To Discourse and beyond
After collecting all the feedbacks from the Rocket.chat trial run, that can be found in this blog post, we decided to slightly change our approach looking for a new home for our safe and cozy community, away from Discord, making the community directly invested in the choice.
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.
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.