I've been running a small Discourse forum for role-playing and
boardgaming for a while now, ever since UKRolePlayers shut down. It's
suddenly got much bigger.
The original idea was that it would be somewhere for the
UKRolePlayers community to go, but they didn't; as far as I can tell
they mostly ended up on a more conventional forum (of the sort I've
never got on with, because I want a forum to be at least as capable
as a decent NNTP client).
But then recently it was announced that Shut Up & Sit Down (a
boardgame review site) was going to shut down its forums, originally
on three days' notice (later extended to ten).
(The reason why is complicated, but I think it largely has to do with
(a) the actual staff of SU&SD not being involved in the forum, and (b)
all the moderators, who were inherited from their old forum some
years earlier, had drifted away, except for one who died suddenly a
couple of months ago, so when there was a problem the moderators had
absolutely no idea who was who. So SU&SD had to get some new
moderators if they were keep the thing running; but because they
weren't there themselves they had no idea who in the community might
be a good candidate…)
I've been on the SU&SD forums for a while; I joined in November 2016,
and my experience there is why I chose Discourse to start a forum for
a friend in March 2017, and my own RPG/boardgame forum in December of
that year. The community there is a really good one, and while SU&SD
are encouraging people to move to "their" Discord server, that's just
not a substitute; it's just another of the legion of
IRC-imitated-badly of which Slack is the predominant example, and
while it has some basic capabilities you can't really have more than
one conversation per channel. (Not to mention the horrible privacy
implications of using Discord at all. But these are people who use
Disqus for their post comments, so users who care about privacy
clearly aren't welcome.)
So it was arking time. And I had an ark: a Discourse server, running
the same software the SU&SD forumites already knew, up and running and
ready for people to log into it.
So now my little toy forum has gone from about five active users a day
to over 50, from five posts a day to 200+. Welcome! It's a little bit
unnerving…
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