Athena
I made a temporary Discord account to see what was going on inside the Ponybooru Discord community.
- Featured image votes are exclusively conducted in a server channel via emoji reactions.
- The moderator channels are completely inaccessible to users.
- The server has a separate set of rules completely independent from the booru’s rules.
- Requires making an account with a third-party service provider to access the server.
- Requires abiding by Discord’s terms of service and community guidelines that can change at any moment to access the server.
- The server has a separate mod audit log specifically for Discord server moderation.
- The server has an exclusive news feed regarding the booru.
- The server is effectively its own insular community completely separate from the booru.
- Art and comments that may otherwise be posted to the booru are posted in the server’s art channel instead.
- Questions and answers posted in the server pertaining to the booru are unable to be indexed by search engines or accessed outside of the server at all.
- Everything posted to the server is unarchivable and will be lost when the server inevitably collapses in on itself in the future (e.g. incompatible ToS changes).
A decent solution may be to either implement a native shoutbox into the booru, embed an IRC chatroom, or (as a last resort) embed a third-party shoutbox that allows anonymous chatting (e.g. Chatango) to unify both communities and allow everyone access to the community features currently exclusive to the Discord server.
I was initially going to suggest bridging/mirroring everything posted to the server as an alternative, but this may cause issues with Discord’s developer policy (“You may not use the APIs in any way to … scrape any Discord Data …”), as well as with privacy laws such as GDPR.
Please let me know what you think!
Additional (albeit old) server discussion: - Ponybooru Discord?
- (subthread about Discord)
- Should ponybooru have a official discord?
- We Have A Discord.
