The Discord Trend

[Dark Jaguar]

It would be an awkward time to announce that we're closing the forums and moving over to Discord!

Seriously though, while Discord doesn't do threads well and it's hard to search, I can't really point to impermanence as a flaw it has and forums do not. Many thousands of my forum posts are nothing but memories in my head because the forums just died and went away.
I treat it as a chat room slash temporary way to make images accessible on multiple devices. The few other forums I still visit have an accompanying Discord server, which is probably the way to go.

Well, it comes down to this.  A bunch of individually hosted sites are more resistant to shutdown than every single site being on a single server.  If discord goes under, which as I mentioned above it absolutely 100% will the very instant telephony tech is upgraded to support modern "chat room" features, then every last one of those places goes away.  And yes, we've lost things too, but since the site came back later, we've managed to keep pretty much everything made past that point pretty well, and sites like archive.org have gone a long way towards keeping that even more permanent.  Archive.org can't even touch discord discussions however.  Further, we run this place ourselves and aren't subject to the arbitrary whims of whoever's running Discord, so we won't be hit with TOS violations and completely closed down because their AI took something out of context.  Mind you, I'm not some "free speech absolutist" and am perfectly content banning some racist who decides to join and spread their hate, but it's better when things are kept relatively small and easier to moderate by actual people like us!

...

Though these days we're certainly a bit... TOO small, that's for sure.