Discord?

Before taking a decision, here is a list of Cons and Pros about Discord. Please, read them all before commenting:

Cons

• TBF and Discord are 2 different things, this means that:
  • You'll need to create a Discord account, in case you still don't have one;
  • You have to agree with Discord ToS.
• The access from some devices appear to be slow;

Pros

• Chat isn't bugged as the current one, and features like thumbnails for multimedial content and the low cooldown between messages contribute to provide a more pleasant experience
• It will be possible to access the chat more easily via web, mobile and desktop apps, and they all come with multiple notification features
• Chatbots support!
• Multiple text and voice channels, to keep Terra Battle away from the random talks, and TB2 talks away from TB1
• Different roles make easier to look for help: groups like @TerraBattle1 and @TerraBattle2 can be used to draw the other people's attention
• More focus on the most recent important events and threads thanks to the pins, which give way more space than how much we currently have on top of the chat

The Chatbots!

Now, among many points there is only one thing that might be worrying: what about the forum?

Fear not my fellow Terra Battlers, because the solution to this problem can be found bolded on the previous list!

Lately we've developed 2 Chatbots that will help us all to stay informed on everything that happens on TBF even from the Discord App, giving at the same time more light on the important topics of the forum and information about the active events in Terra Battle:

Crawler Orbling

This cute little ball of... whatever material the TB Orblings are made of will help you to not forget about TBF!

First of all a word for the current chat: the Discord Server won't "materially" replace taigachat.
Users who want to keep using this old chat of TBF are free to do it and its content will be mirrored on a channel of the Discord Server, but users from Discord won't be able to reply to their messages without entering the forum.
In addition, the users from taigachat will be allowed to attract the attention of the Discord users with selected tags like @TB1 (more information on these will come in a later date).

Three more channels will also list:

• The hottest threads on TBF,
• The help requests,
• The most recent status updates,

Giving this way to the most important topics the importance they deserve

PROTO!

Some of you already had a chance to try it: Proto is a bot developed months ago to keep informed the users about everything that is related to Terra Battle:

• sends scheduled notices about the currently open Metal Zones, the upcoming streams, ending and starting events and much more;
• capable to retrieve guides and other useful content from the forum;
• deeply integrated with my TBc, will help the users to get the information they need when they need them most;
• ...more!

Final words

Please keep in mind that this Discord thing will influence only the users active in chat: TerraBattleForum.com will continue to exist and to work as always, same for the old chat, that will still be moderated but probably not much active anymore.


As at the moment the TBF Staff needs to finalize some decisions, the Discord Server is planned to be released in about a week.

So, what do you guys think? Do we have your blessing to proceed?

 

@here and @everyone will be disabled in order to not bother the users who don't play TB actively

More information about the available tags will be shared at the opening.

 

Hi Jiro

Yes, is something that we thought about, but never actually tried to contact Neo for it.
For now our main interest is seeing how the things will evolve; any eventual (but improbable in this case) change made to the forum's template will be discussed another time.

 

The idea of completely remove taigachat supports the idea of merging the Terra Battle community to a single platform, but we don't think that removing a feature from the forum and enforce the users to create a new account for a different service is the right path to follow.

The alternative of using Discord over taigachat came from our users, who asked us in multiple occasion about the possibility to use a chat with more functions than the one currently used by terrabattleforum, this is why it was taken into consideration.

Still, we know that many people have issues registering an account on multiple websites, that's why is not in our current plans to completely remove taigachat's support from terrabattleforum, remaining this way as a tool for the TBF users who come here occasionally just to enjoy some multiplayer matches to look for partners. As an added value, the @mention support will give their needs more attention than they have right now by sending a notification to all the Discord clients of people who play their same game and are willing to receive important reminders about everything concerning them.

The use of this feature will be of course moderated and kept under control in order to avoid any abuse.

The whole point of this thread is knowing what the Community thinks about it, and if is ok with this decision. Every Terra Battle Forum user should already know how much dedication the TBF Staff puts in offering the Community the highest quality service is capable of, and we'd never come up with something we think will damage the forum on the long run.

Almost all the work to support this change has already been done, but nothing is definitive.

We care about the Community, that's the reason why a thread has been started instead of forcing the users to move to a Discord Server

 

If you're asking it is because you're confused on how all of this will work, and this is the purpose of this thread, clearing out the confusion

TerraBattleForum collects threads of every kind (you find here a list of the most useful and not yet outdated content), and the two bots mentioned on the first post can be used to retrieve that and other useful material from the forum in order to make the life of the users easier; a quick and simple example might be the use of a command !guide vengeful to retrieve the list of all the guides, videos, tips and other interesting content related to the quest Vengeful Heart.
Currently, we have several features on our pipeline, but because of time reasons not all of them will be available at the opening of the Server.
More information will be shared on a later date

That note works as a simple reminder that as TBF's taigachat requires for the user to have a TBF account in order to reply visiting terrabattleforum.com will be required, but:

1. As you said, it doesn't take a lot of movement,
2. To those with the Discord app installed on their mobile devices and not willing to "socialize", it will take less time to check if someone from the forum is looking for help for a multiplayer match,
3. Taigachat will still be moderated, yes, but its use discouraged in order to not keep the community splitted, so it won't happen often to see someone using the TBF's chat.