What's the Quake equivalent to Doomworld?

[ReaperAA]

27 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

Honestly though, much as one'd hate to admit it, forums are reaching an archaic status at this point in time.

 

Sad, but true. I don't like Discord as much as the traditional forums but many forums are dying left and right and their communities are migrating to discord.

 

An example is Duke4.net which now has a discord server. Most of the activity seems to happen there now and the Duke4 forum is very inactive because of this (only like 20-ish messages per day across all the threads.)

[Lizardcommando]

Didn't there used to be a Quakeworld?

 

Also, I thought PlanetQuake was sort of the closest equivalent to Doomworld.

[Lila Feuer]

37 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

Half a year some other forum I was frequently visiting got shut down with the notice "please visit us at Facebook" and as a result I just quit that community forever.

 

Honestly anyone who moves their entire community to FB probably isn't worth the trouble keeping up with.

[loveless]

For single player...no idea, people cared?  

  

ESReality was the only place I knew of that people went to talk Quake.

[Guest MIND]

8 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

 

Honestly anyone who moves their entire community to FB probably isn't worth the trouble keeping up with.

Social Media is garbage. I still use YouTube and some other things though. Like Discord, but the bigger ones are trash. It's easy to find what your looking for if you know what your doing.

[Gez]

I wonder what's gonna happen to the data when Discord eventually goes bust.

[Linguica]

https://matrix.org seems like an interesting IRC / Discord replacement protocol.

[seed]

22 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Sad, but true. I don't like Discord as much as the traditional forums but many forums are dying left and right and their communities are migrating to discord.

 

An example is Duke4.net which now has a discord server. Most of the activity seems to happen there now and the Duke4 forum is very inactive because of this (only like 20-ish messages per day across all the threads.)

 

+1 here as well. DW and ZDoom Forums are virtually the only places I visit anymore. The ol' community I came from originally shut down after almost 10 years of running (I used to be an administrator there, in charge of both the forums and some game servers), and the other one, while technically still in place, is essentially a haunted ship, seeing almost zero traffic at this point.

 

Can't say I see the attraction of platforms such as Discord, I've only ever used them as a sort of Messenger back when I was still playing MP games, when I stopped, I nuked it and never looked back. I've recently made another account but I think I'll just delete it again since it serves no use to me. Forums are a much more pleasant space, and it's much easier to stay up to date without scrolling through mountains and mountains of spam and nonsense, and this can, at least, be preserved, when these corporations go bankrupt they'll probably just take everything to the grave along with them.

 

22 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

Honestly anyone who moves their entire community to FB probably isn't worth the trouble keeping up with.

 

And FB can rot in a burning pit of acid for all I care. Thankfully more and more people seem to be at least aware of these platforms being horrible and make a conscious decision to stop using them, though these people are few and far between in this day and age, the average person is still in the "don't you guys use Facebook, everything is there" mindset.

Edited January 23, 2020 by seed

[LexiMax]

I've got a stick in my craw about IRC specifically.

 

I'm not the biggest fan of these modern chat clients with their hundred-megabyte memory footprint, but the fact is that IRC is such an old protocol that evolves at an absolutely glacial pace since both the clients and servers have to be on board...I've long since become fed up with it.  Maybe if IRC didn't want to slide into irrelevance it should have kept up a the set of features people expect in a modern chat protocol instead of dragging their heels.  You should be able to edit your past chats.  You should be able to delete your chats.  You should be able to scroll and search through channel history without it also being broadcast over the wider internet via a web-accessible log.  You should be able to see past messages if you don't have the application open.  IRC has none of these features unless you go through the trouble to run your own bouncer, which is what I've been doing, and the experience is still...not great.

 

That being said, although I quite enjoy the 21st century feature set that Discord has, the fact that it's a centralized service with no obvious sustainable business model is a huge red flag.  But then again there is...

 

4 hours ago, Linguica said:

https://matrix.org seems like an interesting IRC / Discord replacement protocol.

I can vouch for this.  I use Matrix not only to connect to Matrix chat-rooms, but I am using it to gradually replace my IRC bouncer.  This is because matrix.org (the Matrix server) actually runs several official "bridges" for many major IRC networks.  You can find a list of them here, but in effect, you can join any IRC channel on several popular networks as if it was a Matrix channel, and all of the IRC users show up as separate users.  And besides IRC, the protocol is federated between servers, so even though my user account is with matrix.org, I can connect to any Matrix server that federates with it matrix.org.

The end result ends up looking like this:

 

 

Or, if you prefer a terminal client, those exist too:

 

 

I think WeeChat also has an official plugin as well.

[Graf Zahl]

3 hours ago, AlexMax said:

That being said, although I quite enjoy the 21st century feature set that Discord has, the fact that it's a centralized service with no obvious sustainable business model is a huge red flag.  But then again there is...

  

 

This is the big question. What *IS* Discord's business model? I cannot see anything how they try to monetize their service - and being all centralized it must cost quite a bit of money to run.

[Redneckerz]

11 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

It's a real shame that so many people consider these places so preferable. Especially for (huh?) *ARCHIVING* data?

My main means to search for stuff is still search engines that operate on the WWW so this stuff does not exist for me - or the public at large.

