question about discord -answered-

[Venatici]

howdy all!

update: A help ticket has been sent in a while ago with no response, however from consensus from helpful CS users it's been seen that discord is one of those 'don't link to' sites. That being said, whenever I do get a response from CS staff I will be mentioning some input about my thoughts on more dangerous sites they allow such as JM or chatzy. For more info you can read below and I will still be responding to those who reply. Thanks all! ^^

just hopping in to ask- is a link to a discord chat still allowed on cs?
I remember there being a big thing about mods telling some users it was allowed, only for like two days later tess put up a site bulletin saying it wasn't. however, I've noticed that recently still people are using discord, including cs helpers.

I would like to run a discord chat for some species on CS, because the members get incessantly spammy and I figure a discord chat will help alleviate the cs spam- however, I'm unsure if its allowed or not because I cannot find any CS rules on it. I distinctly remember the issue coming up but I can't find any information on it now.

so if anyone knows about this, please pm me / reply here? thank you kindly in advance ^^

[Aliria]

No, Discord links are not allowed on CS.

[Venatici]

No, Discord links are not allowed on CS.

howdy!

could you possibly redirect me to where this is said? I'm moreover confused than anything. I just can't find any rules because the bulletin that tess posted no longer exists, and general helpers have used discord / will use discord in the time since the message was removed, which is why I am curious.
viewtopic.php?f=57&t=3310529&p=105178556&hilit=discord#p105178556
this is an example- a general helper, meant to be a model for cs, posts in the faq:


If anyone's interested, we could make a Chatzy or a Discord or something to discuss the ongoing challenge!


Which I'm assuming means a discord would be made and therefor the link given out for community members: ergo discord being allowed on cs.

I just don't want to break any "hidden" or otherwise unknown rules because I cannot find any info. I'm just very confused.

[Junhui;]

While the bulletin isn't up anymore, the rule still stands. I'll see if I can find anywhere that still says it, but I'm not sure if there is. But I've seen people get in trouble for posting discord links before, and the question has been asked and mods have said it's not allowed. I'll try to find something though.

It falls under the rule of not being able to share skype, email, kik etc.
Here's a post by Seasonal stating it in another thread a few weeks ago;
Boop

[Venatici]

While the bulletin isn't up anymore, the rule still stands. I'll see if I can find anywhere that still says it, but I'm not sure if there is. But I've seen people get in trouble for posting discord links before, and the question has been asked and mods have said it's not allowed. I'll try to find something though.

It falls under the rule of not being able to share skype, email, kik etc.
Here's a post by Seasonal stating it in another thread a few weeks ago;
Boop

howdy!

alright, thank you kindly! I was just moreover confused because I then couldn't find any information about it since the rule was removed, and I felt like if general helpers were supporting discord it would've been allowed, if you get what I mean?

thank you sincerely for the help! I had sent in a help ticket a while ago so hopefully when I get a response I'll make the suggestion that they make it clear cut that discord isn't allowed, because the only reason I didn't make one is because I was aware of the issue that happened months and months ago. Skype isn't like discord / kik in the sense you can completely disable voice calls and not have video calls, as well as have specific functions that moderate (ex: get rid of cursing, pick up if any personal information is said) so I figured it would have been a different type of scenario. Super glad I asked then because otherwise I would have assumed different.

thank you again for your help, I really appreciate it ^^ I'll try to find other ways to reduce the spam then, hopefully it won't be too hard.

[Junhui;]

Here's a thread where some alt. options are brought up
Chatzy and Join.me are mentioned in it - but neither seem to be thought of well, but I've never personally used them and don't know anything about them. Maybe something to check out? They also brought up making a little website for the species, so there's also that. Hope you can find something!

[Aliria]

Here's a thread where some alt. options are brought up
Chatzy and Join.me are mentioned in it - but neither seem to be thought of well, but I've never personally used them and don't know anything about them. Maybe something to check out? They also brought up making a little website for the species, so there's also that. Hope you can find something!

I would agree that join.me is a bad idea, but in my experience chatzy has always worked very well. The idea of making a site for the species is good, I've had good experiences with forumotion-hosted PHPBB forums, which have chatboxes on them which work quite well.

[Venatici]

Here's a thread where some alt. options are brought up
Chatzy and Join.me are mentioned in it - but neither seem to be thought of well, but I've never personally used them and don't know anything about them. Maybe something to check out? They also brought up making a little website for the species, so there's also that. Hope you can find something!

I would agree that join.me is a bad idea, but in my experience chatzy has always worked very well. The idea of making a site for the species is good, I've had good experiences with forumotion-hosted PHPBB forums, which have chatboxes on them which work quite well.

