Bringing developers, translators, and users together with Discord
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Case Study, Development, Discord | 1988 Views
Discord servers are proving to be a great way to build a fast and direct line of communication between developers and users. Plenty of developers are already deeply familiar with Discord thanks to their beginner-friendly bot API. I use Discord myself to provide support to users, announce updates, and to obtain valuable feedback.
The purpose of any community Discord like my own is to replace the role of forums on the old web. It's a good idea to have an official server managed by your company for any product that you expect a community to grow around before others do it for you. These servers have the added benefit of giving you the ability to communicate updates to thousands of users instantly, gather feedback and bug reports from a wider demographic than one of which you'd find on GitHub or a ticketing service.
Developers
Developers find Discord to be a great place to collaborate. Discord has good integration with GitHub, code highligting, a large character limit for long code snippets, and basically every method of screen sharing is possible through Discord's features.
Translators
The high character limit, rich media sharing features, GitHub integration, and voice chat can all help translators to work quickly and efficiently. You can even automatically notify translators when new strings are ready.
Summary
Discord allows for somewhat secure private messaging when needed, rich attachments, advanced automation with the help of bots, and incredible scalibility. The main challenges are separating work and play (for some people), the lack of tools for dealing with spam and raids (thousands of bad actors working to congest all the channels on your server), and the risks inherit to relying on another company for a free platform.
I'd argue that more people should be using Discord servers for a support-community hybrid like I have with Yiays Bot Support. But at the same time, it's quite the commitment to run a Discord, and it will only be worth the cost of labour if your demographics line up with that of Discord users.