Does an online community’s history matter?

[blazing kiln]

Much content on this Discord has recently been archived and is beyond users reach. Does this matter? If all you want is a place for live chat and the most current talk about the game of Risk then no, but if you want to see the ideas that have been suggested and developed or the art that has been shared over the last several years then maybe this matters to you. If you want to be able to search the community’s answers to common questions over the years then this matters.

I’ll admit most of what I have posted here is jokey and or silly, maybe much of what is posted is, but occasionally I buckle down and really try to answer people’s (primarily new players) questions at length bringing together my own thoughts with all the best previous info I can find on this Discord. Due to a bit of a memory problem I was reliant on searching for my own previous posts to make sure I wasn’t wasting my time and answering a question I had before. Time will tell if I will ever “waste” my time writing out an explanation on here again, under these new circumstances. Time will tell if anything is lost with the loss of years of community posts. Time will tell if anyone else even cares.

[slow ibex]

For the most part I agree with your sentiments! However, I get the sense that the discord re-work is building towards a more efficient approach in terms of having everything more clear and accessible in such a way as to remove the necessity for people to have to continue asking and answering the same questions all the time anyway. Yeah, it kinda sucks to see so much stuff pretty much just wiped off the discord, some of it being things people put a lot of time, effort and thought into. But I think it is probably a necessary sacrifice in the process of building a server that feels and operates more smoothly.

That being said, you dont want to sacrifice too much of the 'character' for the sake of 'efficiency', that is when things tend to rot and die.

[blazing kiln]

I know I have lost interest now… I was very excited about mining the ideas channel to see how things had developed over the years. There is evidence that SMG has actually made changes in response to community suggestions in those old posts. That evidence is now lost. Once I forget I guess I’ll go back to thinking that SMG is non responsive and it is only a matter of time before Risk global domination withers and dies, and I don’t like riding a dying horse so if I think that I’ll move on to something else. I’ll probably be wrong about SMG and the prospect of Risk losing its users but I’ll never know that I’ll be out of the community and won’t see this brave new world you promise.

I’m sure It will be much more efficient without my stupid posts anyway.

[rocky sierra]

It's primarily quieter channels that we've been removing, one of the downsides with Community Onboarding feature is that members can only be in up to 12 channels by default when they join - good part is that things like self assign roles are now part of the join process 🥳

With risk art & risk memes, we're looking at automated routes for bringing these into our Forums using a bot, this will mean that we'll have a more in depth "archive" in forums, along with none of the media actually being lost (along with text can be added within description) - just haven't figured out the best way to implement yet. E.g we could aim for one forum post that has the message/image history of an entire channel, alternately (with art for example) we can post these separately so they're still as a "gallery' - which removes a lot of the "oh that is cool" etc. text that wasn't supposed to be in image channels in the first place, while making finding something visually much easier (with search working as expected)

The #risk_ideas channel hasn't been removed although we have changed it over time (changed out a bot whose developer team we didn't want to support anymore - another fun story 😄)

We also have extensive history across things like bot log channels (that have never been public) and some staff channels too, deleting entirely is not good but as the server evolves alongside discord there's new ways to share content and discuss with others that it eventually becomes too convoluted to navigate, that's what discourages new members from chatting - and letting the community grow - so that's what we're prioritising for the moment

We'll be aiming to switch risk idea discussion to an automated thread made on each idea (without the default "thread created" post) - so if you want to discuss an idea 2y ago it's with the post, can be found again easily with a search etc

[blazing kiln]

Thank you for the information! That last bit sounds promising. I’ll try to reserve judgement and see what comes.

I’m partially disheartened because all the nonsense I was posting last night went through fine but when I was seriously answering player questions… mee6 decided to delete a paragraph plus thorough answer I wrote. I guess it’s karma since I had gone from jokingly defending mee6 to making jokes at mee6’s expense earlier that night.

[rocky sierra]

Yeah that'll be one of the spam prevention things in place, I think it'd have been using "collaboration" X times in Y time

A lot of these are more designed for raid prevention than active members, it may be something that can be set to not happen from one of the Legacy roles - in general it prevents things like "copypasta" you see across discord servers

[blazing kiln]

Oh okay. Thanks I thought it might be word repetition. Can mee6 regurgitate my post or is it already digested?

[rocky sierra]

I sent a DM to you of what I think is the deleted post, it might be lost in the "Message Requests" section if it's not at top of channel list there

[blazing kiln]

Thanks! found it and grabbed a screen shot. Doesn’t seem like such a sweet bit of writing now in the light of day… 😳… but anyway glad I have it. I miss-place or lose too much of what I write already, can’t afford to lose much more as my mind slowly turns to mush. 🥳🥳 I look forward to returning to my loving friendship with mee6 now that this terrible day is behind us. Cheers!