This is a good change that keeps us modern and let's potential members know that we are in fact still an active organization with a bustling community.

Byeeeee!

Thanks for all the work with maintaining this for years, James. It helped transition us away from forums in the old code change, and now that we have contemporary functions like Discord and instant-messaging, they can be phased out without regret.

Thanks for all the work that goes on behind the scenes maintaining these systems, James.

Thank you, James. It was the right tool for the right time. :)

well, another avenue that I would get Novas from is gone. run-ons were fun and enjoyable, especially to coordinate with others in major events. never got into the discord rp and now all the stories I like re-reading will be gone. rip

You obviously didn't read, Brimstone. Diceless Discord RPs are essentially the exact same thing as a run on. They function the exact same way. You're just posting it in a Discord channel vs a forum.

You can re-read any story on the forums you'd like if you just download it. You can re-read any Discord run-on you'd like by just getting the transcript

Discord Threads seem like a pretty good substitute here. And I agree with the reasoning behind this decision. It's always been a little weird when a newbie says hi on the forum and only a couple people respond.

I realized about a month or two ago there was a whole-ass forum for gaming on discourse. Poor newbies looking for people there, only to sit unanswered.

Great call on this.

@Locke that's the idea. And since the bot can automatically track word counts, it is actually less of a hassle to run them.

@Zxyl

No need to be rude to Brimstone. Although the announcement does mention diceless Discord RPs, it doesn’t explain what they are. So those who are unfamiliar with them would continue to not know what they are.

Also I assume Brimstone simply liked the format of using the Discourse forums.

Ok, so the only thing I see with this move is that, unless you are a part of a particular RP on discord then you can't read it. Or if discord archived the RP and then you can't find it. Also is there any way we can just retire Discourse in a way that it's unusable, but we can still access it and read the fictions that we want to. That way there isn't a ton of extra work for the members to scramble to do, while doing other things in RL.
Don't get me wrong, I love James and all the work he's put into the site, coding and everything. And I would hate to see something that you've worked so hard on to just dissappear, James.

I think it's worth noting, Tahiri, that it's James is leading the initiative to remove Discourse. If it makes sense, it's hard to question the head of IT when they want to kill off a part of the site.

A month should be more than long enough for anyone who wants to archive and offload stuff to do so.

Seems to be a good change, but a few things I’m concerned about.

As far as “Diceless Roleplay” goes, I’m confused as to how these are essentially the same as Run-Ons? I don’t know how most Clans manage theirs, though I’ve always assumed (or observed) that Discord Roleplay tend to be more about fast, short posts in a live format, where Run-Ons tend to be longer (with minimum word counts), more constructed posts with a turn order. The former isn’t as interesting for me, but from the sounds of it, the latter will be a Google Docs activity? If that’s the case, I’m all for it as the Discourse requirement tended to just be teams copy/pasting into the forums from a GDoc in the last week of a competition to fill a participation requirement (with people occasionally having to scramble last minute if the person before them went on vacation and couldn’t copy/paste for a few days.)

Second, is archiving. I’ve never used threads on Discord, but are these saved indefinitely? Can these be edited and added to after a few weeks, or locked to read-only? Are these only visible to a select few participants?

For all still curious... Diceless Roleplays are text-based roleplay threads. Usually short responses or actions, they typically move fairly quickly as they are one person typing for one character. We've been doing them since before the pandemic. They're a lot of fun.

ROs would be the same thing but just moving the story along, similar to how a DM would with their posts, for the entire cast as they do now. It's just a different format. The reason diceless RPs became a thing was the popularity they have with new or younger members. You tell a kid to write you 500 words and it never gets done. You tell them to come do a RP with you and the next thing you know they have 500 words and are loving it. If you like the story, pull it off Discord, save it and post it in a Gdoc to share. If I remember correctly transcripts are date and time stamped also.

@Thane True. But I still hate to see it go completely away. You know what I mean :P

@Revak how do I get transcripts off of discord?

Just copy and paste to a gdoc?

That, or anyone could request the transcript generated by dbb0t. Threads are also just archived when a RP is closed, not deleted. In my experience, diceless Discord RPs (or any RP for that matter) only run at the pace set by the group writing it. Some will be faster, yes, but nothing stops everyone from doing the same thing they do with ROs - writing it in a GDoc, getting it proofed, and then posting it once it's ready.

Much like the old forums we had back in the olden days, will the Discourse posts and threads be archived for us to read at our leisure? Or will we need to archive them ourselves? Only question I have.

@Ronnie That was technically two questions. Also, hello! 😝

Apologies. Only questionsssss that I have. ;)

I'm looking into providing a read only archive. It's proving to be a bit more difficult than the old forums, so I can't promise anything, though I'm fairly optimistic I can figure something out. However, make sure to safeguard your content yourselves to be on the safe side of things, as mentioned in the news post.

In either case we'll have backups of the database behind Discourse so we can always manually retrieve stuff for the foreseeable future in case of emergencies.

I might have to RP some of my sit downs I did back in the day with folks again. :) Thank you James for your amazing work on the site.

A good change, one that needed to be done. Forums like Discourse allover are becoming a thing of the past.

The Diceless Roleplays can be as long/short, involved/passive, etc. as much as someone wants them to be. I know in setting up the Roleplays on the Discord you can set up rules and guidelines, especially if you want it to run more like a run-on than a true stricter sense of these roleplays.