Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-25356303-20191123210324

Hi all, Atvelonis here. As you are all likely aware, TESWiki currently hosts two methods of live communication. One of these, the Chat, is an official branch of the wiki, meaning that, as a chat function, our chat moderators  are required to oversee its smooth operation. Unofficially, we also operate a public Discord server; although staff roles in the server more or less map onto roles on the wiki (e.g. I am an administrator  here, and also one on there), the staff are actually under no obligation to spend any time in the server, and punishments on the server have no bearing on one's status on the wiki (and vice versa).

Today, I would like to formally propose that we make the Discord server an official part of the wiki, like the Chat. Although the Chat has its uses, they are decidedly limited in comparison to Discord's significantly more vast array of features; text formatting, image embedding, bot functionality, multiple channels, direct messaging, role customization, user tagging, and much more. The Chat is also relatively buggy, has terrible mobile support, and does not permanently store message histories, none of which are issues on Discord. As a means of communicating more efficiently outside of talk pages, Discord is a much better way to do it than the Chat.

So why have I held off for so long with this proposal? There are a couple main reasons:


 * 1) If we made the server official, we would naturally have to link it somewhere on the wiki, which would increase activity and require more intense moderation. I did not want to force the moderators to deal with that.
 * 2) I am personally somewhat nostalgically attached to the Chat and would not like to see it removed.

But I have already brought this up to our chat moderators, RenzXVI and The Beautiful Princess Ashley, and they are both open to the idea of moderating the Discord server in an official capacity. There is also no reason that we have to remove the Chat even after making Discord official. If nostalgia takes hold and we would like to get together in there for old times' sake, we still may.

My plan is to use a dev script called DiscordIntegrator to link to the server on the wiki's right rail, and perhaps also on the main page. We could also link to it on Discussions and in other places as we see fit. The Chat rules and all other wiki policies would be applied to the Discord server, and blocks on the wiki would correspond to bans from the Discord server (but Discord bans would not necessarily result in wiki blocks). I would not like to implement a policy of mandatory user verification, but simply continue with our current system of optional verification. In the future, we could hold moots in a special channel only available to verified users, which could be locked between meetings and messages saved as an eternally searchable archive.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any questions or concerns in regard to this plan? Is there anything about it that you'd like to see changed? I would like to have a discussion on the matter now so that we can smooth out any ambiguities, and then we can hold a vote to formally decide whether or not we would like to go forward with this. Thanks. —Atvelonis (talk) 21:03, November 23, 2019 (UTC) 