Now that my book tour is mostly wrapped up and my next book is still in the early stages of development, I’m hoping to put more time into the L&B stuff. And as the G+ ship sinks faster, I’m thinking harder about where to swim ashore.
Right now I’m considering revamping the L&B shopfront website to hold an “official” L&B forum (and possibly a blog), with the commercial stuff shunted off to one side.
How many of you would realistically make use of something like that?
Realistically, no. All the communities I wanted to keep tabs on are/were centralized here, so the chances of me actually participating in any one forum replacement for each is rather small 🙁
Unless there’s some kind of forum aggregator these days…
Definitely set up a blog though, ideally with rss.
Blogs are looking like the new (old) hotness…
Like, I’d like to think that I would. But honestly seems unlikely.
I would follow the blog. Unlikely to visit a forum much.
I would absolutely follow a blog; as for forums there is no viable solution yet!
Have you considered a discord server (or channel somewhere, maybe on the osr one?). Also, I saw Berlin in my local Comic book shop (Easthampton, MA) and the owner was singing its praises.
I would definitely follow a blog and utilize a web forum. I likely would not use Discord. I find it too chaotic and poorly organized. Maybe Slack, since I’m part of a few communities there already. I can only speak for myself but definitely would not follow to WeMe unless things have really changed over there. I don’t see what’s wrong with a good old fashioned web forum/message board though!
I don’t think I would. Way things are now, I would probably follow a Discord channel of yours; or lurk wherever you’re known to be lurkin’.
Discord fails for people who drop in a few times a week, or even once a day. Conversations have to be threaded, so they last longer than 5 minutes.
I guess I’ll switch to an rss reader on my phone and start building up a blogroll again.
I haven’t made the leap to really get into Freebooters and other L&B products yet. I just discovered them as I was wrapping up my last game of World of Dungeons. It’s definitely something I’d like to get into in the future and as and when I do I’d definitely value having a place to find discussions about rules issues, techniques, products, etc. But right now I’m running two other games with two more waiting in the wings and I’m not doing much reading beyond those four. So the truth is I wouldn’t really use such a forum for another 6 months at least.
Questions I might ask when you are researching these options:
What is the purpose of this community?
a) To connect users to each other?
b) to connect users to you?
c) announcements/news?
G+ was good for all 3; but other platforms favor one dimension of communication over another. If you understand what your communication priority is, that may help filter out solutions as you do research.
Probably wouldn’t use a forum, unless the tech has improved over the last 5 years or so. The idea of a phpBB forum is making me sick to my stomach… 🙁
A couple of communities have moved to MeWe; and it’s a mixed bag over there. It’s sort of a combination of G+ and Discord, with both a post and comment communication method (like G+); and a chat communication method (like what I imagine Discord is good at). I know there are concerns about ownership of that platform.
Slack would be really cool; although like Discord, it can get a bit overwhelming from an asynchronous standpoint – only your most frequent engagers will be caught up. That said, you can have a “channel” that is devoted only to your news posts that may limit comments.
Slack is free up to 10,000 messages; but after that you have to pay. There may also be a limit to the ## of users; but I’m not sure what that number is. (Ah here it is… https://slack.com/pricing). Wow, the Gauntlet probably loses money on everyone in their Slack, unless they have some sort of cheaper grandfathered plan. But now I understand why they open their Slack to only paid Patreon members at the $6-7 level.
slack.com – Where work happens
That said, I chose “probably would use whatever you decide” as I have found your suite of products match very closely what I like about Dungeon World; and of course I’ve been following your work since early 90’s Jar of Fools days…
Chris Shorb AFAIK with slack if you don’t pay you just lose old messages. They don’t start charging you. (At least that appears to be case for the slacks I am on.)
On forum technology, I’d highly recommend taking a look at discourse.org – they are doing some really impressive stuff with trust levels, threading, and ease of reading long time spanning threads.
discourse.org – Discourse – Civilized Discussion
Shane Liebling Ah, good to know re: Slack.
Shane Liebling Spendy though: payments.discourse.org – Discourse pricing
Chris Shorb In theory you can host it yourself. It is open source and they have a huge community… But yes, if you are not technically inclined it can be pricey.
Chris Shorb, thanks for the solid suggestions!
MeWe is looking like the closest thing to a G+ analogue. It’s not perfect and I share concerns about its ownership, but it does what G+ does and it has a mobile app (which is pretty important for some).
Would read the blog.
Would keep forgetting about the forum
Chris Whetstone Yes. I will say G+’s mobile app was meh. In particular if you get notifications from G+ sent to your Gmail, when I would click the link, I would get an error. That issue was never satisfactorily answered.
There really is no option that will be as good as G+ is. I run some huge forums. I use Slack. I use Discord. None match this place. What a shame.
Maezar the Mad wonder if they’d ever turn the source over, like they did for wave