Announcing the Official Dolphin Discord

***MayImilae*** · (This post was last modified: 01-07-2023, 08:59 PM by MayImilae.)

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2023/01/07/announcing-official-dolphin-discord/

After much consideration, the Community Dolphin Discord is now the Official Dolphin Discord Server! For the full story and what this means for our community, click through the article.

Feel free to comment on this article below.

**AnyOldName3** · 01-09-2023, 02:20 AM #2

This has added an extra click to my visit-the-Dolphin-forums workflow as I've now got to go via a new Community button on the homepage. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

**ExtremeDude2** · 01-09-2023, 03:34 AM #3

(01-09-2023, 02:20 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: This has added an extra click to my visit-the-Dolphin-forums workflow as I've now got to go via a new Community button on the homepage. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

lmao, I just always have a tab open with the forums

**NaturalViolence** · 01-10-2023, 01:06 AM #4

Not sure how I feel about this. Discord is not search indexable. Any help that is given there will not be discoverable by anyone in the future.

Waluigifan · 01-10-2023, 02:33 AM #5

Good to know that it doesn't outright replace the forums and is instead added as an additional form of communication. Well done!

**AnyOldName3** · 01-11-2023, 07:02 AM #6

Even if it's not policy that it replaces the forum, a lot of people will join the Discord server who'd previously have joined the forums. We had that happen with OpenMW when we made an unofficial Discord server official.

As for being less dependent on proprietary software from companies who might go bust, OpenMW's Discord is bridged to Matrix, which nearly works perfectly except there's a serious spam problem, so we've got to have it set to invite-only. We've toyed with the idea of also dumping the Matrix history to the website where it'd be searchable, like some mailing lists do, but we've never done anything to actually start an implementation.

The rise of Discord has had a feedback loop, too. As more people ask their questions on Discord, fewer people with the same question are able to find the answer with a Google search, so more people end up having to ask on Discord. If you've got a basic question that would have been googleable ten years ago, it's a lot less embarrassing than posting it on a forum, too.

Discord is a great tool that unfortunately also ends up becoming the default tool for jobs better achieved by another.

**NaturalViolence** · 01-11-2023, 11:21 PM #7

Also the search function in discord is terrible. Pretty much forcing people to re-ask the same questions over and over again instead of looking them up. And the live chat nature means that often questions get "scrolled out of existence" before anyone reads them. Idk, maybe I'm being a crotchety old man but I can't think of a single project I know of whose community support was better off after adding a discord.

***MayImilae*** · (This post was last modified: 01-12-2023, 03:27 AM by MayImilae.)

Well, I don't disagree with a lot of your points. There are way better systems out there for support than Discord. But the Dolphin Discord already existed, and it has 10,000 users. Asking those users to leave the application they like to use something else, even if that something else was genuinely better for them, wasn't going to work. They'd rather stay within the application they know and deal with its limitations.

But support wasn't why we decided to join with them and make it official. The then-unofficial discord was doing a great job handling that group of our userbase for us, and we were helping users here. It was fine. It wasn't a situation that needed to change - until it became a place that lots of new developers were entering Dolphin from and we started having split pools of developers. When you can't reach developers because "they are only on IRC" or "they are only on discord", that's a problem. Making the Discord official is step 1 of fixing that problem. Step 2 is IRC <-> Discord bridging and step 3 is making Matrix our core with bridging to everything else. That's the plan anyway.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

As a small personal aside, I don't particularly like Discord very much. I have severe social phobia, so going into any environment with humans in it is incredibly challenging for me. But Discord in particular is very... noisy. Emotes, reactions, live channels, game updates, profiles, animated stickers, just, there's just SO MUCH STUFF! It's terrifying and overwhelming. And it's why I've been in the Dolphin Discord for years now but have never said a word, there was just too many people and too much noise, I could never jump in. But, now that the Dolphin Discord official and I have reason to be there, I had to decide on what I personally was going to do. I could just say no to Discord, keep hiding on IRC and wait for the bridging and what not. But, I decided to go for it, and try my best to make it work and dip into the Discord. After all, I was afraid of IRC at first, and I met my lovely husbando Sonicadvance there! <3 It's not a bad thing to leave your comfort zone. But of course, I have to do it carefully and slowly and only as much as I can bare. So I have turned Discord into an entirely text based experience by disabling all the things in the settings and then loading it in a chrome tab with images disabled for discord.com. Stripping out all that noise has helped a loooot. Most importantly, I'm only watching a couple of channels (the developer focused ones) while ignoring the vast majority to reduce exposure. I will never watch the whole discord, and that's ok. Stepping out of one's comfort zone doesn't mean hurting yourself! I'm doing what I can do! And the important thing is that I'm on it and available if anyone wants to reach me, and I can reach any developers there too. That's the whole point after all. That being said, it's been a struggle. I've had to deal with a lot of anxiety from all this over the past few weeks. It's hard. But I think I'm making it through.

However, I am never going near the Discord's support channels. That is a place of madness and terror unending.

nisa2 · 01-13-2023, 05:09 PM #9

(01-11-2023, 11:21 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: Also the search function in discord is terrible. Pretty much forcing people to re-ask the same questions over and over again instead of looking them up. And the live chat nature means that often questions get "scrolled out of existence" before anyone reads them. Idk, maybe I'm being a crotchety old man but I can't think of a single project I know of whose community support was better off after adding a discord.

I should be possible to store logs of the Discord as well! I actually have written a bot that logs all activity into a sqlite3 database. If anyone is interested, feel free to PM me here. It unfortunately requires a C+20 capable compiler and logs a bit too much for this purpose (like message deletions and edits, or even user presences, names, avatars etc), but that shouldn't be too hard to change! Oh, and it doesn't support threads as of now. It can run as either a bot or user (again their terms of service, but I made sure that works too anyways).
But then some web frontend to browse the messages is required too.