Hey Team,
As you may have noticed, Megiddo and I have been toying with setting up some form of app or service where we can facilitate better team communication as well as interface more directly with our community. We have our forums here- but communication tends to be slow and we usually only check once or twice per day (if we're lucky). We have a Steam group to interface with our community but.. how often do we check that?
We first started looking at
Slack:
https://slack.com/, but we were put off when we saw pricing and limitations for free accounts (we don't want another OneAll, do we?), as well as some other concerns like not being able to hide our email addresses.
The next was
Gitter, which you may have received invitations for:
https://gitter.im/. I wasn't a fan of this since it seems to tie closely into GitHub accounts, but it does show git activity, which is neat. It doesn't have any desktop/mobile apps from what I can tell, which is a personal preference for me. On top of that, we're limited to 25 users for private chats- Not a concern for our team size, but, something we'd have to watch for.
We've just tried
Discord- and I think it's a good fit for what we want to do:
http://discordapp.com/. It works like a combination of TeamSpeak and Skype (or IRC), and the whole site is more oriented for gaming, much like TeamSpeak servers are. It's completely free, no catches, and can allow for people to use it without having to sign up. I doubt we'll use the voice chat features at all, but it does provide us a spot to have meetings if we choose to.
So, why do we need this? There is one major reason that I wanted to use something like this- and that is team communication. Quite frequently, Megiddo and I will hop on Google Chat and start talking about ULX4 related features, discuss bugs/issues, task lists and things to focus on, ask questions about how things work, etc... These discussions are always helpful for the both of us, but everyone else on our team is left out. I feel that if we had a place where these discussions could be shared, then we will all be much more informed about project updates, as well as having a greater opportunity to provide suggestions and directions for moving forward. I also believe that it will be helpful for Mr. President in particular- we would love your help with development on ULX4, or even patching up ULX 3, and I know that it's hard to just "jump in" given that we have no formal structure for what needs to be worked on. If you were to see us in chat one day while we were working on ULX, I'm sure you would be able to help us out.
The other (lesser) reason I considered something like this is that if we get an active enough community on the chat, we can keep an eye out for common issues or complaints or feedback addressed by users. Additionally, this is an outlet where we can provide users with quicker help and support, and I think some users may like just "hanging out" with us. I'm still hesitant on this, and I definitely won't be throwing it open to the public until we feel comfortable with it. Think of IRC channels for specific software or games- Megiddo frequents the #moonscript IRC channel and has been able to get some good feedback about moonscript-related issues. Obviously, we don't want to be obligated to respond to each user that comes to the chat- most likely we'll be pretty silent unless we need to respond.
Anyways, it is late and I think this post turned into much more rambling than I initially intended.
I'd love for feedback from you guys about this. I've created the server, and you guys can join up using the URL below:
https://discord.gg/0sj22xxJO7nKiS2vEnter your username, and in order to permanently "claim" that username, you'll have to tie it to a new account (email address). You only have one account for all of Discord, so you can use that account to join other channels if you choose to.
You will start in the public chat- everyone will be able to see your posts there. Once you're added, I can promote you to the "Team Ulysses" role, which will give you access to our private chat. Be sure to disable voice chat once you sign in, and familiarize yourself with how the app works.
