What emerged is that it''s increasingly clear that a lot of the Discord alternatives whilst very promising are just not quite ready yet and need more time to bake in various different ways. Put simply, all of them have trade offs and drawbacks unique to each. Discourse was a big hit with the community and it was with the staff too.

So we decided to shift our focus to Discourse, but why?

Why Discourse

It has to be said that whilst Discourse isn't and wasn't intended to be a Discord replacement, it worked for us in a way we perhaps totally missed – the fact that The Tavern is spread across the world and we don't all get to keep up with the flow of a live chat simply due to timezone restrictions.

Text and voice chat

That said, there is still a need or want to be able to have live chat in some instances. The plugin for this with Discourse was ok (not great, just ok) and filled a gap but was a little bit of a bolt on. There are however other options we can work on for this though, such as getting other services integrated with Discourse (i.e. XMPP, IRC or Mumble) to let us have more functionalities in the live chatting side of things, that will probably supersede the usage of Discourse chat plugin, making it useless and to be deactivated.

Is Discourse private (as in available to fews)?

No, it is not. As mentioned previously we self-host all our services in a secure production-ready manner and Discourse was no exception, so it's completely usable. In fact, everyone is welcome, may you be a lurker or the most active poster/chatter.

You can sign up directly at our Discourse instance or request a TGT SSO account if you are interested in our other services (like Writefreely, Peertube, etc.). Should you choose to go for the TGT SSO account please contact a Staff member because it requires a manual action from our side.

Is Discourse private (as in managed by us?)

Yes, it is. Our Discourse instance resides in a VPN in EU, as well as the Object Storage connected. Everything is hosted by Hetzner and by any means under the GDPR regulation. The only piece of infrastructure we're not managing directly is the Content Delivery Network (CDN) which is hosted by Bunny.net (find more about their stance about GDPR here). The contract the Staff agreed upon about data protection and data processing is available here.

What we will do next

Even though the community voted to continue on Discourse, we will still keep an eye on testing and checking out Discord alternatives as they develop more and get better and better with time (hopefully) and share with you if anything groundbreaking comes up or develops.

#Discord #Discourse

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

after using Rocket.chat for a few days we summarised the feedback from the community and our administrative feedback for ease of reading and to let us retrieve them later during the next test run(s).

The feedbacks from the community

The community reported back that with adding more and more channels it felt way less organized due to the web and app behaviour. Even though Rocket.chat comes with native mobile apps, the community found them lacking in terms of QoL functionalities and carrying more bugs than the web interface

Overall, the community deemed Rocket.chat to be way too deep into the enterprise and soulless corporate side of things, more than being a community tool, while also preferring the previous test (Discourse) instead of the current test. Generally speaking, the community felt that the best solution wasn't probably a single app or service but rather a combination of at least two services, one for community building and one for quick communication (textual, voice, video, this last not being a dealbreaker)

The feedbacks from the staff

What we found positive from the behind-the-curtains side of things is that Rocket.chat is self hostable, not too difficult to maintain and easy to setup and quite lightweight infrastructurally.

What really didn't click with us (or clicked negatively) is that most of the settings are paywalled behind a subscription and said subscription has to be paid even for self-hosted instance. The first setup require mandatorily a subscription/registration to the starter plan (free up to 50 users), with no way to skip it. The community plan (which we're currently using after downgrading) allow us to have only 5 plugin/integrations; we installed Giphy and Jitsi during the test run and many others are just proprietary/big tech plugins. We couldn't enable push notifications for our instance because Rocket.chat requires a subscription to use the Rocket.chat official gateway even for self hosted instances OR let you build a custom android/iOS app (whitelabeling) which is a huge tech commitment;

Generally speaking, the overall UX is more similar to Matrix (Element, etc.) than Slack and seems being more enterprise oriented than community oriented, differently from the previous test (Discourse)

Next steps

In the days ahed we will proceed to the next test run, that will be described in the next blog post.

Stay tuned for more updates

#Discord #RocketChat

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

A week and some more has passed since we announced the grand opening of our Discourse instance and we collected all of the precious feedbacks from the community, you can read about them in this post

Having said that, we wanted to let you know that soon we will start setting up Rocket.chat for our next test run.

It will take around two to three days to set up everything ready in a Production-ready way and another two to three days to let us configure the “behind the curtains” stuff, like permissions, categories, etc.

One of our goals in those days will be to allow you all the login through our SSO Page so you won’t need to register again for yet another service.

Regarding Discourse, it will be shut down for the Rocket.chat test, to let us monitor precisely the hardware usage, but won’t be deleted, meaning that all of your posts, settings, etc. will still be there in case should you choose to continue The Gamers’ Tavern’s adventure in this tool as the main community outlet.

Take this with a grain of salt, but we will shut down Discourse this Sunday (February, 22) and with some luck on our side we will let you access Rocket.chat in the first half of the next week (let’s say Wednesday)

As always, we thank all the member of the community for being amazing!

