The Craft community has a new home on Discord, which has replaced the Slack workspace.
If you’re unfamiliar with Discord, it’s like Slack, but built for communities rather than teams. They’re primarily focused on gaming communities, but have been branching out to tech as well.
The Craft community on Discord.
Why mess with a good thing?
By most measures our Slack workspace was a huge success. We had over 7,700 members, and it had gained a reputation as one of the most helpful Slack communities out there.
Still, there are a few reasons we’ve decided it’s time to move away from Slack, and they all stem from the same problem: Slack wasn’t built for communities.
It lacks critical features for protecting members from spam and abuse, such as member-based moderation roles and member muting/blocking. There’s not even a way to bulk-delete a spam user’s messages after disabling their account; admins must quickly work to manually delete each message individually.
The message and file storage limits imposed on free accounts are completely insufficient for communities of several thousand members. Paid plans are priced per active member, making them impossibly expensive for communities.
In fact, “public” Slack workspaces are technically not even a thing, as far as Slack is concerned. The API that public Slack communities use to invite new members isn’t publicly documented, allowing Slack to distance themselves from the various issues that arise in them.
Why Discord?
We’ve looked at several Slack alternatives including Spectrum and Mattermost, as well as more traditional forums like Disqus. We chose Discord for a few reasons:
It’s built for gamers. That may sound like weird praise, but hear us out: Gamers are the worst.* Discord deals with abusive users on a daily basis, and they’ve armed their users with the tools they need to protect themselves.
It’s built for developers. Features such as a dark theme and syntax highlighting based on the GFM syntax (e.g.
```php) make developers feel right at home. It’s no wonder that projects like Vue and GraphQL have turned to Discord for community chat.It has a smart business model. With Discord, “servers” (as they call them) are free, and each individual user can decide whether they want a free or “Nitro” account.
It’s single sign-on. You only need a single user account with Discord, making it easier to quickly join new servers. And private conversations live separately from your servers, so if you’re friends with the same person across two different servers, you don’t need to worry about your conversations getting split between them.
There’s no message limit. Post to Discord without worrying about losing crucial information a few days later.
Is Discord perfect? Of course not. We admittedly think Slack is a bit easier on the eyes, and there’s no thread feature yet. But features change over time, and on the whole it’s a heck of a lot better for our needs than Slack will ever be. We’re confident that the Craft community is in better hands there.
If you’re ready to check it out, head over to craftcms.com/discord. You’ll need to create a Discord account (if you don’t already have one) and then you’ll be on your way.
Once you’re in, you can run Discord from your web browser, or download an app (available for Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux).
We look forward to seeing you there!