One feature that platforms like Slack, Discord, … offer is instant response, also known as chat.
But Discourse, the software that runs this forum, also has such functionality via chats (https://scsynth.org/chat) which can be reached via the bubble at the top.
Currently it has only one channel, Lobby, but maybe the admins could extend this to (at least?)
- Questions
- Development
- Creative process
and create a sticky post which mentions that this is also one way of communicating around here.
The question is therefore - do we embrace the chat functionality or should we leave this place as a purely thread-based forum?
Right now, much of the SC community seems to be spread out across multiple platforms, which is nice in terms of decentralization, but also makes it difficult to reach as many people as possible - especially on proprietary platforms.
I think there has been some discussion recently about how to reach as many people as possible to ask for feedback or questions like “is anyone affected by a proposed change”? (Although I think we should be careful about taking this or any other platform as a representation of the community, as many people who use SC are not on any of these platforms.)
I think chat could be really useful for quick questions (e.g. why does x do y?) or coordination for developers (e.g. do we do x and then y or the other way around? how does the setup of x work?) and would provide an open and self-sufficient alternative for chat. IIRC, we don’t have an open platform for such gatherings, but Discourse could be one.
See you in the Lobby!