Merge Discord and IRC

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Bad idea
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idea
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Total votes : 40

Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Sun Jan 01, 2017 2:30 pm

Kate wrote:One big difference between the logging is, let's say Tess, avi, ambi, and Jack are all on irc. I might trust all four of them and feel comfortable with any or all of them logging what I say. When I found myself not talking on discord a good number of times because I was comfortable with the people who were there seeing it but not necessarily everyone who shows up in perpetuity, I realized it really wasn't worth it. I hadn't considered that a bot communicating between the two would remove that advantage. So...I guess I think it's a good idea but I personally will probably use Irc even less?

That's actually a pretty good point that I forgot about, since it was one of my original objections to IRC. I'm still not huge on that aspect of it, but I don't think it's a dealbreaker either, for me anyway. Totally think it's fair to.

Piter Lauchy wrote:Maybe it's possible to deactivate that bot for single users on request? People who know stuff about stuff would have to figure that out, but that's my first thought. Surely, the goal of the merge isn't to alienate anyone.

I'm not really sure how this would work out, really. If we disable the bot from transferring messages from an individual user to Discord, it means the conversation on the Discord end is missing part of the conversation, and anyone on the IRC side that responds to it is gonna look crazy and confuse Discord users. Kinda like hearing one side of a phone conversation, except now there's as many as 10 people at once, and you're missing only one of them. (We could probably do this, just set the bot to ignore that user's nicks and IP, but that could quickly become a pain, and if a bunch of users to it, it kinda defeats the purpose of the bot in the first place).

Because of the way Discord is set up, we're not able to disable logging for a single user, and doing so for a single user that's being relayed via a bot would, I imagine, be pretty difficult, even if it was possible. For that matter, from doing some googling and poking about the client, I don't think there's a way for server admins to even set a history limit on the channel, or even to delete history. (Not mass delete anyway, you could go line by line, but fuck that). Possibly there's a way to delete history with a bot, but it's still logged for some time at least.

Sooooo it's probably going to come down to what's the lesser of the evils.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Learned Nand » Sun Jan 01, 2017 2:53 pm

I think the solution when you want to say something that isn't being logged is to create a throwaway channel. That's already what you have to do on IRC if you don't want your conversation being logged, or want to limit the people who are going to hear it.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Tesseracts » Sun Jan 01, 2017 6:02 pm

Kate wrote:One big difference between the logging is, let's say Tess, avi, ambi, and Jack are all on irc. I might trust all four of them and feel comfortable with any or all of them logging what I say. When I found myself not talking on discord a good number of times because I was comfortable with the people who were there seeing it but not necessarily everyone who shows up in perpetuity, I realized it really wasn't worth it. I hadn't considered that a bot communicating between the two would remove that advantage. So...I guess I think it's a good idea but I personally will probably use Irc even less?

We are currently discussing how to manage the spoiler channel in Discord. There are bots which would make it easy to clear out a large number of posts at once, so we could delete everything in the spoiler room after every discussion. So if you don't want a discussion to be logged a channel such as this may be an option.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Kate » Sun Jan 01, 2017 6:42 pm

aviel wrote:I think the solution when you want to say something that isn't being logged is to create a throwaway channel. That's already what you have to do on IRC if you don't want your conversation being logged, or want to limit the people who are going to hear it.

Yes, but this means that you always need to do this. Like I said, it's the difference between trusting the people who are there now with your information and trusting everyone who will ever be there; monitoring my conversation because I don't necessarily want someone I know to join TCS and be able to easily see everything I talk about with my friends here is tedious and I don't want to make a throwaway channel to talk about my son, my marriage, my ambitions, my fears, my insecurities, etc. Perhaps it is unwise to trust that Tess, avi, ambi, and Jack won't ever use that information against me or relay it to people who I don't want to have it, but it's a calculation I make based on knowing them. With Discord, that is very different. I wouldn't want, for example, my ex-husband to see even some of the more mundane things about my life.

