Hi,
I was recently in the Aberdeen hackerspaces where we were experimenting with using discord for chats and discussions. Imho I think that a hackerspace discord would be great for sharing ideas or getting input on stuff, jumping into voice chats and streaming stuff. Having all the hackerspaces in a collaborative real-time environment would be beneficial.
Mike
I love discord.
I don’t love the “discord” that comes about from discussing discussion platforms.
Some prefer slack, irc, telegram, forums, email, matrix, you’ll never get a consensus.
Discord and slack are mostly disliked because they are not searchable (outside of discord), it’s mainly a proprietary and shareholder beholden monetised platform, and managing that kind of thing requires very good moderation tools and an attentive team.
That being said, there is a discord for different hackspaces members someone has brought about, there’s an unofficial emfcamp discord, and a bunch of others.
Would I set this up gor the hackspace foundation? I’d be tempted to.
I’d have to be convinced by full buy-in from everyone, and re-assured that discord wouldn’t upend the whole thing.
We use it at EEH and it works very well most the time. We use the forum capability for discussing item purchases or threads for specific topics. My only frustration is that you have to go looking for “new” forum entries - they’re not highlighted if a new discussion kicks off. So if you start a project and blog about it in our projects forum, no one reads it unless you tag @everyone!
Yes, there’s a “problem” with the forums on discord, that members aren’t subscribed to the forum notifications by default, they have to opt in, so that needs supplementing with some kind of bot to ask if people want to opt in.
Do you use roles that users can select to get notifications about?
I should amend that there are bots that users react to to select roles they want including in
This will be a complicated answer. When people join, they have no role and get dumped into our welcome area. A trustee greets them and when we’ve decided they’re human, we assign them the human role. When they’ve been inducted, we can upgrade them to “member” role. If they are a member, they can use our discord bot. The discord bot provides discount codes for software deals we have (like lightburn), controls the outside lights and you can view the current status of the 3D printers and get updates on overnight prints etc. Our trustee roles have even more access, including access to security cameras and non-discord server functions.
Any reason for not allowing someone joining that they just get dropped into a general channel, and get access to the other channels when mod gives the role? The gate keeping doesn’t allow someone to invite a friend who might be interested.
Yes, lots of spammers and data harvesters. This has been fairly successful since we brought it in and we haven’t had issues since. It’s not gatekeeping. Anyone can join as long as they’re vaguely human and the average waiting time for approval is a few minutes to a couple of hours (unless they join at 4am, which usually gives us pause)
There are a few bots that stop accounts that very new or are not verified, filters out a lot of the spam accounts
Have you seen any that can handle if an account that’s joined has been compromised? They seem to miss that when a ‘trusted’ account turns to spam.
I’m eyeing up double counter as a potential bot.
Anymore thoughts on an discord server for hackerspaces?
I thought there already was one?
Is it for a subgroup?
and ours East Essex Hackspace