Should you have questions feel free to ask any member of the Staff

#Discord #RocketChat

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

we’re approaching the end of the Discourse trial, as we originally discussed in The first alternative: Discourse.

We asked the users in the community their feedback and summarised them for ease of reading and to let us retrieve them later during the next test run(s).

The feedbacks

• The ActivityPub plugin was installed but not activated, due to this being a test run, but it’s possible to let other people interact publicly with posts; those posts could come from an entire category or flagged with a special tag. To allow us more flexibility and a better conception of what to share vs what to not share we could sport a fediverse tag or similar. Some users showed interests in this possibility.
• Some users found this experience more similar to a blog than a forum and enjoyed that.
• Some users found the native mobile experience not up to the challenge but there was some users that really enjoyed the Progressive Web App on their phones.
• Almost every user appreciated having the freedom of tagging their own posts and even though many subcategories were created it didn’t affect negatively the user experience.
• The minimum lengths of a reply and post were lowered to an acceptable value. On this note, there are a lot of settings that could be fine tuned should the community choose this tool, to offer a better user experience.
• Many users felt negatively the lack of an immediate channel to share videos (aka le-stage) and chat, due to Peertube/Owncast not being so immediate in their usage.
• Some users were interested in the possibility of having an external feed (i.e. Gaming News, Free Stuff). Rest assured there’s a plugin for this, but it wasn’t activated due to this being a test run.
• Some users were completely new to forums but the overall feedback from those users is positive, especially for catching up activities from people in different timezones, preferring using threads instead of the live chat.

Next steps

In the days ahed we will proceed to the next test run, that will be described in the next blog post.

Stay tuned for more updates

#Discord #Discourse

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

It's a bit of a controversial pick due to the more forum-like experience, but it has a live chat in it and tries to unite the best of two worlds.

May you want to test with tool with us, mind that it's open to all of the members of our community but we welcome everyone who might be interested. If you already are part of our Discord server the login informations can be retrieved in the announcements channel, if not feel free to contact any member of the Staff to receive the login procedure (it would be really counterintuitive inviting you to our Discord server at this time :) )

We will run Discourse for a few weeks and collect the feedbacks from the users

As always, the staff will be 100% available (except during sleeping time) to answer all your questions and help you!

#Discord #Discourse

The Gamers' Tavern is a cozy place where you can rest and have fun with others gamers. This community main goal is to provide everyone a cozy and safe place to keep in touch and play together.

GENERAL

Respect towards others

It's fun to make fun of yourself when it's a game for both sides. Do not exaggerate or touch on sensitive topics that can easily offend the other person (religious, sexual orientation, etc.).

Respect the netiquette

Respect the sacred principles of netiquette as much as possible: find those here

Toxic behaviors

It makes no sense to be in The Gamer's Tavern with the sole purpose of insulting others and being toxic.

Aggressive behaviors

We want our community to be a welcoming and respectful space for everyone. To ensure that we ask you to express your opinions repectfully by:

• avoiding instigating violence against individuals, groups, etc.;
• avoiding personal attacks, insults, or needlessly aggressive tones.

ADDITIONAL RULES FOR MASTODON

Beware of sensitive topics

Use Content Warnings (CW) for sensitive topics as some topics can be difficult or triggering for others. Use a CW for subjects like:

• violence;
• politics;
• mental health;
• tragedies

or any other potentially sensitive discussions.

When in doubt, adding a CW is a good way to show respect for others.

ADDITIONAL RULES FOR PIXELFED

Post your original contents

Creators should only upload their own content. It's fine if you upload an image, photo or video containing fragments of other people's content but the overall content must be yours truly.

ADDITIONAL RULES FOR PEERTUBE

Post your original contents

Creators should only upload their own content. It's fine if you upload a video containing fragments of other people's content (maybe a reaction to something or analysis) but the overall content must be yours truly.

Disclose AI use

At The Gamers' Tavern, we celebrate the diverse ways creators express their passion for gaming. If your content includes AI-generated elements (e.g., music, video, voiceovers, etc.), this must be clearly noted in the video description. This ensures viewers are aware of the tools shaping their experience, allowing for informed engagement. This policy is subject to change as technology and community needs evolve.

ADDITIONAL RULES FOR DISCOURSE/IRC

Spam/Promo

We don’t mind helping other people grow their communities/channels – but please use the dedicated channels for any promotional activities.

To use those, please don’t just join and then immediately start spamming us with links for other servers/twitch channels etc., be an active part of our community first.

We ask you to avoid directly contacting other Tavern users unsolicited and sending said links.

Zero tolerance policy

never mind if it's on Mastodon, Pixelfed, Discord, etc., we have a ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY regarding contents:

• antilgbt;
• antidisability;
• antifeminism;
• racial slurs;
• white suprematism;
• far right/left wing sympathizing;
• trolling;
• spamming;
• crypto scams;
• paedophilia

or anything nearby.

#rules #mastodon #pixelfed #peertube #discord #lemmy