So if they were merged this way, I would either need to accept the unlikely but possible chance that someone whom I don't want to have access to those logs having access, or not participate on main on Irc unless I was willing to be constantly editing myself. And that is a bit tiresome when your mouth (fingers?) is as big as mine.

A bot that goes through and deletes logs periodically is an interesting idea, though would Discord still have that?

I know I'm a freak, especially given how open I have been in the past on the forum.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Bert » Sun Jan 01, 2017 7:11 pm

Kate, I think that is a valid concern, so you shouldn't feel crazier than usual for voicing it. One of the bots I've been playing around with can do batch deletes of a specific persons messages. The catch is you or another moderator would have to tell it to do so, and it could only do 100 at a wack (so given your big mouth, it would take a couple commands a day :P), and you would have to be on Discord for it to work.

Dr. Ambiguous wrote:ripping it in two with two chat rooms was a terrible idea, but oh well.


Tess kind of addressed this but I'm going to cover it a bit more. Since I stay online on both and log IRC constantly, like you, I can objectively back up her assertion that there was little activity in IRC before Discord started, and now there is regular activity in Discord and the same or less activity in IRC as there was before. I get that it is frustrating since IRC is your preferred choice, but it isn't fair to dictate other people's behavior based on your preferences that way. Which brings me to the important point.

There was no high-level decision to move everyone to Discord. A member had the idea of creating a TCS Discord server, they went ahead and created it, and ceded it to the TCS staff when a couple of us came over to it. Beyond that people made their own decision to use Discord or IRC. It could have gone the other way and everyone would be back on IRC, but it didn't. It seems like from your previous statements on this that you would prefer we have stopped everything and had a staff discussion as to if we were going to allow this to continue, which didn't happen. We let it run and TCS users decided with their feet, so to say, what they wanted to do. I'm only speaking for myself when I say this but I think it is more in the spirit of TCS for staff to step aside and let the users decide the direction the site takes, as much as we can, anyways.

Now, the majority of the real time chat users here have apparently decided they wanted to stick with Discord, despite ridicule and hints that they were dumb for doing so from some that prefer IRC (yourself included). That kind of stuff has really left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't have a dog in this "fight". I'm a moderator and I will continue to do my job in both, no matter where people end up. But this really doesn't have to be a fight, guys. Not everybody is going to like the same apps you do. It's a fact of digital life. They can have good reasons for doing so and aren't obligated to stick with your choice. It isn't personal. These are just ways to talk with each other, not tribes to get up in arms about.

In closing, I think we need to go with this bridge bot so we can go back to swapping dank memes and circlejerking about how bad the new movie rebooting a classic is. Kate, I love you and I really hope the deleting bot solution works for you because I miss having you in the conversations. I know this is less than ideal for you but we gotta make this work. You and I both know how boring IRC is right now by comparison and it isn't fair to those over there to leave them hanging if there is a way for them to have their cake and eat it, too.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Kate » Sun Jan 01, 2017 9:40 pm

I said in my first post it's probably a good idea but that it eliminates the advantage that ultimately led to me choosing irc over discord; I think there has been ridicule on both "sides" of this. Which is silly; it's okay to prefer one client or the other. Honestly, I think the decision here is best left to the people who frequent IRC since they're the ones who will be most affected by this. It would be awesome to be unified again, but I would say that people, including in the mod staff, actively encouraged switching over and said, "it's dead here, we're all over at discord now." While it's accurate that discord has more activity, I think it's easy to get the impression that mods had a part in the quasi-move. There is less activity in IRC since discord, so I'm not sure why some people seem to think that the switch to discord did not negatively impact IRC. It did. Of course that makes for a tense and sour situation. It's great that discord has been a net positive, but it has certainly seemed to make things worse for some people and that seems to be kind of ignored or denied. Which just makes things even more divided. I don't think it does any good to focus on whether people are right or wrong to feel upset by how things were handled. What good will come from it? I think what matters is how it's handled from this point forward, and if some people felt left behind, slighted, etc. maybe now is the chance to listen to each other carefully and think this through. If you want to have a voice in this, now is the time to do it. Like I said, I would be more comfortable if this was something that the crowd who stayed on IRC was fully behind, or if we could do it in a way so that there was a discord specific chat that was linked to it (not main) so that irc people get to make an active choice to participate in this or not.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Learned Nand » Mon Jan 02, 2017 2:12 am