Discord provides a drag and drop option of files sharing. It then generates an attachment link. Anyone who has that can download it.

 

Pluses:

• Its the main reason stuff is shared, but is not on a different filehost. 

Minuses:

• Its a bitch to search for, because somehow Discord cannot search on attachment file names alone.
• Its also quite unsafe to just have an open attachment url laying around...

Fortunately most host outside Discord, but some invaluable insight can be gained there.

[Graf Zahl]

44 minutes ago, Redneckerz said:

Discord provides a drag and drop option of files sharing. It then generates an attachment link. Anyone who has that can download it.

 

Pluses:

• Its the main reason stuff is shared, but is not on a different filehost. 

Minuses:

• Its a bitch to search for, because somehow Discord cannot search on attachment file names alone.
• Its also quite unsafe to just have an open attachment url laying around...

Fortunately most host outside Discord, but some invaluable insight can be gained there.

 

You got that absolutely right: It's a great tool for quickly sharing data, but not for long term hosting. The use case would be to give WIP data to your collaborators but don't ever expect that the data can be retrieved years later in case somebody needs to take a look. Do you know how long Discord retains old conversations and their attachments? They may just delete them after a finite amount of time to make room for new things.

 

[Redneckerz]

39 minutes ago, Graf Zahl said:

 

You got that absolutely right: It's a great tool for quickly sharing data, but not for long term hosting. The use case would be to give WIP data to your collaborators but don't ever expect that the data can be retrieved years later in case somebody needs to take a look. Do you know how long Discord retains old conversations and their attachments? They may just delete them after a finite amount of time to make room for new things.

 

Which is where i step in and try to archive it before its gone, and i am mostly looking towards things that can actually be useful to some - Old testbuilds or utilities. The legacy userbase is not one where your work resides, but just yesterday i found folks that were aching for a Legacy version of GZDoom on Mac, and made do with @drfrag's excellent Vintage versions. (This was from september.) So that to me tells me that outside the Doom community, there is an interest in these, so its worth the effort of archiving it or bringing it up to speed with something else. But i digress.

 

Unironically outside of Discord, Mediafire has been a great host to this - 7-8 year old download links that still work. So i've accumulated a lot of archival stuff in a short time. I have to figure a way to get these a permanent home for history sakes, but that's for later.

Regarding your Discord question: Actually, infinite. Just by the ZDoom Discord alone from the start of when it was made (2017 or so), i can still download all the things that have been hosted since. So there is a considerable longevity at play here.

 

The only downsides are what i listed: Discord's search function is not the greatest, especially for attachments - have fun putting in a search string for .zips, and there is no attachment browser so you can look per channel what is attached and to which post.

 

So there Discord definitively can improve, but permanent hosts like FTP locations or DRDTeam's are by far more preferrable. You know the people who host this when you are in semi-regular contact in such a community and as such you know where to look for.

[Graf Zahl]

"Infinity" is relative. These services also may shut down if they run out of money but the bigger issue is to finance all that storage space. They accumulate more and more data, resulting in ever increasing costs but I fail to see the revenue stream they finance themselves with.

 

[Redneckerz]

In that case every site may apply, incl DRDTeam, ZDoom and DW.

[Ribbiks]

14 hours ago, AlexMax said:

That being said, although I quite enjoy the 21st century feature set that Discord has, the fact that it's a centralized service with no obvious sustainable business model is a huge red flag.

 

perhaps they're going that silicon-valley-startup route of banking on analytics (remember MoviePass? ;D). They have a huge userbase, a majority of which are going to be discussing, playing and purchasing videogames, and their privacy policy reads vague enough such that I'm sure they have ways to capitalize on that data.

[Linguica]

If you're not the paying customer, you're the product for sale!!!

[seed]

^ Ditto.

 

If it sounds like bait, then it probably is. Many people I've interacted with cited their terms of use and privacy policy as being deliberately vague, and not for no reason.

[wallabra]

I don't really like Discord. The only reason I use it is because most of my online friends are currently only there.

 

I do also use IRC, though, but most people on IRC come from this very niche "90s technology" background, and I'm fucking fed of hearing everyone say the same thing again and again. "Blah blah blah, Gopher good HTTP bad, Shawn get the shotgun". It's like entering a room with hundreds of clones of @Graf Zahl.

 

Who, by the way, I think should urgently see this.

 

[Fairweather]

The amount of assumptions in this thread is astounding.

Discord didn't replace release threads, archives or a community hub. It's a suped-up IRC that just happens to be a much, much better vector for small treads than the forums we have.

 

We have Quaddicted as a hub for releases. It's been around forever and has everything.

We have Func Msgboard as a community hub. Once again it's been around forever, all releases are posted there and show up in Google.

 

Edit: That's not to say that the centralized nature of Discord as a service isn't an issue. I believe it is. But unlike most other services, this is meant to be used as a major forum-esque service for communities, I'd be surprised if at the end of life we won't be able to back up our stuff. (We already can through a bot, but I'm talking officially here)

[Fairweather]

On 1/23/2020 at 7:13 PM, Graf Zahl said:

They may just delete them after a finite amount of time to make room for new things.

 

I have files from 2016 still accessable, so unless it's a long tail, it seems they're there for the life of the service. Of course that might bubble over with the amount of stuff shared.