Discord now requires age verification, and why you should reconsider the age-old forum

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

I wholeheartedly support the step back to forums. The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.

NodeBB doesn't really have a solution to this as far as I can tell. I've been looking for several days but the only option I can see, other than contact forms which do not meet the required specs, is a deprecated plugin that isn't readily available on the ACP.

A real issue that NodeBB is going to face if it wants to step up against Discord is, as has been discussed already, the issue of everything being all in one place. That's what Discord did well and that's what it cornered the market on. No network of platforms is going to replace that. It has to be centralised. A forum obviously can't replace the voice channels of Discord but it can excel for text based communications. However, it needs to be a complete package in that regard and flexible to the needs of people coming over from Discord.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> The only problem I am having with it is providing real-time dedicated (and most importantly private) support to individual users. This is something that was crucial to many communities over at Discord where you were spoiled for choice in terms of solutions to this.

Thanks for commenting! I'd love to hear more about what kind of individualized support features Discord offered.

I am not a Discord power user, so I think many of the bot enhancements and customizations I am not at all familiar with.

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

So really what I'm missing currently is an internal ticket system. A place where someone can press a button and then privately reach out to staff in order to raise an issue. This mostly impacts gaming communities I think as it has been raised in the past here once. We have a contact form on the forum now but it really is no replacement for an instant messaging ticket system. I'd rather avoid third-party options not only for privacy and security but primarily so that it is integrated into our current platform.

But this is just one of many issues that will need to be overcome in the near future. Moving away from discord is incredibly difficult. Not only is it free but it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community. It's meant for this purpose and it does it really well.

As I mentioned there was a deprecated plugin for this. This plugin allowed you to create a category where the posts could only be viewed by the author and authorised groups. This would have been a perfectly viable solution however it is over a decade old now.

(nodebb-plugin-support-forum is the name of the plugin)

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@hemiechinuss ah! You're talking about nodebb-plugin-support-forum!

If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.

When you say...

> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> it has fantastic support for setting up and maintaining your community

What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

I'd want to make some inroads into providing something like this for NodeBB admins as well.

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

Yes, that's the one. I would love for that to still be supported. It would meet my needs perfectly.

> @julian said:
>
> What was there for community admins, good documentation? Onboarding support? One on one contact point?

The documentation was ok, it was decent enough if you wanted to create your own bots and webhooks. They did onboarding well. Agreeing to rules, prompting new users to visit a spot and post there, etc.

For community admin it doesn't really offer much more than NodeBB other than being more flexible in its capacity to service more types of community. Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.

One-on-one contact points were definitely a plus. Allowing individual users permissions to specific channels and threads was a really useful feature that I used a lot.

While it does lean on bots and webhooks for functionality, it is really easy to set up whatever you need on Discord and there are significantly less plugins on NodeBB that offer the same functionality that the various bots provide over on Discord. What I think is the biggest sore spot here is automation. Discord had a lot of that.

To be fair though I've only been using NodeBB this last week and I am only scratching the surface of what it can do. I'm really new to this specific forum software.

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

I'm looking back on Discord though and really there were a few things I can say were easier for me over there knowing what little I do about NodeBB so far.

1. Automation - a lot of functions were automated by bots and webhooks
2. Permissions - permissions were a lot more flexible over there which allowed for more control
3. Support - as we talked about the capacity to provide support to individual users was better
4. Events - being able to easily push events to the community was nice I'm not sure if that functionality exists in NodeBB but Discord allows you to put a banner up on your server announcing an event
5. Onboarding - onboarding was quite nice to have with presenting users a list of rules, places to visit, and permissions based on answers they provided in a questionnaire
6. Announcements - announcements had a dedicated spot and could easily be pushed to either part of or the entire community where it was quite visible

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

> @hemiechinuss said:
>
> Permissions is definitely a sore spot with NodeBB. They work, but they don't work as well as on Discord where I can lock a channel to a group or even an individual and the sheer amount of permissions I can define per group or individual makes it incredibly flexible.

Oh actually NodeBB has fine-grained privileges. You're able to restrict categories by posting or viewing privileges. Privileges can be applied to user groups and individual users.

All of this is handled at the admin level in the admin control panel.

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

I did not know it could be done individually. That's very useful.

[hemiechinuss@community.nodebb.org]

> @julian said:
>
> If you're interested in that plugin I'm sure I can get it updated for v4. You're right in that that would be helpful from a moderation standpoint.

Would this be something you'd be willing to do? I would be really grateful.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

@hemiechinuss since it's my plugin at least it's easier to do. I'll make a point of looking into it Tuesday (as Monday is a holiday)