I don't get the impression that there is ridicule going on. He can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Ambi's point is that people are stupid or even wrong for preferring discord (even though I know he feels IRC is better), but that the bifurcation of chat was a problem regardless of which system is better. And to the extent that the creation of a discord reduced activity on IRC, that is a problem.

I think Kate's recommendation that there be a discord-connected chat on IRC separate from #TCSChat is an interesting compromise, but if people on IRC are usually using #TCSChat, then I am not sure it totally solves the bifurcation issue. I think it might be preferable to simply not hook up #thevan, and encourage people to have unrecorded discussion in that room. It depends on whether the more general use case is one in which people on IRC are okay having their conversations logged on discord's servers or one in which people on IRC chose IRC because of its transient nature, but I suspect the former case is more common.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Jan 02, 2017 3:10 am

I would like to emphasize the point that there was no official decision to move to Discord. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this at all, because it should be obvious, but I guess it is not.

Members decided to use Discord because they like it. This was not "handled" poorly, because the only alternative to the way this was handled would be for me to forbid members from using Discord, which is not in our power to do since members are autonomous human beings. The only official action we took was adding Discord to the official IRC channels forum. This forum also includes channels like TCSBoners. If everyone spontaneously decided to chat on TCSBoners exclusively, it would be beyond my abilities to stop it and I wouldn't try to stop it.

Many IRC communities now use Discord instead. The change has happened all over the internet at about the same time, we are just one small part of a larger trend. If I had the ability to give you 6 months advance notice on all internet trends I would, but sadly I cannot.

Although it would be nice if we were in the same place, I have no problem with those of you who prefer IRC. I know IRC has it's advantages, and we have all devoted a lot of time and thought into building our IRC community. I don't want to push the community in a direction it doesn't want, which is why I made a public thread about this subject.

The way I see it, a chat room is defined by the people there and the conversations that happen. Discord and IRC are just tools and they're not worth agonizing over.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Kate » Mon Jan 02, 2017 4:06 am

I mean, I would say that staff redirecting people to discord counts as handling it. If we put a bot bridge in where the only way to not be logged from main in discord is to join discord so you can delete it (making it so that you need to work to maintain a level of privacy that was a given before
Spoiler: show
privacy here being the difference between walking around your friend's house naked with the curtains open, and doing that while it is being streamed and made accessible to anyone who wants to see it.
)

that is also an official move. Do we have the staff hierarchy there? Do the TCS IRC rules apply? (Actually do they?) Was there a consensus or discussion before that happened? The alternative to suddenly having the staff officially installed somewhere and telling users to go there is not forbidding things. Or rather, that is only one of a myriad of alternatives, one that no one was suggesting.

I'm not saying discord is wrong, but that it is very, very easy to get the impression that an official move was made and encouraged by TCS, because of how it happened.

I cannot speak for anyone else on IRC. I can only speak for myself. If main starts being logged on discord, I won't chat on IRC anymore either, but that is okay because I am barely there as is. If no one else on irc shares my concerns, great, and I am pretty sure I am the only one. But my options are to either not say anything and silently disappear or mention it before it happens. I did vote yes in the poll, because I think a bridge is a good idea and it's problematic that we are split when there is a simple solution. But, this will change IRC and I do think the people to ask about that are the ones who use it the most.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Grimstone » Mon Jan 02, 2017 4:47 am

Deleting/pruning chat history seems to be a feature of many Discord bots so there shouldn't be any problem here.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Bert » Mon Jan 02, 2017 5:30 am

There was no staff hierarchy when it started. In fact staff weren't even the administrators of it in the beginning, nor did we ask for it, it was given by the member who started it. As time went on and more people joined and like it we worked stuff out as we went. I said many times to people that it was unofficial for the first week or so, as did others. Now it serves as the de facto main chat location. None of that changes the fact no official decision was made to move the chat to Discord, nor will one be made. I understand if people got the wrong impression, but those incorrect impressions have now been corrected. However, we did not bamboozle people into using Discord and they are free to return to use IRC or even both any time they wish.

