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.

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.