Forum - Merits of the WikiForum and Talk Pages vs. Off-Site Groups

But do the forum and the chats share the same purpose? I've always felt the wiki and the forums were a more formal space dedicated to serious discussion, and the off-site platforms were for casual chat. Hence the message format. The long texts on the forum versus instant messaging. I don't think people who created the past chats were looking for a forum, they just wanted to socialize with other mappers.

To answer your first question, I feel like younger (<13?) people often want to prove themselves by becoming an admin/mod of *something*. I'd bet that at least half of these Discord chats and whatnot were created by users like that. I completely agree with Eklas though, Discord people just don't tend to use it for mapping. What they want is a social platform, but IMO OGF doesn't need that - it needs a reliable system for communication in long term which is by the forum is a better option.

I think the thing we need the most is a better form of the Forum log that brings the latest posts up in chronological order like how the User Diaries do, alongside the most recent replies. Maybe linking to it from the left side of the page under recent changes

Main reason: I like to voice chat with my collaborators and my companions.

And of course, its more casual

When I joined the OGF discord and was just chatting with other mappers, it was great!

Does the communication on the chat actually happen faster than communication here? Because even here on this post with all the people reading it, replies are often not instantaneous because of time zone differences, people mapping, working, sleeping, etc. I find it hard to imagine that the chat would be any faster for the same reasons.

Yes, because a million written words can be conveyed in 100 spoken words. Voice chat is infinitely more community based and important than text to text

For the forum, I think, one factor are admins. It's their presence or non-presence which affects a thread most. The same in the diaries. People gather eagerly where they see admins involvement and leave where is their absence. If the admins want to make the forum to our gathering place, then they need to do something for it. Where admins are involved there will be a result at the end of the thread, without admins its just bla-blah.

Admins: Keep us excited, keep us updated and keep us involved! What will be going on in the next months? What are your plans, generally? When will be the next AR120 vote? The western continents? Commonia? Do you want us involved or not?

If you want to talk with us about that, the forum will be a vivid place. If you don't, it's gonna be very dull here.

I'ma have to disagree with Zytik here, strongly.

I do think that something beyond the forum and wiki could be very helpful, but voice chat is probably the single most problematic because there's no "stop and think about what you're about to say" factor- which has been a problem even in text from what I've seen. Also, text-to-text allows for people who aren't there at the exact moment to respond when they're available, and for people who say problematic stuff to generally be held responsible vs a "he said-she-said" situation. As long as there's a way for more efficient group communication and a good notification system, something more basic-social-media-like than the forum but not unorganized and risky like Discord would be optimal

Also, while Toadwart has a valid point about being updated and involved, we need to respect the fact that this is just a hobby, even for the admins, and that they don't always have the time or energy to always be involved or run everything. That's where more experienced mappers have to step up and do our parts as well. Granted, for large projects where we can't progress at all without an answer from admin, that's a special case, but I'm pretty sure pre-incidents that the reasoning for NOT adding more stuff was largely the fact that the admins already have so much on their plate. Let's try to respect that fact