Also, you are mischaracterizing the privacy situation. Things said on Discord are only visible to members of TCS who bother to follow the link to Discord and bother to scroll or search through the logs to find it. That's it. In that sense it is actually more private than TCS forum posts, which can be seen by anyone on the internet. Or in a sense IRC, which can be accessed by anyone on the internet who can find our room (though they wouldn't see past messages so it isn't relevant).

I'm not sure what else we can do, Kate. Are there any other reasonable accommodations we can make? I'll totally send the commands for the bot to delete your messages every day if that is what it takes! I'm not joking.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Kate » Mon Jan 02, 2017 7:52 am

I'm not asking to be accomodated. I joined discord not long after it started, and the staff hierarchy was there, so it didn't take too long. I literally saw someone on staff tell people to go there instead on more than one occasion. Those things both gave that impression; that's all I'm saying, and I don't think it's an unreasonable impression. There are a few other things to say on this matter but we'd be beating a dead horse. You seem to believe things were not handled in a way that gave off the wrong impression; that's fine. The way it was handled certainly gave me the wrong impression that took a few weeks to correct, and perhaps that is on me but I am not alone so I tend to think it isn't. I never accused anyone of bamboozling, merely of accidentally sending the wrong impression and then saying there was no better way to do things when some people got upset when in fact there were other options.

And no, that is not mischaracterizing the privacy difference between irc and discord. Anyone who joins TCS has access to that link and can see anything said on the channel (indeed, some people like that feature). I cannot control who joins TCS, nor would I want to, but chat is not the forum and I never compared it to the forum. I will say things in chat that I specifically will not on the forum. That is easier to do when you have time to sit down and compose a post, not when you're shooting the shit with your friends at 3am. Am I wrong? Can people not see the backlog? Will I not need to employ just a bit more self-editing than I do on IRC? You know I'm not wrong. And it is just enough extra work to not be worth it, for me personally. If I blow off steam about my husband to a few friends who are on, is he never going to be able to see it and feel hurt? He's a member here. If I don't trust CertainlyATrollButSkatingTheLineWellEnoughToNotBeBanned, it's unreasonable to not want them to have easy access to what I say about my life when they aren't around? It's an appreciable difference in privacy. Not a huge one since irc isn't exactly private, but big enough to cross that line for me.

Again, I voted for the bridge bot. I think it's a good idea to make sure the people who use this are on board before doing this, which is not unreasonable, and I suspect most, if not all, will be because they miss their friends and to my knowledge, no one else is quite as hung up as I am on a third party logging and displaying those chats.

I think discord is a net good, as I said. As I said, I think a bridge bot is a good thing and it would be good to be unified again. I'm not, I cannot stress this enough, not asking for accomodations. So I'm not sure what you take issue with here; that I have a line I am uncomfortable crossing personally and I voiced it? That I don't think people were unreasonable to be hurt or see this the way they did, and think the transition could have been a bit smoother?
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Jan 02, 2017 8:05 am

I can't read Bert's mind but I do not believe anyone thought you were asking for accommodations. Even without being asked I think we just naturally want to accommodate everyone though because we are all a bunch of hippies.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Mon Jan 02, 2017 1:04 pm

Bert wrote:
Dr. Ambiguous wrote:ripping it in two with two chat rooms was a terrible idea, but oh well.

