phantom of the black parade
pronounsshe / her pronouns
4,237written posts
offlinecurrently
at this, the world's end, do we cast off tomorrow~!
as someone who's done the transition in reverse + helped people go from discord to forums before?
tbeh, i wouldn't probably wouldn't recommend moving a community from discord to forums (proboards, jcink, or any other host) unless your existing community is heavily biased towards wanting to make that shift + the staff team have enough previous familiarity with forums to handle the transition.
i could go on for a good long while about how forums are a huge learning curve for people to first learn how to navigate compared to discord (since even if you are using the new forums feature for discord to minimize the base navigation differences solely on the user end, tupper is getting rid of so many clicks and menus you have to go through to update accounts/images and make posts + the admin controls for the main hosts are both pretty unintuitive if you're not familiar with the base software) and how forum-based rpers have very different expectations out of sites than discord rpers do (rules + lore information is typically far more extensive on forums than discord and the web design aesthetics arms race that is skinning is probably the biggest thing i was glad to avoid in transitioning over towards discord).
but i won't because all of that is a huge deep dive into rp meta that largely doesn't matter. because the reason i wouldn't recommend it essentially boils down to that the animanga forum rpc community is by and large a much shallower pool than the discord one - which will make it a lot harder for you to expand your community, especially if you're having to fight an uphill battle with discord rpers getting frustrated with the learning curve to get started + forum rpers being turned off because your site doesn't check boxes that they largely consider standard at this point or are checking ones that have largely fallen out of favor.
it'd also be a harder transition to make since a lot of rp resources are either disappearing entirely (like the big jcink resource site, caution to the wind, closing their doors soon + blocking access to their 10+ year library of various codes and their ad directory) or are becoming less easy to find if you don't already know where/how to look (via shifting resources into tumblr ad directories or coding discords). advertising your community also relies a ton more heavily on personal networking (since most long-term members tend to come via word of mouth), which you may not have, and takes a lot more effort too (since posting ads on other sites is a lot more time-consuming than just bumping the server on disboard every couple of hours).
i can feel the rest of the animanga community trying to deathglare me into oblivion for having said all of this, but i also couldn't in good conscience say anything else in my answer - not to dissuade you if this is what you and your server ultimately want to do but so that you'd be able to step into the wider forum community knowing it's going to be a lot of effort and huge learning curve. if you're willing to put in the work to get over that higher barrier of entry that forum rp has, it can be a lot of fun and it opens you up to a very different community than what discord rp typically has (i've found, for example, you tend to get a younger crowd with discord than forums). but it's also enough effort that i don't think the decision should be made lightly by any means + i would never recommend making the jump one way or the other if they weren't absolutely sure of it.
(honestly, if you want me to ramble more about my personal experiences with making the transition between the two + what the experience is like on either end, i'm more than happy to delve into stuff more, i just don't want to slam down so much text that it just gets skimmed/ignored or for forums to kick me out as a filthy traitor to my people for becoming a discord convert.)
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last edit on Dec 13, 2023 3:14:50 GMT by Kuroya
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