Ooh okay, yeah I know about that. Unfortunately both are limiting- we could only have 10 people in one of those group chats, and that's the same with join.me's. You have to pay for 'subscriptions' which allow for more members. Not to mention join.me has both video and voice capabilities. People post on the CAAA all the time with stuff like 'voice on if you wanna chat' or 'video on', which in my opinion is even worse because there's absolutely no chat log and there's no way to 'link' someone to something. What I mean by this is people are never linked to an account, and people can change their names easier than two clicks of a button- meaning someone could easily impersonate someone else without anyone even knowing it.
Discord at least keeps chat logs and there's way to keep records if anyone ever edits or deletes their posts, and there's ways to IP ban if someone is getting a little too rowdy. You can't even ban someone on JM- you can 'kick' them out, but all they have to do is refresh the page and they're back in again. Chatzy is like the terrible, offbrand version of discord and JM is just a place of havoc where you cannot control anything.

Concerning the site, stuff like that often excludes people and the chat there has no way to moderate. All you can do is 'prune' posts which would delete however many recent posts, but thats about it. Some don't even offer that ability. I've looked into these all before and none have worked well: even communities that at one point had a freeforum, such as kiamaras or jellybeandragons, have now moved on to discord and skype. I think the alternatives CS staff give are rather pointless and even more detrimental than the actual stuff they're trying to "hide". I'm honestly amazed they haven't banned join.me because of how volatile it is.

Thank you for the suggestions though! I'm still unsure what to do because all these options were mostly looked into already but I still appreciate them really, because at least it's something. CS staff still haven't gotten back to me so I'm kind of just twiddling my thumbs waiting for them to respond.

If anything, I think its silly to ban something like discord when the alternatives are even worse. Join.me is literally terrible when you look at it, yet CS staff still recommends that. Chatzy is literally a nightmare and you'd have to pay for it, and you're unable to ban people. It even says in the FAQ-


How can I kick out people who are being rude?

In a Quick Chat, you have no control of people, once you have let them in. Your only option is to stop using the room and move your trusted friends or visitors to another room by sending them the new chatroom address.

In a Virtual Room, you can ban or explicitly allow users based on their email address. You can also change the room password from time to time. Of course, these options only apply if you have the administrator password for the chatroom.



Meaning you would either have to make a new chat entirely (because there is no way to moderate, and because you would have no idea who it is they'd get the chat link yet again) or ask for email addresses, which is strictly against CS rules: and yet CS mods still support it.


I wish they would just give us clear cut, clear alternatives on what to use and what to not use. They don't say anywhere in the rules discord is disallowed- because honestly, it makes sense that it would be allowed because JM is allowed and on JM you can video chat with absolutely no record: discord you can only voice call, and there's a chat log of absolutely everything.

[ede]

Concerning the site, stuff like that often excludes people and the chat there has no way to moderate. All you can do is 'prune' posts which would delete however many recent posts, but thats about it. Some don't even offer that ability. I've looked into these all before and none have worked well: even communities that at one point had a freeforum, such as kiamaras or jellybeandragons, have now moved on to discord and skype. I think the alternatives CS staff give are rather pointless and even more detrimental than the actual stuff they're trying to "hide". I'm honestly amazed they haven't banned join.me because of how volatile it is.

Thank you for the suggestions though! I'm still unsure what to do because all these options were mostly looked into already but I still appreciate them really, because at least it's something. CS staff still haven't gotten back to me so I'm kind of just twiddling my thumbs waiting for them to respond.

If anything, I think its silly to ban something like discord when the alternatives are even worse. Join.me is literally terrible when you look at it, yet CS staff still recommends that. Chatzy is literally a nightmare and you'd have to pay for it, and you're unable to ban people. It even says in the FAQ-

I wish they would just give us clear cut, clear alternatives on what to use and what to not use. They don't say anywhere in the rules discord is disallowed- because honestly, it makes sense that it would be allowed because JM is allowed and on JM you can video chat with absolutely no record: discord you can only voice call, and there's a chat log of absolutely everything.

I agree, I wish they didn't have rules scattered everywhere. If I wasnt aware and posted that link, I would get a warning without knowing the rule beforehand. Ridiculous.
I'd also like to know the reason why Discord and Skype isn't allowed, if it's because of personal information, people share DeviantArt links that have a lot of personal info on it so why not ban DA links as well.

[nickjr]

My guess for Skype is that its very nature is like those of Facebook and Google+: personal information is required and there's no way to hide all of it. Last time I checked, entering false information is against the TOS of those three services (for lack of a better term because really, those aren't doing anyone any services by making personal info available to the world, especially since it's not like they're job-oriented sites >.>) As of a semi-recent update, new Skype accounts that are created without a link to a Microsoft account have no way to hide the telephone number, which is required information. I know this from experience. So many wasted hours of searching only to have a friend link me to this horrifying answer...

We are not supposed to put links with personal info, so we can report dA links that have personal info. dA by itself isn't an offender, because no personal info is required to set up a dA account except for an email address and a date of birth, both of which can be hidden easily.