Tess kind of addressed this but I'm going to cover it a bit more. Since I stay online on both and log IRC constantly, like you, I can objectively back up her assertion that there was little activity in IRC before Discord started, and now there is regular activity in Discord and the same or less activity in IRC as there was before. I get that it is frustrating since IRC is your preferred choice, but it isn't fair to dictate other people's behavior based on your preferences that way. Which brings me to the important point.

There was no high-level decision to move everyone to Discord. A member had the idea of creating a TCS Discord server, they went ahead and created it, and ceded it to the TCS staff when a couple of us came over to it. Beyond that people made their own decision to use Discord or IRC. It could have gone the other way and everyone would be back on IRC, but it didn't. It seems like from your previous statements on this that you would prefer we have stopped everything and had a staff discussion as to if we were going to allow this to continue, which didn't happen. We let it run and TCS users decided with their feet, so to say, what they wanted to do. I'm only speaking for myself when I say this but I think it is more in the spirit of TCS for staff to step aside and let the users decide the direction the site takes, as much as we can, anyways.

Now, the majority of the real time chat users here have apparently decided they wanted to stick with Discord, despite ridicule and hints that they were dumb for doing so from some that prefer IRC (yourself included). That kind of stuff has really left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't have a dog in this "fight". I'm a moderator and I will continue to do my job in both, no matter where people end up. But this really doesn't have to be a fight, guys. Not everybody is going to like the same apps you do. It's a fact of digital life. They can have good reasons for doing so and aren't obligated to stick with your choice. It isn't personal. These are just ways to talk with each other, not tribes to get up in arms about.

So let's shut this down right now, cause this misunderstands and misrepresents my position. I never said that Discord killed IRC, or that it was some bumping place prior to all this. It'd been pretty dead for a long time now, and I've been saying as much since before TCS Discord was a thing. I've also never tried to dictate which one anyone uses. I'm very vocal about my opinion on the matter, but I've not once tried to stop someone from using Discord. So let's not imply that I have.

Which brings me to my main issue with Discord, and it's not even that it's a shit text client. I'd use it anyway if things had been handled more properly. It's that there wasn't any sort of staff discussion on it, not before, not during, not after. Not until now anyway, a few months after the fact. I literally woke up one day to "hey, we're using Discord now, but we're only testing it." Yeah, a user set it up, but if a user is going to do something, then we, as staff, should discuss it and come to a consensus before officially endorsing it. That hasn't happened. Now sure, Discord hasn't to my knowledge been officially made the official TCS chat platform, but it effectively has been. There needs to be leadership, there needs to be someone in charge, the staff manage the site, and if we want user input about something, we should discuss it as a staff first, then present it to the wider site. Not just let whoever has an idea run willy nilly with it and see who jumps on the bandwagon.

Sure, most users have decided to switch to Discord, and that's all fine and dandy. But let's not act like this was just the users, and let's not pretend that you're some neutral party with "no dog in this fight," cause you aren't. You've been pushing Discord since Day 1, or damn close to it. Tess has too. And if that's what you guys prefer, then that's fine. But let's not pretend you're truly neutral and "just doing your job." And let's not pretend it was purely the users who wanted this. And let's not pretend that the handling of all of this has been abysmal. Not everyone's problem with Discord is purely at the client level, or even primarily. I'm sure for some reason it is, but I'll let others speak for themselves. We're not all a bunch of children who are just upset that our favorite toy isn't the most popular anymore.

Furthermore, since I forgot to say it earlier, Discord has infact had a negative impact on IRC activity. Whether anyone actually cares or not, or if they consider that to matter is another point. IRC may have been largely dead before, but the split has made it even more dead.

And all of what I've been saying is stuff that I've been saying since the get go. Normally we discuss things as staff, reach a consensus, and then move from there. This was an out of left field "we're using this now too" with no discussion whatsoever, prior to this.
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Re: Merge Discord and IRC

Postby Tesseracts » Mon Jan 02, 2017 3:39 pm

Because the discussion of the staff has nothing to do with privacy concerns, the actual merits of Discord, or anything which concerns users, I'm moving it to the staff forum.
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