ばか！バカ！　馬鹿ー月！

You may have probably already heard of it (as it's popular with a few translation groups), but there's a free chat program that has gained on popularity in the last few years called Discord. The service can be accessed via the browser, a dedicated desktop app or on mobile.

You could say it's what IRC would have been if it had been created today instead of 25 years ago. I won't go over all the features, but you can check them out here.

What I think this program gives us over IRC (as the BT irc channel is not so active) that could benefit BT, is a more dynamic place for conversations. I've made a dummy BT server as an example to show a bit of what could be done with it:



Staff can set up channels for different things, like language sections so readers and even contributors could meet up and exchange together (could replace some of the use of the BT talk pages), an announcement or support channels. The service keeps logs of the conversations, so even if you had been offline for a while, you only need to scroll up to check on what has been said.

Links, like images and pages are resolved with a preview, which is a nice plus. Staff could also choose to have a voice channel if they ever wanted to have a voice conversation (no idea if they do that currently).

On the management side, there're also some nice features:



In Discord there can be "roles" which compare to user groups, were privileges or restrictions can apply. In the example above, the announcement channel is read-only for regular users and only supervisor or higher users can post messages. In a similar way, the admin-room (first image), is hidden for all but supervisors and higher users. They can also delete posts, kick or ban users if needed.

Overall, it's a nice service, with new features regulary added. I'm not saying it should replace IRC completely, but it would be a nifty add-on to what we currently have on BT to exchange and communicate.

Give it a try!



PS Who won the council elections?

While not having a reply in a month is kinda discouraging, I still think this is a good idea.

Might as well say that the devs are working on a search function of the chat history? that's gonna be great.

Some users have come by to check it out, so know that the example server is still there.


PS I'm still curious about who won the elections.

Sorry, I meant to reply to this earlier, but was distracted by RL when this was first posted. On one hand, sure, why not have a Discord server, I wouldn't see a problem with putting it on the sidebar.

On the other hand, there's not too much chatting going on in IRC, I think, so I'm not sure it'd get a lot of use, particularly if it's not replacing IRC completely (then at least chat there is wouldn't be split). I think it could potentially work if there was at least a small core group of users who want to use it; I'm personally not spending as much time on BT these days, and I'm not a particularly chatty person even if I was, so I don't think I'd count for much in that regard.

Frankly, I'd love to see more BT discussion or chat, so if there was a group of people that wanted to use, I'd want to support it. If you want it to be added to the sidebar or whatever, we should be able to do that, the only thing I'd want to make sure is there'd be at least a few people stopping by the channel to answer questions or whatever if new people use it. As for the exec council elections: cloudii, zzhk, Cthaeh, hobogunner, and KLSymph.

Thanks for the reply!

As for myself, I admit that for the last year I've used IRC only for the xdcc bots and having moved to discord with my group of friends for conversation, so at least I'm pretty much on discord everyday.

I don't know if the discord question should maybe be asked on the wiki, so it's more visible?


PS thanks for the council info too.

Yeah, so, I think there's at least a couple of people who would log on, so I feel like we might as well throw it on the sidebar. I feel like it might be a bit of a long shot as far as becoming active, but it certainly won't become active hidden in the forums. And who knows, maybe some new members can start some regular discussions away from all the dead old members (ie myself) on the IRC chat.

Any support or opposition to me adding it on the sidebar?

I support this.

I support the discord server being made, I am on discord quite frequently and join many ln servers.

I support this. Time to upgrade communication channels I believe. IRC's glory days are done.

Definitely support this

I'm in. Will try to help anyway I can

I support this as i see people (and myself) being more online on discord.

I recently started using discord and have found it most useful in keeping in contact with fellow light novel fans and translators. It's a useful place to haute and discuss.

i support this

I'm up for this. Discord is great because it's got excellent organisational features and it's cross platform with a browser interface as well.

Since the service is now being considered, some people have joined out of interest/curiosity, so it's nice

I think the most interest thing so far, is having several languages on the same server